New Flow Features in Winter’22 Release
It feels like Summer’21 release just happened yesterday, but here we have the Winter’22 already! In my opinion, this release has many technical updates. If you want to take your Flow building skills into the next level, make sure you study the relevant release notes. I have attached the official release notes in each heading.
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Section:
General Updates
1. Auto-Layout Can Now Connect To More Elements
Now you can route the elements to anywhere you want and this has made auto-layout one step closer to the free form layout. I personally still prefer the free form, but if you have multiple flow builders in the team, auto-layout might be better option to maintain the structure.
2. List View Can Now Show Triggering Object or Platform Events
Now you can use the “Triggering Object or Platform Event Label” field in your Flow list view, so you don’t need to open each flow to check the triggering object.
3. Use Optimizer To Evaluate Workflow Migration
If you are looking for some guidance to migrate your Workflows into Flows, you can now utilize the Optimizer.
4. CPU Time Is Measured More Accurately
Since it is measured accurately, Salesforce will enforce the CPU limit without any buffering. It will be a good idea to check if any of your existing complex flows to make sure they don’t fail.
For Record-Triggered Flow
5. Start Element Revamp (Before/After Trigger Change Names)
For the UX consideration, the Start Element has been re-arranged a little. The biggest difference is the before/after trigger are now changed into different names. I do think it is still important to remember that one is before-trigger and one is after-trigger, as this is relevant to learning Apex trigger.
6. Subflow Is Now Available!
Finally the subflow is available in Record-Triggered flow! Now we can separate our flow into blocks so it can be easier to read the structure. This is a really important update because now Flow structure can be one step closer to the Apex trigger/class structure.
7. Send Outbound Message In Flow
Are we saying goodbye to Workflow soon? Everyone is guessing. Even though Salesforce won’t retire a feature that easily, it could be smart to start planning the migration.
8. Add A “Run Async” Path
Synchronous and Asynchronous is an advanced topic for Apex execution. You can check out the introduction post from Apex Hours. With this update, we can now run async actions in Flow.
9. Schedule Path Update – Minute, Batch Size, Timeout Limit
We can now say goodbye to this workaround, as the schedule paths now support the minute level! Not only that, now the schedule path also uses the 1-minute timeout instead of 15-second, so the scheduled interviews are less likely to fail. If your flow is still regularly hitting the limit, you can also decrease the batch size. (If your flow doesn’t consume that much resources, there’s no need to adjust the batch size)
10. Debug Update
We can now debug a scheduled path or an async path!
I really really love this feature (I think it’s my favorite for Winter’22). When debugging a record-triggered flow, you can now temporarily change the field value so you can also test the trigger. Previously you could only skip the start condition and test the whole flow in the actual environment. Well done Flow team!
For Screen Flow
11. Roll Back Element
This one might be a bit confusing because we have to know what a transaction is. This Roll Back Element will only roll back the DML operations (Create, Update, Delete) in the same transaction. In a Screen flow, the Screen Element will separate the interview into several transactions like described in the screenshot.
Since only the DML in the same transaction will roll back, if the Create Contact fails, the system will only roll back the Create Lead.
Create Account will still execute successfully.
12. Customize Navigation Buttons
A great feature to design a better user experience of your flows!
13. Easier To Configure Choices
In short, working with choice resources should not be a pain anymore ;)!
14. Pilot – Reactive Custom Screen Components
This is a pilot feature and only works on custom components, but I still want to bring this up! Starting from my second or third Screen flows, I got deeply bothered by that the output of the components can never show on the same screen. I am really excited about this direction and really hope this feature will become Beta or General Available and will support the standard components soon!
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Flow Orchestrator
The most exciting one for me is that Flow Orchestrator is now in Beta! If you are curious, check out my introduction video.
Good Reference
If you are looking for more summaries for Winter’22 Flow release, check out the reference below. Personally, I think unofficalSF makes the most detailed explanation (makes sense because they made these updates :P)
What are your favorite features? Leave a comment and let us know!
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