Salesforce Winter Update ’22 Top 5 Flow Changes

Salesforce Winter '22 Flow Changes

So here we are again, another Salesforce winter update release, and another breakdown of the most useful changes to Salesforce Flow configuration.

I’ll be breaking down what I see as the most exciting changes, why they’re important, and trying to put in some real-world examples to help make them tangible.

5 – Subflows

This is functionality that a lot of users have been asking for over the years, and with Winter ’22 it is finally here. Following this update you will have the ability to place a “Subflow” element on the canvas to call from another flow.

You might find yourself struggling to see the benefit of this, asking “Why not just build that functionality into the main flow?”

Well, the reason is that we can now make a single flow for common tasks, and then call that flow in any other flow where we need to perform that action. This is especially useful in Orgs with a lot of flows.

4 – Customise Footer Labels in Screen Flow (Beta)

This definitely falls under the mantle of “Quality of Life” changes, and I’d like to see this functionality extended more in the future.

If you’ve ever built a screen flow and tried to create a custom navigation button to finish your flow this will be familiar to you.

Currently, to do the above use case, you’d need to head over to http://unofficialsf.com and download their excellent flow add-on. But if Salesforce were to extend the functionality of this change to allow custom navigation we’d finally have an official way of doing this, so hopefully, it’s coming!

3 – More Element Connections in Auto-Layout (Beta)

Another quality of life change here. Previously you’d have to switch into the normal layout view to connect to sequential elements, but with this functionality you can now choose an element to connect to.

This should save quite a lot of time and hassle for big flows.

2 – Flow Orchestrator (Beta)

This is an interesting addition to the Flow toolbox. I haven’t personally had the opportunity to test it, but from what I’ve read it could well be a game-changer.

It is, in simple terms, trying to replicate the way that something like Zapier builds an automation path, letting you bring together multiple flows that can be built to run sequentially.

It means no more hunting around to find which flows trigger each other and trying to debug multiple layers of yours or someone else’s automation paths. It will also make documenting much easier!

Salesforce Flow Orchestrator
Figure 1: Flow Orchestrator

1 – Scheduled Flow Enhancements

This one is huge! I’m sure anyone reading this with an interest in automation-heavy systems who uses flow on a regular basis will really appreciate this change.

You can now schedule paths to run more granularly (minutes), which is a big help, but bigger than that is the ability to specify batch sizes when that scheduled path runs.

This is most useful if you find yourself hitting governor limits within the system regularly, and you need to split off an automation and control how many records are processed per batch.

I have already implemented this across multiple orgs to relieve stress caused by multiple layers of automations!

So those are my highlights from this years’ Salesforce Winter Update. Please have a look at the full release notes to see if anything else is going to make your life easier!

Thank you for reading about my top 5 Winter ’22 Flow Changes. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful.

If you would like to keep up to date with our latest blogs then please make sure to follow our LinkedIn page.

Alternatively, to continue reading our articles please click here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.