Say 'NO' to Duplicates

The problem?

In many industries and Salesforce orgs, Salesforce Admins have built custom flow-based UIs that allow users to create records and guide them through this process to ensure all necessary information is gathered efficiently.

The publishing industry is no exception.

Publishers, like many other professionals, work with high volumes of data and follow processes (some of which can be very complex) to ensure your favourite journals and magazines are available and accessible in a timely manner.?

With the growing data volumes, the subject of duplicate management has become more critical than ever. Duplicates can lead to inaccurate analysis and insights, misleading reporting, inefficient operations, compliance issues, integration problems, poor customer experience, and other challenges.?

Existing Solution Options?

Many of us are well familiar with duplicate and matching rules that help simplify the process of duplicate management for records created or edited via the standard UI buttons and API.

However, some ‘loopholes’ still exist when creating records with a Screen Flow.??

One of them is the UX difference – if a user creates a potential duplicate via a standard ‘New’ button on an object with active matching and duplicate rules, they see the ‘Similar Records Exist’ notification which allows them to view those records and navigate to them.?

If the same user creates a potential duplicate record via a custom quick action with a screen flow behind it, by default, they see ‘An unhandled fault has occurred in this flow’ error message.?

In the past a Salesforce Administrator (or a Developer, if the scenario is complex or data volume is high) had to create a work around, which required additional development time and added complexity, even if the logic and scenario were straightforward.??

The New Solution Option?

The Summer 2024 release has introduced Check for Matching Records functionality that simplifies preventing duplicate creation when records are created by Flow. This functionality allows specifying matching criteria and preventing the creation of duplicate records. It also offers an option of auto updating an existing record if a match is found.?

Benefits:?

• Quicker development lifecycle for scenarios with a simple and straightforward logic?
• Lower risk of hitting system limits for flows?
• Improved performance?

Evaluation against a Publishing industry requirement?

Okay, let's check this feature out against a common publishing industry requirement.

A Salesforce Administrator has been asked to evaluate if this new feature can prevent duplicates when creating Publication Orders for a journal issue that is published in several different languages.

An issue can have multiple Publication Orders, where each Publication Order is restricted to a single language, printer and publication type. While some attributes are entered by the creating user on the screen, others are copied automatically from the Issue.?

To evaluate the above feature, a Salesforce Administrator created a screen flow and prompted the user to enter Language, Quantity and Due Date for a Publication Order.???

On the Create Records screen a System Administrator set How to set record field values = ‘Manually’. This setting is required to allow using the Check for Matching Records.??

Although this results in extra work to map individual fields (compared to ‘From a record variable’ option), it doesn’t add complexity to the solution.?

A Salesforce Administrator then enabled ‘Check for Matching Records’ toggle and listed the conditions to flag a Publication Order being created as a duplicate.?

?The functionality only supports ‘AND’ or ‘OR’ conditions. There is no ability to define a custom logic (yet). It is not a problem for a given scenario but would require a work around solution for a more complex one.?

The feature was tested with both ‘Update the matching record’ and ‘Skip the matching record’ option being selected.?

Although it does what it says, unlike with duplicate rules, there is no out-of-the-box setting / message to inform the user that they attempted to create a duplicate record and the original record was either updated or skipped. Therefore, a System Administrator needs to build custom logic to identify if a new record was created or not within the flow and display a meaningful ‘outcome’ message to the user.??

Is it possible to use this feature with a Flow ‘Repeater’ component??

When the ‘Repeater’ component is used, entered values are added into a collection which is then used to create records. Therefore, How to set record field values should be set to ‘From a Record Variable’.? Check for Matching Records feature is not (currently) available with the above selection. An alternative custom solution needs to be built to allow a user-friendly experience when checking for duplicates in this scenario.?

Conclusion?

The Check for matching records functionality can be easily used in straight-forward scenarios even by the System Administrators who are relatively new to Flows. It doesn’t replace duplicate rules but instead can be used alongside those rules to offer users a better experience and to simplify the logic within the flows, especially where the complexity is not justified by the requirements.??

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RibbonFish specialises in providing innovative solutions for industry, including the publishing industry. We help streamline operations and optimise data management. Explore more about what we do at ribbonfish.com