Top 10 Salesforce Flow Best Practices

Be it automation of business processes, simplification of tasks, or enhancing user experience, Salesforce Flows have become an essential tool. They provide developers with the ability to streamline operations and reduce any manual effort. This ultimately empowers the organization to work more efficiently. However, to get the most out of them, following the Salesforce flow best practices is crucial. Keeping them in mind and aligning with governance limits will help you ensure performance, maintainability, and scalability.?

Read along to find out some of the best practices to build robust and optimized flows, which help you avoid common pitfalls and ensure a smooth user experience.

Key Takeaways

• Flows are declarative automation tools that allow users to create applications without writing any piece of code.
• It is important to apply Salesforce flow best practices while executing them for best results and preventing any errors.
• Always plan you flows before building.
• Avoid using DML statement loops in flows.
• Reduces redundancy and improves efficiency with subflows.
• Don’t create flows for everything and use triggers wherever applicable.
• Use only one automation tool per object.
• Don’t hardcode IDs, instead make custom labels.
• Implement fault paths for error handling.
• Document your flows to make sure people understand your intent.
• Make and test your flows in a sandbox environment.

What are Salesforce Flows?

Salesforce Flows are declarative automation tools that allow users to create applications without writing any piece of code. They help automate complex business processes by guiding users through screens, updating records, sending emails, and more. Flows can range from simple step-by-step guides to intricate automation routines, making them highly versatile for a wide range of use cases in Salesforce.

Salesforce Flow Best Practices to Implement

Here is a list of 10 best practices that you should implement throughout the development process of your flows in Salesforce:?

1. Plan Before You Start Building Flows

Planning is an important stage at the beginning of any project, and Salesforce Flows should have a planning phase as well. It is best to make a proper plan before you start building your flows based on requirements. A spontaneous flow, in most cases, leads to unnecessary error messages. Ask yourself and your team about the problem this flow will be solving, where it hooks into the business process, and what object group it is going to touch during execution. This will make it easier and more safe to build a flow without errors.

2. Do Not Use DML Statement Loops

It is best not to add any DML statement loop in a flow. When you perform a repetitive Get, Update, Create, or Delete inside of a Loop, you will get a Salesforce flow limit exception error from SOQL . This means you will hit your DML limits, and the flow might fail. Instead, you can use the bulkification method to control the number of times a data element is used. This will also decrease the risk of hitting your governor limits in a flow.

3. Focus on Building Reusable Flows – Subflows

Building flows can be unnecessary in some cases, and it is better to build reusable flows that can be called from one or more parent flows. These are called subflows. It is usually used to reduce the pressure from a flow and pass on some automotive actions and calculations to a subflow. They make the working of a flow efficient if you build a part of a complex action and use it in multiple flows. This will improve your programming and make it faster as well.?

Subflows consist of:

• Subflow inputs to pass variables to the actions in the subflow.
• A sequence of actions, flow logic, and subflows.
• Subflow outputs to create data (variables) for use by other flow actions or subflows.

4. Don’t Create Flows for Everything

We know we are talking about Salesforce flow best practices, but it is not always ideal to create a flow. There are other ways to find a solution, such as a Formula or a Report. You may face instances when making a choice between the many options available to you; thus, it is important to know when to use which method. If you can handle a problem with alternatives like an Apex Trigger , then it is wise to use a trigger.

5. Don’t mix Trigger, Process Builder, Flow, and Record Trigger Flow

Avoid mixing Trigger, Process Builder, Flow, and Record-Triggered Flow in your development. For each object, it’s best to choose one automation tool based on your business needs and the Salesforce team’s support. Mixing tools like Apex triggers with Flows or Process Builders with Record-Triggered Flows can cause problems like poor performance, unexpected results, and increased technical debt. A common practice is to handle data updates (DML) with Apex while using Flows for non-DML tasks like sending emails. Be cautious to prevent conflicts, especially as best practices for Record-Triggered Flows are still evolving.

6. Don’t Hardcore IDs

Hardcoding IDs is often seen as a bad practice due to their inflexibility while making changes. When you switch environments, creating or updating a record will be difficult because of these hardcoded record IDs. In fact, flows allow you to access information like Record type and IDs easily, which is why there is no requirement for hard coding. To avoid hard-coding IDs in flows, you can:

• Query them using the Get Records features.
• Store IDs using Custom Labels or Custom Metadata Types.

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