Developing Enterprise Apps with Flow and Next Best ActionDreamforce 2019

November 22, 2019

Alex Edelstein – Sr. Dir. Product Manager, Automation & Decisioning

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Alex EdelsteinSr. Director of Product Management. Automation & DecisioningSalesforce

Unleash Productivity with Lightning Flow

Design with point-and-click buildersBuild complex workflows with visual elements and reusable building blocks

Automate across connected systemsBring disparate systems and data sources together in a seamless workflow

Embed visual workflows everywhereEnhance user experience and business agility with guided interactions

Build seamless interactions with automated workflows

+ Pre-built solutions in the AppExchange

 

Einstein Next Best ActionDeliver Optimal Recommendations at the Point of Maximum Impact

Unify Your Sources of InsightCombine business rules with powerful predictive models, using Salesforce and non-Salesforce data

Surface Actionable Intelligence Assist coworkers and customers with insights at the mosteffective time

Connect Recommendations to AutomationUse Lightning Flow’s powerful tools and productivity

Developing on Flow and Next Best Action allows for higher-level solutions with less work

Development on Flow

Salesforce Core Platform

Decisioning (NBA)

Flow

Traditional Salesforce Features

Flow-based Appdev

Embedded Decisioning Strategies

• Salesforce Clouds actively developing on Flow• Commerce• Marketing• Industries - Financial Services• Industries - Health Services• Industries - Consumer Products• Surveys

Development on Flow

Build once and customize everywhereEmpower Everyone to Automate Complex Processes

NO-CODE BUILDERS

PRO-CODE ACTIONS

Business IT

No Code

Admins IT Dev

Build Together

LOW-CODE INTEGRATIONS

Declarative Program

matic

• Turn code into reusable, portable building blocks• Push configuration deep into the organization• Growing libraries of prebuilt components and actions

How Flow and NBA Help You Build Enterprise Apps

• Turn code into reusable, portable building blocks• Push configuration deep into the organization• Growing libraries of prebuilt components and actions

How Flow and NBA Help You Build Enterprise Apps

Invocable Actions –The Building Block of The Building Blocks

An invocable action is a building block that you create from an Apex class or Javascript component

Invocable actions show up in an admin-friendly way in several parts of Salesforce:

Invocable Actions –Use in Four Different Salesforce Services

Invocable actions show up in an admin-friendly way in several parts of Salesforce:

Flows Next Best Action Strategies

Bots Process Builder

Case Study – Rich HTML Email

Problem: The business units want to send modern emails as part of automations triggered by record changes.IT reports that there’s good news and bad news.

Invocable Actions

The good news: Flow lets you send emails easily.

The bad news: Flow’s built-in email action is weak on features:• Plain Text only• No Attachments,• Templates• No access to Organization-Wide Addresses• Etc…

Case Study – Rich HTML Email When you look at the Apex functions available to you, you see that there’s a pretty powerful set of built-in email sending services you can tap into

Invocable Actions

Attachments!

Rich Text!

Templates!

OrgWideEmailAddressIds!

Case Study – Rich HTML Email

It won’t take you long to write an Apex class that sends some truly fine-looking emails.

But in order to get that to your Admins in a sustainable way, you have issues:

● If they want any degree of customization at all, you’ll need to provide a UI.

● Now you have a full Email App to support

Invocable Actions

You have given them a fish. You have not taught them to fish.

Demo: Send Rich HTML Email

Case Study – Rich HTML EmailSuppose you distributed your Send HTML Email apex code as an invocable action.

Invocable Actions

It would show up in builder tools like this:

This is all the work being done by Someone Who Is Not Youto assemble the inputs

Case Study – Rich HTML EmailInvocable Actions provide a granular way to package your work for others to use

Invocable Actions

You can revise and version your code without breaking existing flow

You can deploy the entire flow as a template

You can add telemetry to your code and track utilization

Case Study – Rich HTML EmailIt takes very little effort to ‘blockify’ your code

Invocable Actions

Add the @invocableMethod annotation to one method in your class

Define the inputs that you want to expose to consumers with the @invocableVariable annotation and this Request inner class pattern:

Likewise with the outputs:

Case Study – Rich HTML EmailThe Invocable Action interface expects data to be packed in a List structure

Invocable Actions

In this case, I know I only will have one item in the List, so I just extract it directly without iterating:

Case Study – Rich HTML Email

Next comes the core of your code:

Invocable Actions

Case Study – Rich HTML Email - 9

Your core activity usually culminates in an Apex method call or callout

Invocable Actions

Case Study – Rich HTML Email

Finally, populate your return values and pack them into a List

Invocable Actions

Benefits of Building Code Blocks

Encourage portability and reusability by enforcing a strict input and output schema that you define

Plays nice in the open-source world, with an increasing number of installable invocable actions

Encourages good habits, including modularity, process-centric application design, pipelining, and more

Invocable Actions

Public directory of installable actions at http://unofficialsf.com

Learn More

Learn more about invocable actions at:

https://unofficialsf.com/developing-flow-actions/

Invocable Actions

Push Control Deep Into The OrganizationForce-Multiply Your Code

Code Building Blocks in

No-Code Apps

Record-based Configuration

• Turn code into reusable, portable building blocks• Push configuration deep into the organization• Growing libraries of prebuilt components and actions

How Flow and NBA Help You Build Enterprise Apps

How do you focus salespeople on the right priorities?

Case Study –Good Morning, Salesperson

Problem: Salespeople have an infinite number of things they can spend their time on.

1) How can you serve them the highest-value, highest-priority tasks?

2) How can you give sales team leaders the ability to easily change priorities?

Invocable Actions

Demo – Good Morning, Salesperson

Case Study –Good Morning, Salesperson - 3Available Sales Tactics

Invocable Actions

Name Description

Opportunity Value: Prioritize opportunities with greater value

Opportunity Sector Prioritize opportunities based on a specified value for the custom field Opportunity.Sector. For example you might prioritize "Enterprise" opportunities or "Foreign" opportunities.

Opportunity Einstein Score Prioritize opportunities based on an Einstein score value.

Opportunity Time Before Close Date

Prioritize the opportunities based on the amount of time remaining until close date.

Case Study –Good Morning, SalespersonEnable Sales Managers to specify tactical priorities with a Flow

Invocable Actions

Good Morning, SalespersonInvocable

Actions

TeamSalesTacticalPlan Record

Maintained by Sales Team Leader

“Display Recommendations” Flow on User Page

Invocable Action “Execute NBA Strategy”

NBAEngine

Display Recommendations LWC

Good Morning, SalespersonInvocable

Actions

TeamSalesTacticalPlan Record

Maintained by Sales Team Leader

“Display Recommendations” Flow on User Page

Invocable Action “Execute NBA Strategy”

NBAEngine

Display Recommendations LWC

Case Study –Good Morning, SalespersonNext Best Action handles the recommendation generation

Invocable Actions

Looser Coupling via Apex-Defined Data Types

Case Study –Good Morning, Salesperson The Display and Query functionality is split up into reusable parts

Invocable Actions

Hard-Coupled Decoupled

Case Study –Good Morning, Salesperson The Display and Query functionality is split up into reusable parts

Invocable Actions

Hard-Coupled

Decoupled

How does the data pass from the Recommendation call to the custom lightning web component?

Good Morning, SalespersonInvocable

Actions

TeamSalesTacticalPlan Record

Maintained by Sales Team Leader “Display Recommendations” Flow on User Page

Invocable Action “Execute NBA Strategy”

NBAEngine

Display Recommendations LWC

Case Study –Good Morning, Salesperson - 2

Problem:

Sales Leadership wants the following customizations to the Out-of-the-box Next Best Action Experience

1) Show More recommendations in less space

2) Slide up new recommendations to replace consumed recommendations

…

Invocable Actions

The Data Coming Back Via API Is Complex...Invocable

Actions

Invocable Action “Execute NBA Strategy”

Apex-Defined Type Support provides crucial connectability

The API call to the NBA Engine returns a rich, nested object

….But the LWC Interface is Simple

LWC’s In Flow Screens Can Intake and Output Rich Objects

Invocable Actions

Flow provides the platform substrate that allows complex objects to be passed between LWC components and Apex Actions

Rich Apex Data is carried from the output of an invocable action to the input of an LWC

Classes with @auraEnabled attributes show up in Flow BuilderAccessing Apex Data in Flow

Invocable Actions

The template classes let you choose which properties to expose to Flow, via @auraEnabled annotations

Rich Apex Data is carried from the output of an invocable action to the input of an LWC

To expose ‘standard’ Apex data structures directly in Flow, create matching ‘template classes’

Accessing Apex Data in FlowInvocable

Actions

The template classes let you choose which properties to expose to Flow, via @auraEnabled annotations

Rich Data Isn’t Just AvailableAt Salesforce, Though…

A Rich Object from the Docusign Cloud

The Web is Full of Rich Web Objects

A Rich Object from the Quickbooks Cloud

This One-time Process Creates a Pattern That Flow Can Use To Automatically Convert Web Objects to Flow Resources

One-Time Setup:Create a template in Apex that matches the incoming JSON

1) Start with the JSON

2) Run it through a converter like JSON2Apex

3) Take the resulting Apex

code...

4) ...and add the classes to your org.

Add @auraEnabled to publish the properties to Flow and Lightning

Components.

Use Case: I want to get rich web product data from my enterprise back end and turn it into products in Salesforce

Output: 3 Salesforce records, each with a unique SKU and picture URL

Input: A rich web object sourced through Mulesoft from an enterprise database

Demonstration

1. GET Rich Web Data

2. Extract Nested Lists

3. Loop over Lists to Process Them

4. Combine with Salesforce data or create new records

Learn More About Apex Data in Flow and NBAInvocable

Actions

https://unofficialsf.com/the-salesforce-automation-and-decisioning-wiki/apex-data/

Actions Roadmap

New features to enable the building of a new generation of actions:

● Spring ‘20○ Custom Property Editors for Actions (Pilot)○ Support for Generic Sobject Variables ○ Custom Categories

● Summer ‘20○ Custom Icons○ Custom Property Editors for Actions (GA)

● 2020○ Full support for Open API spec ingestion

Invocable Actions Roadmap

Example: Send HTML Email

Custom Property Editors forFlow Actions

1) Make an LWC that shows your configuration UI

2) Link the LWC to your Invocable Action with an annotation

3) Receive Flow Context as design time so you can provide merge field picklists

4) Fire events to inform Flow Builder so it can save your config values into the Flow metadata

PILOT Spring ‘20

Enable processing actions that work with all SObject CollectionsSubstantially reduce Looping, reducing impact on limits

Examples that are being built:● FilterCollection● SortCollection● MapCollection● GetFirst● CountCollection● CopyCollection

Generic SObject Support with Flow Actions

● JoinCollections● DedupeCollection● FindRecordsInCollection● RemoveRecordsFromCollection● AddOrInsertRecord

Generic SObject Support with Flow Actions

As a first step, the flow creator chooses the SObject Type for each available SObject attribute.

That ‘locks it in’, and Flow Builder can take it from there.

Roadmap for 2020

Custom Property Editors for LWC Screen Components

Support for Generic Sobject Variables (“Dynamic Type Mapping”) for LWC Screen Components

Sections and Columns

2020 Roadmap - ScreensComing

2020

Enable rich, multi-column positioningAdvanced Flow Screen Layout

Sections and ColumnsMix images, fields, and components to deliver granular UI layout options that don’t require coding

Component Preview ModeSee component output while in the Screen Builder

Screen Builder – Full Screen Mode

Coming 2020

Bringing Process Builder features to Flow BuilderTriggers and Streamlined UI in Flow Builder

Trigger on Record Changes and Platform EventsEliminates the need for Process Builder or Apex Triggers to start a Flow

Easier Canvas with Auto LayoutNo more need to connect elements

Coming 2020

Build richer, more powerful, easy-to-configure Invocable ActionsPowerful Action Developer Tools

Add a custom configuration UIPair an action with a custom Lightning Web Component that serves up configuration UI

Custom CategoriesOrganize with categories

Generic Objects SupportCreate Actions that work declaratively with any input collection of records

Detect issues and opportunities quicklyFlow Engine Analytics and Dev Tools

Flow MetricsAutomated logging of selected Flow activity

Improved DebuggingNew tools for profile simulation, input data selection and display

Coming 2020

Flow Hero Shout Outs

Eric Smith

Relentless improvement to public components, including the highly regarded ‘Community’ Lookup FSC and a wide range of Lightning Page Experience Components

UnofficialSF Volunteers

Helping to curate and improve content:

● Tamar Erlich● Lisa Malmanager● Allison Letts● Makario Aruliah● Gabriel McGinn● Jack Van Dijk● Jim House

Automation Hour

● David Litton,

● Jennifer Lee

● Rakesh Gupta

New Flow Community Resource - The Flow Wiki

● Goal: Topic pages that serve as a single point of entry for information about that topic, curated by the Flow community

● Part of UnofficialSF● Anyone can submit an edit● Please Contribute!

○ Links to Existing Blog Posts and Documentation

○ Extending the Wiki with new Articles○ Organizing and improving the

presentation of existing pages○ You can’t do any harm: proposed

changes get reviewed

Check out these resources and earn badges on Trailhead Learn more about Flow

Build a Simple Flow

Lightning Flow

Flow Basics

Flow Builder

Screen Flow Distribution

Get Hands-On at Flow Workshops

Platform Meadow MW Floor 2

Chat with Flow Experts

Platform Park Demos

MW Floor 1

Thank You!