What On Earth are Flow Templates? And Why Exactly Should You Use Them in Your Flow Orchestrations?
Flow Templates Are Helpful with Orchestrations, But What are They?
Ahead of my sessions at Dreamforce ’22, I’ll be putting out a number of posts, most of which will be relating to my sessions that can be used as resources after the conference is over. Here in the second of those posts, I’ll be covering Flow templates. In a slight spoiler, I’ll be noting that I think it is well worth getting to grips with Flow Templates as you level up your game when using Flow Orchestrator. In this post I’ll go over what Flow Templates are, and why you should consider using them in Orchestrations.
Let’s dive in shall we?
What Are Flow Templates Exactly?
In kind of a what you see is what you get type of thing … Flow Templates are Flows that have been built that have been designated as a template. Once the template setting has been enabled for a Flow, that Flow gets added to the list of Flows shown in the All + Templates section when you click New and launch Flow builder to begin creating a new Flow.
I’ll go over how you make a Flow a template in a little bit. However, before I do that, allow to explain why I use Flow Templates and the benefit of them.
Why I Use Flow Templates
Over the last year or so, I’ve often found myself building Flows that do the same kind of tasks in different objects. Maybe it’s a Screen Flow that acts as an approval for an Orchestration step, maybe it’s one of my Flows that act as a Custom Roll-Up Summary launchpad, maybe it’s another Flow that includes some of the routine tasks I find myself building in Flow over and over again. If I need a boilerplate type of Flow, I like to try and increase the productivity behind creating and updating these by leveraging templates.
Templates can save you considerable time in the building phase, as you can simply open up a template Flow make the tweaks needed and save it as new Flow. By doing that, you’ll keep the template and work with a new Flow you save when you need to use that template and build an entirely new Flow.
How Do You Make a Flow into a Template?
Now that I’ve given you a little taste of why I use Flow templates. Let’s ask the question of how you set up a Flow as a template. Thankfully, it’s easy!!!
There’s a few steps you need to in order to do this:
- Save your Flow … this only applies if you haven’t already done this.
- Open your Flows settings inside Flow Builder.
- Click Show Advanced.
- Click the Template checkbox and then click Done.
- Save your Flow.
Once you have saved your Flow it will then appear in the All + Templates list within the launch component when you create a new Flow. Bonus tip here, if you add a description to your Flow it will be visible in the component.
Below are the screenshots that show the template checkbox and a Flow I built and set up as a template as an example for this article.
Why Use Flow Templates for Orchestrator?
OK, so now let’s get to the meaty portion of this blog. The question of why should we use Flow Templates when it comes to building Orchestrations.
Well, the answer is remarkably simple … EASE!!!
That’s it. It’s as simple as that. Ease. Getting into the habit of creating Flow Templates will make our lives so much easier for building out powerful Orchestrations in Flow. The reason for this is because many of the typical Orchestrations that you’ll build will bear include many Flows that could be much quickly built by starting with a template. This will ultimately save you time as you’ll be able to make the relevant adjustments much more quickly than you would if you built a Flow that was more or less the same as another you already had in your org. Yes, it really is as simple as ease.
In fact, as a side note, it will save you even more time if you could use Flows that you’ve already built in a new Orchestration without the need to rebuild the same functionality over and over again. What I mean by this for example, is rather than building more Screen Flows which act as approvals, why not simply build one Flow to do that job and then pass variables from that into an Autolaunched Flow that then carries out the tasks you need.
Examples of Flow Templates you could create are as follows:
- Approve Requests via a Screen Flow
- Calculations for Custom Rollup Summaries
- Create Task Activities for Users
- Send Email Alerts to Contacts
With Flow Templates you can release the productivity in building powerful Orchestrations as in many Orchestrations you will find yourself carrying out similar tasks, such as posting messages to Chatter, creating or updating records, sending emails, and carrying out actions in Slack. Simply by using Flow Templates you will find that you can open up a template, make your quick tweaks, save it as a new Flow and as a result save a ton of time.
So again, to summarise, the reason to use Flow Templates when building your Flow Orchestrations, is to save time, and make it easier on you, the builder. That really is as simple as it gets. And sometimes that’s all it needs.
Closing Comments
So that’s a very brief introduction to Flow Templates, and my thoughts on why you should consider using them in your Flow Orchestrations. I’ll be presenting on Flow Orchestrator and Slack this week, if you’re there, I’d love to see you at my session (more details here). Even if you can’t make it, I’d love to meet you and say hello while I’m in town for Dreamforce. And for those who can’t make it to Dreamforce in-person, do check it out online, there’s plenty of great content, and I’m sure you’ll find it really beneficial.
Let me know your thoughts on this post, in the responses below or online via social media when this post goes live ahead of my session this week.
