Flow 2: I feel a second guide to failure coming on

Full disclosure: I scrapped the first flow. And then I started building a Visualforce page, but then I said “no. Flow. I said I would do it.”

So I scrapped the Visualforce page.

Skip ahead about an hour later, and I was still staring at the Flow Designer with a decision box and two screens with no information.

<internal monologue>

What is happening? I cannot decide how to make this work. I have to get back to step 0, and I’ve done that so many times. This is frustrating. But something…anything is better than nothing, right? So I am trudging ahead.

</internal monologue>

First thing I learned: if you do a lookup for a record, you’re going to need to make sure you map every field you’re going to use. That seemed extremely obvious for something like a record update, but I was surprised by the lookup. I don’t know why that seemed surprising, now that I think about it.

In my first iterations of this particular Flow, I wanted to give my users a choice in where to start. I gave them an input screen where they could choose among an Account, an Opportunity, and a Freight Matrix. I created a complex flow with a 3-branch decision tree that could then loop back to the original and etc. But that would not have solved the problem I was trying to solve – they might not go back and finish.

I reworked it, and I ended up with something like this:

Look at that! One simple flow with a series of screens and updates. All good. I ran a test, and I had missed one field in my final lookup screen. No worries! I added it to the fields to map. I clicked save.

And then this happened.

Well, this is awkward, amiright?

Tune in next time for Flow 3: The Polymath’s New Guide to Failure! (And in the meantime, feel free to see the original Guide to Failure.)