Redline Work Completion Record with airSlate SignNow

Redline work completion record

[Music] hello everyone a very good morning good afternoon or good evening based on the time zone that you are in and welcome to apex hours my name is meera mayor and today's topic is exception handling in flows using fault connectors and platform events a big thank you to amit chaudhary for inviting me to apec servers again this is my second session with apex servers this is really a great platform for all of us to learn everything about salesforce a little about myself i'm currently working as a salesforce architect in usd global trivandrum india i have total of 13 years of it experience 11 of which has been on the salesforce platform this is our agenda for today let us see some flow use cases and exception handling in this flows using four connectors and platform events in each release salesforce is adding lots of new features to flows i have mentioned some of this here but there are many more floors can be used to do some operations during a record safe operation before update and after update flows are latest addition to this which help us to use flows without the help of a process builder flows can be used to integrate salesforce with external systems also in addition to this flaws can be used to perform some user interface specific actions but before deciding flow as your solution it is better to consider performance aspects also since flow might not be suitable for very complex operations but because of its popularity and ease of implementation the count of flows are getting increased day by day in every org so it is becoming equally important to hand till exceptions happening from flows what is an exception it's an unexpected event okay during your transaction execution it can happen because of multiple reason it can be a dml failure a secure exception or a null pointer exception or it can be anything but why you need to handle this if you are not handling exception your entire transaction is going to fail and users are going to see system error messages on the screen that is definitely not a good user experience right and why you need to log exceptions when you handle exceptions actually your transaction will be success and users won't recognize that something went wrong at the back end later when they review their records they will see that some of their expected values are not populated so when they are raising a support ticket to identify what went wrong unless there is a log on this exception details support team might not be able to debug this issue so let us see some flow use cases and also see how we can handle exceptions and log exceptions in this particular flow this is our first scenario which is an after update use case the scenario is something like this i would like to concatenate and populate child contact country value to parent account for example if we have got two contacts under an account contact one on contact two with country values as india and united states once the second contact is saved i would like to see the country value in accordance india comma us as you are seeing in this particular screenshot so let us see what is the expected behavior this is my account let us go to contact and create a new contact enter only the required fields also populate country as india now let us save this record go back to account and verify if the account country has populated there you can see account country has populated as india so this is the expected behavior now we need to see how we can introduce an exception in in this particular flow uh before that this is the solution that i have implemented it's a combination of process builder and flow from the process builder whenever a new contact is getting created i am passing a couple of parameters to my flow and the parameters are basically the contact ids under a particular account and inside the flow we will iterate over all these contacts get the country value and concatenate it to a temporary flow variable at the end when the looping is completed i am going to retrieve the account again and going to update account with the concatenated country value this is how the flow is getting executed now let us see how how we can create an exception scenario for this what i have done i have created a violation rule in account which makes a call number field mandatory for any account update operation let us go back to the org i have validation rule created already but it is not active so let us edit this and make it active now let us go back and create a new contact and see what is the transaction behavior this time i am selecting country value as united states and let us save this okay this thing the transaction got failed with an error message saying accord country population is mandatory on an account update now let us see how we can handle and log exception for logging exception i have created an exception object like like you can see on the screen it contains just a few fields only exception details object uh which holds like uh the exception happened on which object the operation type and the record id for which the exception happened now let us see how to handle the exception using fault connector so what is a fault connector fault connector and face which element to execute when the previous element results in an error from this picture you can see that there is a red line which is getting connected to a create exception process from the update record action so this fault connectors can be associated with only specific nodes so to nodes like when you are doing a dml operation or a query operation or if you have got an apex column from all these nodes you will be able to associate it to a fault connector this is our flow which is doing the account update with the country values actually so here let us see how we can add a fold connector basically when you add the fault connector it is going to log an exception record to the exception object so the action that you need to perform is create record so i'm adding a create record node here and let us name it like log exception and i am going to use values from multiple resources now we need to select the object select it as exception and we can now do the field mapping also first i will select the object and here the object type is account for operation also you can enter some string value so here i am going to populate it as account country population record id i have already a process to fetch a code value actually so i'm just selecting the account id from that particular process and last one is exception details so exception details we will be able to retrieve from flow which is a global variable click on flow in flow you can see something called fault message so select this one now we have mapped all the values we see which we need in the exception object since this is done we have added the create record operation here next what we need to do is add the fold connector normally how we are adding a connector to another node in the flow you just drag drag and dropping this right so this is a normal connector now let us see how how to add a fault connector when you add a second connector from a node to a second node what you are getting is fault connector and you can remove the first connector because we don't need this you need to add the first connector only if you want to do some additional operations if the update record operation is success in my scenario i don't want to do any additional operation that's why i removed the first connector and i kept only the second connector here which is the fold connector now what this word connection is going to do if the update record operation is a failure it is going to log an exception record to exception object since we have added the fold connector let us save this flow as a new version and activate this let us go back create a new contact record and see what is the transaction behavior now click on new contact enter all mandatory fields public country save this since we have added the fault connector what happened is the contact creation is success but it should also create an exception record let us go to exception tab refresh now we can see we don't have any record here so let's just refresh and see if we have got an exception object or exception record would create it yes we can see an entry here open and see you can see whatever mapping we have given in the create record process it is populated here including the record id and the flow exception so this is how adding a full connector you can log exception details and the transaction can be success in this case let us see the transaction behavior like you have seen the contact creation is success exception record got created and account country is not populated yeah that is an important step that is forward to show you let us go back to the account and check if we have united state appended there no it is not that is because the update actually got failed so that particular flow process didn't happen and country is not updated so the behavior is similar to adding a try catch in apex block when you added try cache that particular if there is some exception happening within the try cash blog then single base is getting failed but from the next outside the try catch block the execution continues similar behavior here also but if something goes wrong if you want to fail the complete transaction what we can do this can be our requirement some cases right if something is get getting failed you don't want the entire transaction to be success instead you would like to roll back all the changes but you want to still log error how we can do that there is no standard approach available in flow for this so what i have done i have used the standard throw exception approach available in apex class for that i have introduced an apex class called exception newton this has an invokable method called invoke exception util it's accepting the flow error message as a parameter and it is just throwing the exception that's the only thing happening within this particular exception util class now within the flow what we need to do is we need to call this apex method for throwing the exception let us do that this is our flow and what we need to do is add an add an action for calling the apex method i have the apex method created already maybe yeah this is the exception muted class that i was just mentioning so let us add that in work exception utility you can input values also we have exception message as a parameter include that and what we need to pass here is the exception message from the flow so select flow here and select the fault message this is done connect this to throw exception save as a new version activate it let us go back and create a new record new contact record and see the behavior our expectation is that contact creation is going to fail and it is going to create an exception record let us see if that is going to happen this is the country value as china save this okay like expected the contact creation got failed but what happened to exception details let us go back and see if we have a new exception got logged okay this is the previous exception that means we don't have a new exception record code created but why this is because the transaction got failed and whatever operation happened within that transaction that got rolled back so what was the transaction behavior complete transaction good failed and no exception logging happened have to solve this because i want to fail my transaction but i want to create that exception record also that is where platform events are going to help us so i have created a platform event in my org called exception log which almost has the same fields as my exception object like exception details object operation and record id and the important thing that you need to take here is that the published behavior for our platform even should be published immediately so platform events has got two type of or two kinds of published behavior publish after commit and publish immediately what do you mean by publish after commit so if you have a record action happening and as part of that operation if you have a published platform even operation that going to actually happen only if the transaction completed successfully that means in case the transaction got failed the published pe action will not be happening so what publish immediately action means it means if you have a published platform even action as part of your current operation irrespective of the transaction is success or failed the event is going to get published successfully so it will not wait for the complete transaction completion this is the behavior that we are looking for that is even if the contact creation got failed we still want to log the exception so once you capture the details to a platform even right i would like to log those details back to our exception record for this i want to process the platform event platform events can be processed in same source in multiple ways either through a pb or through a flow or through a trigger i have used trigger operation here because i felt like trigger is more flexible compared to process builder and flow because when i tried to consume the platform even using the process builder it was asking for some additional details like you have to associate that particular platform even subscribe operation using a particular record at all which i felt like more complex compared to a normal trigger so that's why i have opted a trigger and this is the trigger which is iterating over the platform event and creating the exception record so you might be thinking like if we have got a platform event which has got almost the same fields as an exception object why you still need the exception object there you can still or you can just utilize platform even instead of that but the reason is here the platform even does not support many of the operations that we are looking for like reporting executing queries if you want to create a formula fields on this particular exception record for some additional operations that's also not supported that's why we are going with a two-step process that is that when an exception is happening within the transaction we are going to publish a platform event and the trigger inside the platform event is going to create the actual exception record let us go back and see how we can publish a platform event from this particular flow so you have this create record option available here already right which is currently creating the exception record okay before showing how i can publish a platform even maybe quickly i will show you the platform even also how you can create a new platform even so new platform event is almost similar to a new object creation you can click on new platform event you need to enter all the labels here and once the platform even is created that particular this is almost like an object only you will have an option to create fields under that particular platform event so this is the platform that i have created for our exception login called exception log you can see it's almost looks like an object only if a standard object is getting appended with underscore underscore c a platform event is getting appended with underscore underscore e and also there are some restrictions on the type of fields that you can create instead of platform event so you can see the custom fields that i have created since the platform even is ready let us go back to the flow and publish the platform event instead of the exception record creation so publishing platform event from a flow is same as create record operation since we have create record operation already available here let us modify that and create a platform event instead of that that particular object exception log choose the object as exception log which is platform event now we need to redo the field mapping because the type of object code changed similar to what we have done before object let us choose it as account operational support country population record id as current account id which is already available as part of get account process and the last field is exception message which can be retrieved from flow fort message so we have changed the exception logging using platform event save this as a new version and activate this flow let us go back and create a new record so uh so the expected behavior is that the transaction should fail but still we should have the exception record getting created save this record you can see uh the transaction got failed but let us go back to exception and see if we have okay you can see that a new exception record got created now with all the details that we have seen in the previous case i hope now it is clear like if you want to log the exception but still want to fail the transaction how we can achieve that that is using a platform event let us see exception login in a screenflow element also so i have got a scenario for screenflow which is something like if the icon type is partner account that is an account i have got a pickles called account type which contains two values end user and partner account so if the account type is partner account then i would like to display a screen on account detail page where user is asked to enter some additional details and based on the details that user has entered it will be automatically deciding the partnership level of that particular account as diamond gold or silver this is the flow let us go to the org and see how the behavior is okay so here now the aqua type is not populated but this is still visible so like we mentioned first let us make this conditionally visible i hope you know what to do to make this conditionally visible let us go and edit this page this is the floor component that i have added which passes basically a record id um to the flow and here you can set the component visibility and i'm adding a filter here which basically says a code type equals partner so we have added the criteria and save this flow go back to the account okay now you can see that the screen is not visible here because the condition has not met okay so let us focus account type here as partner oh but we have this validation rule on the account which does not allow us to save this account so for now what we can do just deactivate the particular validation rule so that we can update the values correctly on account for now and later we will enable it back i have deactivated the violation rule and let us save this okay deactivating the validation rule itself let us do this operation now you can see that section that is the flow of screen is visible now so like i said based on a set of conditions it's basically populating the partnership level that's what you can see here like i said partnership level is either diamond gold or silver but it should be populated automatically based on the condition from here so you can see the screen uh with flow element is visible here now and let us populate or let us select some basic values first one is the employee account let me select the highest value so that the partnership level should be diamond click on next and country count uh meaning here you can see the number of countries in which the partners are present again choose the highest one okay the operation has completed that's why it could reset and you can see here that the partner level got updated as diamond this is what the screenflow is doing now let us activate that violation rule again so that the transaction is going to fail and if the transaction failed let us see what is the type of operation happening here you will be seeing an and handle fault exception here and similar to what we have done in the previous flow we can add basically a create record option which is going to log platform event select the object type as exception log and map all the field values our operation type is accord partnership population record id we are basically passing the account record id from uh the account page to the flow through this particular variable so select that one now add the error message or exception details and select flow and flows fault message will be populated here we are done so like we have done before so like we have done before add the second connector and remove the first one so we have added the logic to create the platform event which should be automatically logging details to exception here i am not going to throw the exception because the operation is just the screen element right we are not doing anything else so save this as a new version and activate this let us go back to the flow and redo the operation since the exception is handled there is no error message shown on the screen but let us go to the record exception record and see like if we have got a new currently we have got only two exception record take on yes you can see this is this is the one which is corresponding to the account partnership population failure all the records or all the field values are populated here this is one way of handling the exception from a screenflow but salesforce by default provides something called flow execution error event which is a plus standard platform event provided by salesforce and whenever a screen flow is failing an entry with all the details will be populated to this particular flow execution error event let us try this one also i tried using this but i think this uh standard error is somewhat a recent addition to sales source and some of the details are getting populated but i was not able to populate all the required details uh so we might need to still wait to use this flow execution error your error event and like i said this is only available in screen flows but if say source can expand this to normal invokable processes also this is going to be really helpful for us and we don't need to actually create our own platform event because flow execution our revenue is going to handle everything for us let us see the behavior for now from this flow basically i am going to remove this particular create record option so if you remove this right if some exception is going to happen it's automatically going to log details to that particular flow event and similar to what we have done for iterating over the platform even and creating exception to record i have created a similar trigger on flow execution error event also but since this is the latest feature i think this is still getting developed i was not able to create a trigger on this particular flow execution error run from this developer console maybe i can quickly show you file new apex trigger float i'm just leaving some name for now and you can select the object typos flow executioner event and once you submit this right i'm getting this kind of error like platform you know subject only support after insert so what i have done i have used visual studio to create this particular trigger and push to my all that is how i created this one you might be seeing um an error like this that's why i thought of informing this in advance so i have got this code already in in place and let us redo this operation and see like if we are having a new exception get record getting load from this particular trigger okay so latest count is 43 let us go to the account refresh the screen and execute this particular flow once again okay you can see like the operation got failed and what we need to know verify is that if exception record got created for this okay yeah you can see that operation now got updated like you know from it's from flow trigger that means it's working but you can see that object record id those details are not getting populated even if i have done uh that mapping inside the trigger operation so if you go to trigger right you can see uh from the floor execution error error event object there is the context object which is fetching the object type and also record id but unfortunately this is not getting populated that's why i feel like you know this might not be still in a usable stage for us so we might need to wait for some more time so that they might fix all these issues and we will be able to populate details from flow execution error event instead of firing platform events by our own but this is going to save lots of time for us these are some resources i referred for preparing for this session and thank you so much amit again for giving me this opportunity to share my knowledge thank you everyone