True North Dreamin (TND) wrapped up today, after two days of keynotes, sessions, and workshops. It was quite a fun event, and especially meeting people in real life that I’ve only spoken to on Zoom or chatted with on LinkedIn.
Here are some thoughts.… Read the rest
Let’s review yesterday’s scenario, in which my role was Solution Architect, and my responsibilities were:
For this work, I billed by the hour, up to an agreed upon maximum of 20 hours per week.… Read the rest
About 6 months ago, I chose to work with a Salesforce agency that billed by the hour. At the time, I needed the opportunity and it was a fun project, so I accepted a reasonable hourly rate.
Fast forward to today, and it turns out I’m not compatible with hourly billing anymore, and the agency let me go.… Read the rest
As a reminder, I’ll be attending True North Dreamin 2025 in Vancouver. The event takes place on April 24-25, 2025 at The Nest at UBC.
I’m attending as a sponsor and a speaker.
As a sponsor, I’ll be demoing two editions of Dryad Receipting for Salesforce, one for NPSP and one for Industries.… Read the rest
While at DreamOle last week, a term was used that I’ve never heard before. To paraphrase, the person said, “Product owners want AI-first products”.
There are several prominent “first” terms.
For example, the term “mobile-first products” is familiar to most. If not, at a certain moment in the past, there was a big shift to ensure all new websites and applications were responsive.… Read the rest
Formulas in Salesforce flows are really cool. They are a unique type of variable, one that has multiple purposes.
Here’s one of my favorite methods to show just how cool they are: formulas are only evaluated at the moment they are used.… Read the rest
Here are my takeaways from this year’s Dream Ole in Zaragoza, Spain.
It’s all about Agentforce
Apparently you cannot escape it. It’s not just prevalent in North America, but in Europe too. The opening keynote speaker was a product manager of Agentforce and we had a chance to chat after her presentation.… Read the rest
It’s a little late to mention, but I’m attending DreamOle in Zaragoza, Spain tomorrow.
If you’re also attending, look out for me and I’ll be happy to meet you.
Here are the sessions in my agenda:
They are offering an Agentforce Certification Bootcamp, in which you can obtain an Agentforce cert, but that hasn’t piqued my interest.… Read the rest
When creating custom fields, there are two settings most people ignore: External Id and Unique. When used properly, these boolean settings can be useful.
By setting a field as an External Id, you’re telling Salesforce that this field represents an Id field from a system outside of Salesforce.… Read the rest
As a Salesforce consultant, sometimes you play the role of architect. That is to say, not only are you implementing the project, you’re also designing it.
The moment you shift into this role, your role increases dramatically.
The main one being, whatever you design, you are responsible for.… Read the rest
There probably isn’t a single Salesforce project that has ever gone perfectly to plan.
Just like the sayings, “If you don’t make any mistakes, you’re probably don’t make anything”, and Mike Tyson’s popular one, “Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face”.… Read the rest
Let’s say you have a record-triggered flow that calls a subflow. Sometimes you need to pass variables to the subflow.
If you need to pass a record to the subflow, you have two options:
While both get the job done, I usually recommend option 1.… Read the rest
A LinkedIn article was published yesterday about hardcoding URLs in flows. The author is trying to solve a problem involving URLs that change depending on the environment.
For example, let’s say you have a screen flow that creates an account, and you want to display a link to the newly created account in the last step.… Read the rest
Every once in a while, when debugging flows, you may come across an error such as “Unable to obtain exclusive access to this record or 1 records: 003OL00000EMzT8YAL”
At face value, this error message doesn’t seem to tell you very much.… Read the rest
Record locking is when you inform Salesforce you want to lock a record for a certain period of time. Your process becomes the only one that can access that record. Any other processes that attempt to access it at the same time receive an error.… Read the rest
How that we’ve covered flow bulkification and flow interviews, we can tie things together. As mentioned, sometimes Salesforce automagically bulkifies flow interviews.
Most of the time, this is a good thing. Sometimes it’s not so good.
For example, imagine a flow that gets and updates a custom setting.… Read the rest
In Salesforce, there are two flow parts: the building part and the execution part. Here are some interesting things to know about the latter.
Each time a flow executes, Salesforce creates an instance of the flow. The instance is a standalone unique copy of the flow, running within a specific context.… Read the rest
Most good Salesforce consultants are already familiar with good flow practices. Things like
Every once in a while, it’s interesting to see how our parent company is doing. You know, the big one that we all depend on for our livelihood.
This income chart was recently released:
It’s interesting to notice a few things:
A couple of readers provided some feedback from yesterday’s email that I felt added to the conversation.
The 1st is the option to use validation rules for required fields. This approach has pros and cons.
Pros:
When creating required fields on a standard or custom object, you have two options:
In most cases, the latter is a better option. Why?
When fields are required at an object level, they are *always* required, regardless of the source.… Read the rest
Last week I wrote about how, despite the trending chatter, I don’t believe AI will fully replace developers in the short term.
Today I had a conversation with a colleague about this topic, and another interesting consideration arose.
If AI writes the apex code, who’s ultimately responsible for it?… Read the rest
In addition to the spanning relationship limit, there are some other important considerations when using formula fields. There are 3 more:
1. Character limit
Formula fields can have a maximum of 3,900 characters. This includes spaces, carriage returns, and comments.
You can easily solve this limit by reducing spaces, or by splitting the formula into sub-formulas.… Read the rest
When attempting to update a client’s formula field on an object, I received an uncommon error message. Salesforce complained, “You have reached the maximum number of object references”.
This error is caused by trying to exceed the limit of cross-object references (also known as “spanning relationships”).… Read the rest
When building flows, it’s common to have input and output variables. Whether passing the current record Id to a screen flow or calling an autolaunched subflow, these variables keep things modular.
Here’s a small tip I haven’t seen often: When using an input variable, only use it once.… Read the rest
There’s more and more chatter about AI replacing developers. Mark Zuckerberg talks about it often these days, and even Marc Benioff has made more than a few comments about it.
While it’s hard to predict the near future, I’m pretty sure about the state of AI today.… Read the rest
There are multiple ways to debug flows in Salesforce.
The debug button
The first option is the most popular. You create the flow and then click “Debug” to see it run. By the way, if your flow has input variables, there’s a way to speed up the debugging process.… Read the rest
I bet you think this email will be about Salesforce flows, eh? Well, it’s not. Instead it’s about flow state.
According to Wikipedia, “Flow state theory suggests that when individuals are in a state of flow, they experience deep immersion, focus, and intrinsic motivation in their activities.”… Read the rest
A Salesforce client of yours has a problem, so they reached out to you for help.
They’ve explained the issue, you’ve repeated it back to them to confirm your understanding, and now it’s time to make a decision. Also let’s remove urgency from this scenario, as that would clearly encourage you in one direction.… Read the rest
The repeater component is a relatively new feature in screen flows.
A simple way to show its usefulness is through an example. Let’s imagine there’s a Payment object, which is related to the Opportunity. Rather than have your users click “Add” on the Payment related list, enter some data, and then click “Save & New”, you can offer an optimized screen flow with a repeater.… Read the rest