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samch_uncsamch_unc 

VPM: Returning and displaying a recordset

Hi All,

 

I'm new to the Visual Process Manager, and although I skimmed through the Firefly Illustrator documentation, I cannot seem to figure out how to do return & display a recordset.

 

What I want to do is have the user search for an item and be presented with a list of matching items to help them further drill down.  I can, of course, use the Account Lookup feature to display options like this, but it seems to be fairly limited.  First, the Account Lookup object can only display a single column of information - say, the Name of each record.  Second, it can only display a few results.  If the search term finds 30 or 40 results, the remainder aren't provided as selection options.  Ideally, I would like to be able to display a table of results with multiple columns to help our users identify the record they're looking for.  I've tried various approaches, but nothing seems to work right.  Any help would be appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Sam

swoodswood

The best way is to use the choice lookup element:

 

1. Create a question asking the user to select the appropriate record.

2. Create a choice lookup which links to your data source.

3. Complete the choice lookup allocations and filter as you did for the data lookup

 

If you want to display more information to the user than a single field, put a text formula into your object (displaying the data in the format you'd like) - then in the choice lookup, use the formula field as the field displayed to the end user.

 

Hope that makes sense!


Steve

samch_uncsamch_unc

Hi Steve,

 

Yep, that's the problem.  I would like to be able to display several fields per returned record in order to help my users ensure that they are selecting the correct one.  I certainly hadn't thought of using a text formula to concatenate the fields.  That could get a bit unwieldy for what I'm trying to do (several fields), but it might work.  Also, it doesn't get around the limitation of having too many similar results returned from the parent lookup.  I was really hoping for a way to display something akin to a standard Salesforce list view.  Any thoughts on if that can be accomplished with this tool just yet?

 

Thanks,

Sam

swoodswood

When you say it doesn't get around the limitation of having too many similar results returned from the parent lookup, not sure I understand what you mean.  Do you have an example scenario?  Might help me frame it a bit better!

 

There are options to display a list view, but you head down the Visualforce path to do that.  Flow integrates neatly with Visualforce, so you can do some interesting stuff there - however, there are some limits on the interaction between a Flow and a Visualforce page.

 

Cheers,


Steve

samch_uncsamch_unc

Hi Steve,

 

The idea is that I want the user to first select an account on which to perform the subsequent actions.  Right now, they would type all or part of the account name into a search box I've created in the Flow.  The next screen displays a list of matching accounts from which they can select.  That's all very easy.  The problem is that we have several accounts in our org that are essentially sub-accounts of a parent.  They are, in fact, divisions or departments within a larger company.  In some cases, there are over a hundred divisions / departments and corresponding accounts for each.  This is simply a necessity of our particular implementation.  It also means that, even if the Flow could diplay 100+ results (which I don't think it can), I would have to concatentate the Company Name + Division Name + Department Name for them to find the unique entry they were searching for.  I know that I could have them drill through a number of levels of searching until they found the right one, but the UI paradigm I was hoping to replicate was the native Salesforce List View.  That would enable me to display all of the relevant columns at once and eliminate extra clicks.

 

I'm thinking that, at least until this product matures a little more, I'll probably have to build some hybrid VisualForce solution as you suggested.  Are there examples / white papers / guidelines on doing that?  I haven't found a lot of detail on VPM + VisualForce integration.

 

Thanks again,

Sam

swoodswood

Got it.

 

You can display 100+ records - though you should probably put them in a drop-down as opposed to individual radio buttons!  (open the parent question, choice settings tab, "show as drop-down" - or very similar path - I don't have the designer open in front of me).

 

If you were to display a list view in the VF page, you can't actually then pass the data back from the list view into the flow - which is a bit of a limitation on that design.

 

This is the kind of stuff we'd really like to enable - but we're just not quite there yet.  The plan is to expose flow in the apex controller directly, so you can actually set your own rendering based on the information in the flow.  The other thing we are working on is "table" support to better handle these types of use cases.  There a little while off though.

 

Sorry there's not a better solution.

 

Steve

VPrakashVPrakash

 

Hi Steve,
 I went through the Dreamforce 2010 session of Business Process Application Development on the force.com flow. It is really great to have this feature. I was wondering that this force.com flow can be applicable to the following scenario:
 We at our org want to clone the functionality of adding opportunity line items from the products object to opportunity(Wizard) in the custom object Contract__c that we have in our org.
  Can we achieve this through force.com flow?
Thanks & regards 
Venu Prakash 

 

swoodswood

I would have thought so, though I'm not super familiar with that process.  You could launch a flow from the parent opportunity object, passing in the opportunity id, then simply write back the product line items as needed.  You can have loops in a flow, so that's not a problem.  Is there something specific that you think might not work?