Thank you for attending Custom Notifications- An Alternative to Email Alerts at Dreamforce ’19. As promised everyone who attended gets to install the Flow presented right into your org. The attached PDF has instructions on how to access

User Notification Flow Installation Instructions

Two sets of instructions are contained in this document. The first is a quick set of instructions outlining the steps but without details or screenshots. Following the quick instructions, more detailed step-by-step instructions are provided. Please use the set of instructions that is most useful to you to help you learn to get your package installed and configured! 

Quick Instructions

Installation steps for User Notification Flow

  1. Install unmanaged package (https://sforce.co/33SZOZj)
  2. Create Custom Notification 
  3. Query for Custom Notification ID
  4. Update Flow with your Custom Notification ID
  5. Save As> Activate Flow
  6. Add Flow Component to Account page
  7. Associate User Notification Flow to component
  8. Enable passing of RecordId to AccountId Flow variable
  9. Save Lightning Page
  10. Done!

Installation steps for use with Slack

  1. Setup Slack channel and create webhook for the channel
  2. Create Named Credential in Salesforce with Slack webhook URL
  3. Update Flow SlackMessage variable with your org’s domain (bonus challenge: make this dynamic so that you do not have to hardcode the URL)
  4. Done!

Detailed Instructions for User Notification Flow

***This package requires that Account Teams are enabled. If Account Teams are not enabled in your Production environment, please install, test, and modify the Flow to remove references to Account Teams in a Sandbox before pushing to production.***

Step 1: Install the unmanaged package into your org https://sforce.co/33SZOZj. If installing into a sandbox use this link: https://test.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage.apexp?p0=04tB000000071tF

Select which profiles to deploy to and click Install. 

Step 2. After the package is installed successfully navigate to Setup>Notification Builder>Custom Notifications and click on Custom Notifications. 

Create a new Custom Notification Type with the following parameters: 

Click Save. 

Step 3. Using the SOQL query tool of your choice, query for your Custom Notification Type Id using the following query: Select Id, CustomNotifTypeName from CustomNotificationType

Step 4. Copy the Id onto your clipboard and then go to Setup>Process Automation>Flows. Click Flows. 

Select the User Message Flow to load into the Lightning Flow Canvas. In the left-side column, you will see the  Flow Toolbox. Click the Manager Tab and then search your Flow Resources for NotificationId. 

Click on the NotificationId constant and paste your Custom Notification Type record Id into the Value field. 

Click Done.

In the top right corner of your Flow Canvas click Save As. This will open a pop up allowing you to save a new version of this Flow or save as a new Flow. 

Either option is fine, but for the purpose of getting configuring this package, choose A New Version and click Save. 

Activate the new version of the Flow by clicking the Activate button in the top right corner of the Canvas

Once activated, close your Flow. 

Step 5. Navigate to an Account record and from the Account page click on the Setup Icon and then select Edit Page. 

On the Lightning Page Editor, on the left-side component column, search for Flow. 

Click the Flow component and drag it onto the Canvas wherever you would like it to live on the page. For the purpose of this demonstration, we will have it live in the narrow right-side column of our page. Note that not all Lightning Pages will have multiple columns. 

Click on the Flow component to load its properties on the right-side column of the Lightning Page Canvas. Set the properties of the component identical to the image below. 

Additionally set Component Visibility if needed. Once page edits are complete Click Save at the top-right-side of the page and then click the Back button to go back to your Account record. 

You will now see the Flow loaded and ready for use

Send a test notification to yourself using the following text: Wow, look at this cool new Custom Notification flow component! {!AccountName}. 

After you click next, sit back and watch the magic happen! Notice how the {!AccountName} syntax merged and actually displayed the name of the Account. Pretty cool, right? 

Now that the component is installed and useable you can deploy to your users, or enhance it and make it even better than it already is. For even more functionality follow the below instructions to connect your new notification tool to a Slack channel! 

Detailed Slack Integration Instructions: 

It’s important to note that this simple integration can only post to one channel. More complex integrations can be built as needed. 

Step 1: Create a  new channel in Slack to hold your messages. Follow these instructions to set up your Slack App and Create your Webhook: https://api.slack.com/messaging/webhooks

Once the Webhook is created copy the URL

Step 2: Go back to Salesforce and navigate to Setup>Security>Named Credentials

Create a new Named Credential with the same configuration as below. Be sure to paste your webhook URL into the URL field. 

Step 3: Navigate back to the User Message Flow and in the Flow Toolbox select the Manager tab and search for SlackMessag

Update the domain part of the URL to your org’s Domain. Your org domain will be the part of the URL before “lightning.force.com”. It should match your company’s My Domain. Remember if configuring in a sandbox you will need to update when you deploy to production. 

Leaving the domain as-is will cause the links in your Slack messages to point to the wrong org or an org that does not exist. 

Once your URL is updated, click Done. Save your Flow as a new version and then activate the new version of your Flow. 

Step 4: Navigate back to an Account record and send a new test message to yourself that says “I just configured my flow to send the message to a Slack channel! What an awesome admin I am!”

Assuming you followed the above guide you should see a message like this in your Slack Channel.

CONGRATULATIONS! You have now installed and configured the User Message Flow with optional Slack integration. This package is really just a proof of concept to help you get a glimpse into one use case of Custom Notifications with Lightning Flow Builder. We would love to hear and see how you took this and really made it your own. Please reach out to us at info@cloudthinkconsulting.com if you have questions or need anything! 

Be on the lookout for more great utilities and productivity apps coming from Cloud Think soon!