Last Updated on January 10, 2019 by Rakesh Gupta

Oh sweet, I guess this is my 100th posts on automation in Salesforce. I would like to thank everyone for their kind messages and support. I also wanted to share the good news, now Automation Champion blog is listed as Process Builder resource on Trailhead along with awesome Jenwlee’s Salesforce blog, she has amazing contents on Process Builder and Flow.  

If you have a large Community implemented and a very active instance of Salesforce,  you are probably leveraging Public Groups extensively. The public group represents a group of users. We can add any number of users to a public group. There is no limitation on the number of members per Public Group. It is a daily job of Salesforce administrator to add or remove users to the Public group. Let’s start with a business use case 

Business Use case

Donna Serdula is working as System administrator at Universal Containers. They have just implemented partner community to manage their partner’s related work better in one place and help them to sell more. As a part of partner onboarding process, once both parties sign the contract. The next steps are to create partner account and contacts in Salesforce, to grant them partner community access. Currently, at Universal Containers they have few manual processes that they want to automate are mentioned below

• As a part of partner onboarding process, system administrator at Universal Containers manually creates a public group (Account Number for Name and DeveloperName) for each partner account. (Blog 56) 
• Then add partner users from that account to Public Group, created in the preceding step. (Blog 57) 

Solution for the above business requirement

I’m going to share a solution for the first requirement in this article and will publish another article for the second requirement i.e. Blog 57. 

There are a few possible solutions for the first business scenario, but I’ll use Process Builder and Flow to solve it. Before proceeding, you have to understand Group objects in Salesforce. It represents, a set of User records. The group can contain individual users, other groups, the users in a particular role or territory, or the users in a particular role or territory plus all of the users below that role or territory in the hierarchy. Follow the below instructions to solve the above business requirement

Assumption: – I’m going to use Account Number as public group Label and Group Name. The reason behind it, we need a unique name for the public group name and account number (Standard field on account object) is always unique for business. If you want to use something else like Account Name Plus Account Number or ID, then consider using formula field.

1. Click on Name | Setup | App Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | Flows
2. Click on New Flow button and it will open the Flow canvas for you. Now create one text variable to store the account number, as shown in the following screenshots

VarAccountNumber

–> A variable is used to store the value. You can use the variable throughout your Flow. For example, while creating the record, performing an update or with delete operations.

3. The next step is to create a public group, as soon as an account gets enabled as Partner account. For this, we will use Record Create element. Drag-and-drop Record Create element (Enter the name Create new public group) onto the canvas and map the fields according to below details

• Select Object Group
• Name = {!VarAccountNumber}
• DeveloperName = {!VarAccountNumber}, it will look like the following screenshot 

Create new public group

–> Record Create element allow you to create a record in Salesforce using the values from the Flow. 
–> Name refer the group name, corresponds to Label on the user interface.
–> DeveloperName is the unique name of the object in the API. 
–> If you want to create a Queue then, set Type value equals to Queue.

Finally, your Flow will look like the following screenshot

4. Save the Flow (Type: – Autolaunched Flow) with name Create public group Flow and close the canvas. Don’t forget to Activate the Flow.

Activate a Flow

–> If the Flow doesn’t have a start point then you will not get an activate link on the Flow detail page. 

Launch a Flow from Process Builder

Our next task is to create a Process Builder on the Account object to start a Flow. To create a Process Builder on the Account object follow the below instructions

1.  Click on Name | Setup | App Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | Process Builder
2. To create a new process from scratch, click on the New Button available on Process Management page. A popup will appear where you have to enter the Name (Use Create public group PB as name), API Name and Description as shown in the below screenshot

Define Process Properties

3. Click on Object node to add object and then select Account object. For the entry criteria, Select when a record is created or edited, as shown in the below screenshot. Once done, click on the Save button

Evaluation Criteria

4. The next task is to add Process Criteria. To do this click on Add Criteria, enter Name, Type of action and set filter conditions as shown in the following screenshot.

•  [Account].IsPartner Equals Boolean True

–> Make sure to select the checkbox Do you want to execute the actions only when specified changes are made to the record? When you select this option, the process ignores record changes that aren’t relevant to your defined criteria. 

Process Criteria

5. The next step is to add a Scheduled action to Process. Under Scheduled Actions, click Set Schedule. Set the schedule for 0 Hours after the account Last Modified Date.  

Set Schedule

6. Now that you have a schedule add the Flows action to it. For this select action type Flow, Use Field Picker to choose the field [Account].AccountNumber, as shown in the following screenshot.

Add action – Flows

–> The reason behind to use time-based action is to avoid MIXED DML error. DML operations on certain sObjects, sometimes referred to as setup objects, can’t be mixed with DML on other sObjects in the same transaction. It means we cannot perform DML Operation on both Setup and Non-setup object in a same context of execution. 

7. Once done, click on the Save button, it will redirect you to Process canvas. Finally, the Process will look like the following screenshot

Don’t forget to active the Process by clicking on the Activate button.

It’s time to test the Flow and Process

1) Navigate to the Account tab, identify an account that you want to enable as Partner account. In this case, I want to enable Grand Hotels & Resorts Ltd as Partner account 

New Account

2) Click on Manage External Account and then, click Enable as Partner, as shown in the following screenshot 

Enable Partner Account

Wait for few minutes and then navigate to public group (Click on Setup | Administer | Manage Users | Public Groups) 

Proof of concept

Note: –  I will suggest you to implement this first on your developer org, test it and then move it to production.