Big Idea or Enduring Question:
How can users be allowed to Merge Chatter Topics?
Topics for Objects allow us to organize the records using Chatter’s topic. Topics help to organize records in a better way and make the search easier for you. For example, if you post that you’re working on a presentation for Dreamforce20, you might want to add the hashtag topic #Dreamforce20 or #DF20 in your updates.
Salesforce allowed you to delete the topic from the user interface – but not merge two different Chatter Topics. This article goes a step ahead and explains how to merge two chatter topics without using a single line of code.
I have written a few articles on automating Topic association and email notification in the past. Why not check them out while you are at it?!
- Getting Started with Process Builder – Part 39 (Auto-assign a topic to a record)
- Getting Started with Process Builder – Part 41 (Email notification on TopicAssignment)
Objectives:
After reading this article, you will be able to:
- Use Flow to merge two topics with preserving the associated links of records, posts, and files
- Learn how to work with the picklist component (Screen Flow)
- Learn how to use a Decision element to find whether a Record variable or a Record collection variable contains a record
- Find out how to use the Loop element to extract records from a record collection variable.
- And, last but not least, discover how to use the Create Records element to create multiple records at once (Bulk Safe)
Business Use case
Rachel Gillett is working as a System administrator at Universal Containers (UC). Users at UC are using the Chatter hashtag to organize their posts, records, and files. She has received management requirements to allow their users to merge two topics from the Salesforce user interface (for example, #DF21 and Dreamforce21).
Automation Champion Approach (I-do):
While this can be solved using various automation tools like Apex, etc, we will use Screen Flow.
Before proceeding ahead, you have to understand the TopicAssignment object. It represents the assignment of a topic to a specific feed item, record, or file.
| Field Name | Details |
| EntityId | Identifier of the feed item or record. |
| TopicId | Identifier of the topic. |
Before discussing the solution, let me show you a diagram of a Process Flow at a high level. Please spend a few minutes to go through the following Flow diagram and understand it.
Let’s begin building this automation process.
Guided Practice (We-do):
There are 2 steps to solve Rachel’s business requirement using Screen Flow. We must: Read the rest of this entry!
