Big Idea or Enduring Question:

A warm welcome goes a long way in solidifying a company’s culture! If so then, why not provide existing users an ability to auto-follow new users in chatter?

Chatter is a great way to boost collaboration in your organization. You can Post Status, Links, Files, and Comments on others’ posts, etc. The benefits of following the new users in Chatter are the following:

Keep up with what new users are doing; your guidance will expedite, and streamline their on-boarding journey!
Following new users will enable you to track their chatter activities; use this ‘crystal ball’ to help them to improve their productivity!

In the past, I have written a few articles related to User, Chatter, and automation. Why not check them out while you are at it?!

On the Trailblazer community, several people have been wondering how to allow their users to auto-follow new users. Salesforce doesn’t have any out-of-the-box feature for this; so, I decided to take a crack at it. This article shows how to develop an app that allows your users to auto-follow news users without code.

Objectives:

After reading this blog post, the reader will be able to:

What is a MIXED DML error and how to avoid it?
Add a Time-dependent action in After-save Record-Triggered Flow
Get the list of user who has opted to follow new users in Chatter
Use a Loop element to work with multiple records
Use After-save Record-Triggered Flow to create a record (Bulk Safe)
Monitor Time-based flow queue

Business Use Case

Warren Mason, Gurukul on Cloud‘s (GoC) awesome System Administrator, received the following requirement – allow users to auto-follow new users in Chatter. And, make this an optional feature.

Automation Champion Approach (I-do):

While this can be solved using various automation tools like Apex, etc, but we’ll use After-save Record-Triggered Flow to solve it. Check out this article to understand why we are using after-save record-triggered flow for this scenario.

Before proceeding ahead, you have to understand the EntitySubscription object. The object represents a user‘s subscription – whether the user follows a record or other users.

Field Name	Details
SubscriberId	The Id of the User who is following the record or user.
ParentId	The Id of the record or user which the user is following.

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 Warren’s business requirement using After-save Record-Triggered Flow. We must:

Topics are a great way to organize or increase post and comment visibility. For example, if you post that you’re working on a presentation for Dreamforce’14, you might want to add the hashtag topic #Dreamforce14 or #DF14 in your updates. Anyone can click on these topics to find out more information about Dreamforce’14 and see what people and groups are talking about Dreamforce’14. After Summer’14 Salesforce allows you to the Delete topic from Salesforce User Interface, but not merge two different Chatter Topics. I have never found any apps or out of the box, solution to merge two different Chatter Topics. In this article, we will develop the same app without using code.

Business Use Case

People at Universal Container are using Chatter hashtag to organize their posts. Management in Universal Container wants to develop an application so that their system administrator can merge two different Topics (For example ABC & DEF).

Solution for the above business requirement

To solve above business requirement, we will use Visual Workflow and fire this flow will use Custom Link. Before going ahead with the solution, you have to understand about TopicAssignment Object. It represents the assignment of a topic to a specific feed item or record. Below are the key fields from TopicAssignment object

Field Name	Details
EntityId	Identifier of the feed item or record.
TopicId	Identifier of the topic.

To develop this application follow the below instructions

Topics (SObject variable – TopicAssignment type )
GetAllPostFromTopics and NewTopicDetails (SObject Collection Variable – TopicAssignment type)

Sobject Variables

3) Drag and drop a Screen Element ( Give the name Merge Topics) onto the window and add two fields with below detail

Name	Data Type	Required
Old Topic ID	Textbox	Yes
New Topic ID	Textbox	Yes

It will look like the below screenshot

To Get User’s Input

4) Drag and drop a Fast Lookup ( Give the name Get all post from Old Topic ) onto the window to get all posts, links etc from old Chatter Topic and map the fields according to below details

Select Object TopicAssignment
TopicId= {!OldTopicID} [OldTopicID is nothing but Screen Input field], Save Id of records into any variable in our case it’s {!GetAllPostFromTopics} Sobject Collection variable. You can take help from the following screenshot

Extract all Posts from old Topic

5) Drag and drop a Record Delete ( Give the name Delete Old Topic) on the window. Under object select Topic, and map ID–> {!OldTopicID}, as shown in below screenshot

Delete Old Topic

6) Drag and drop a Loop Logic (Give the name Extract post one by one) on the window and extract post from Sobject Collection variable and pass it to Sobject variable, as shown in the below screenshot

Loop Over Topic Assignment

7) Drag and Drop Assignment Logic (Give the name Update Topic ID) on the window and assign value of Screen input {!NewTopicID} to Sobject variable variable {!Topic.TopicId} so that all posts from an Old Topic to assign New Topic. Take the help from the below screenshot

Update Topic ID

8) Drag and Drop Assignment Logic (Give the name Add all posts Into New Collection) on the window and assign value from Sobject variable {!Topic} to Sobject Collection variable {!NewTopicDetails} so at the end of for loop we will have all posts from Old Topic into One collection with updated Topic ID. Take the help from the below screenshot

All in One

9) Finally drag and Drop Fast Create (Give the name Record Create) on the window to add all posts from an Old Topic to New Topic, It means we are creating their reference in TopicAssignment object, as shown in the below screenshot

Move Posts from one Topic to another

10) Finally our flow will look like the below screenshot

Merge Chatter Topics

11) Save the flow with name (Merge Chatter Topic) and close the canvas.

Add Visual workflow into the home page component

We can call Flow from the custom button, link, sub-flow, Visualforce page, Apex start() or using Flow Trigger workflow action. Here we will call our flow using Custom Link available in the homepage component. To do that, follow below instruction:

Custom Link

2) Add custom link in the Home page component
3) Add Home page component into the Home page layout

It’s time to test this feature

1) In this demo, I will Merge Chatter Topic Dreamforce (Old) with Salesforce (New)
2) To get Topic ID, for Topic Dreamforce take a look at the below screenshot

How To Get Topic ID

3) To open this app click on “Merge Chatter Files” link available on the homepage, and fill the details you can take help from below screenshot

Open Merge Chatter Topic app

4) Now enter old and New Topic ID, In my case Dreamforce is Old Topic and Salesforce is New Topic and click on Next Button, as shown in the below screenshot

Merge Chatter Flow

Your all Posts Including Status Update, links, polls or files are moved to new Topic.

Note: – I will suggest you to Implement this first on your developer org, test it and then move it to Production. Let me know if you have any difficulty to Implement it.

Automation Champion

Tag: Flow Triggers For Workflow

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Tag: Flow Triggers For Workflow

Getting Started with Salesforce Flow – Part 50 (Welcome New Users by Default – Auto Follow them in Chatter!)

Posted at 9:00 AM by Rakesh Gupta, on January 7, 2021

Big Idea or Enduring Question:

Objectives:

Business Use Case

Automation Champion Approach (I-do):

Guided Practice (We-do):

Share this:

Like this:

Merge Chatter Topics

Posted at 6:36 PM by Rakesh Gupta, on August 18, 2014

Business Use Case

Solution for the above business requirement

Add Visual workflow into the home page component

It’s time to test this feature

Share this:

Like this:

Search

Upcoming Trainings

Sponsor #1

Sponsor #2

Sponsor #3

Sponsor #4

Order Now!

Buy My Book

Buy My Book

Recent Posts

Salesforce ID Converter Build on Lightning Flow

Blog Archives

Categories

Information

Top Posts

Social Media