In Salesforce Chatter is a great way to boost internal Collaboration. This is great because it allows your organization to keep all its data and information in one place. A user can Post Status, link, File, and comment on others post etc. Many time I found on success community people are asking about a way to Auto follow a new user. The first solution that comes upon in our mind is to write an Apex Trigger, but do you know you can achieve the same functionality without using code i.e. by using Flow and Workflow Rule to fire/trigger our Flow. Few benefits of following the new user is
1) Keep up with what new user are doing by following and you can able to guide them so they will get more out of it.
2) You can help them to improve their productivity by clearing their doubts because after following you can track their Chatter activity.
Business Use Case
Higher management in Universal Container wants to develop an application for their organization so that new users will auto follow by all System administrators.
Solution for the above business requirement
To solve this requirement we will use Flow and Headless Flow. Before going ahead with the solution you have to understand about EntitySubscription Object. It’s Represents a subscription for a user following a record or another user. The user can subscribe to a record or to another user.
| Field Name | Details |
| ParentId | ID of the record or user which the user is following |
| SubscriberId | ID of the User who is following the record or user |
To develop this application follow the below instructions
1) Create a Custom Field Start (Data Type: – Check-box) on the User object. We will use this field in Workflow Rule.
2) Click on Name | Setup | App Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | Flows
3) Click on New Flow, it will open flow canvas for you. Now create One Text type variable ParentID (To pass the new user ID ),
Variable to store new User ID
4) Drag and drop a Fast Lookup ( Give the name System Administrators UserID) onto the window to get a list of users those having a system administrator profile and and map the fields according to below details
- Select Object User
- IsActive= TRUE
- ProfileId= 00e90000001A75c [System Administrator profile ID], Save the records ID into Sobject Collection variable in our case it’s {!UsersID}, You can take help from the following screenshot
To get Users with profile system administrator
5) Drag and drop a Loop Logic (Give the name Extract user id one by one) on the window to extract value from Sobject Collection variable and pass it to Sobject variable, as shown in the below screenshot
Loop to extract User ID one-by-one
6) Drag and Drop Assignment Logic (Give the name Set follower detail) on the window, to assign SubscriberID and ParentID and into the Sobject variable (EntitySubscription Object Type) {!FollowerDetail} as shown in the below screenshot
Set Follower Details
7) Drag and Drop Assignment Logic (Give the name All Details into one Collection Variable) on the window and assign value from Sobject variable {!FollowerDetail} to Sobject Collection variable {!MassFollow} so at the end of the for loop (To avoid SOQL limit) we will use it inside the Fast Create for Auto follow new users. You can take help from the following screenshot
Bulkify your flow
8) Our final task is to create records in EntitySubscription object, To do that drag and Drop Fast Create (Give the name Auto Follow New Users) on the window and map the field according to the below screenshot
Auto Follow New Users
9) Finally our Flow will look like the following screenshot
10) Save the flow with name Auto Follow New Users and close the canvas.
Create Workflow rule to fire our Flow
Our next task is to create a workflow on the User object on creation and every time it’s edited event. To create a workflow on the User object follow the below instructions
1) Click on Name | Setup | App Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | New Rule
2) Select object User from the drop-down
3) Enter Name, for Evaluate the rule when a record is select Created, For Rule Criteria select is Active To True, as shown in the below screenshot
Workflow Rule on User Creation
4) Now Add a time trigger to to set Start To True (Custom field – Checkbox ) after 0 hours of record Creation date. To do this click on Add Time Trigger button and Set the length after how many days/hours workflow will fire i.e. in hours and days, I’ve selected 0 hours after the Created Date. Now add one field update action for time dependent workflow and set the Start to True. You can take help from the following screenshot
Workflow Field Update
5) Save the workflow and activate it.
6) Create another workflow (i.e. workflow Rule2 ) on the same object i.e. User to fire our Flow, set entry criteria of trigger is Start To True
Workflow Rule2
7) Add one Immediate Workflow Actions i.e. New Flow Trigger, Select Flow (Auto Follow New Users) and set Variable (ParentID) value as shown in the following screenshot
New Flow Trigger Action
8) Add one more Immediate Workflow Actions i.e. New Field Update and Set Start to False, so it won’t create an issue next time when you will try to update the user.
9) Save the workflow and activate it.
Note: – I will suggest you Implement this first on your developer org test it and then move it to Production.
