Big Idea or Enduring Question:
How do you allow your users to preschedule Chatter posts?
Chatter is a great way to boost collaboration in your organization. You can Post Status, Links, Files, and Comments on others’ posts, etc. Many time I found on Trailblazer community people is asking about a way to Preschedule Chatter Posts. But Salesforce doesn’t have any out-of-the-box feature for this, so the next way is to use the AppExchange app.
In this article, I will show, how you can develop your own app for scheduling Chatter Posts too without code.
Objectives:
After reading this blog post, the reader will be able to:
- Use After-save Record-Triggered Flow to create a record
- Use After-save Record-Triggered Flow to delete a record(s)
- Add a Scheduled Paths action in After-save Record-Triggered Flow
- Monitor Time-based flow queue
Business Use case
Pamela Kline is working as a System administrator at Universal Containers (UC). She has received a requirement from the management to allow their users to preschedule Chatter posts. Which will help them to schedule posts ahead of time, for example, birthday wishes, or other important announcements.
Automation Champion Approach (I-do):
Salesforce now (After Spring’21 Release) allows you to add time-dependent actions in the Flows, similar to the Process Builder. This is a major enhancement that will ultimately bring Flow to the next level.
There are few solutions possible for the above business scenario, 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 FeedItem object. It represents an entry in the feed, such as changes in a record feed, including text posts, link posts, and content posts.
| Field Name | Details |
| Body | This is the message that appears in the feed. |
| ParentId | The ID of the object type to which the is related. For example, set this field to a UserId to post to someone’s profile feed, or a GroupId to post to a specific Group. |
| Type | The type of feed item. In our case it’s Textpost. |
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 Pamela’s business requirement using After-save Record-Triggered Flow. We must: Read the rest of this entry!
