My Favorite Salesforce Winter’18 Feature: Flow Action
There’s a lot in the Winter’18 release. Just like the last two years of releases, it’s primarily Lightning Experience features. Salesforce is still working on getting their new user interface, Lightning Experience, up to parity with Classic while adding new features.
I will hopefully get into writing more about the features that are out with Winter ’18. I wanted to share my favorite and most used feature so far… And that’s the Action that launches a Flow in Lightning Experience.
One of my frustrations with Lightning Experience was just how icky using Flows with screens worked. There was the Flow component, which was nice, but it mean that the Flow ALWAYS was open on the record. (This also can be changed in Winter ’18).
The Flow action gives me the capability to call a Flow from an Action instead of a button or a link. Plus it looks all nice and pretty in the Lightning runtime. This is a beta feature so not all features are available and working… but this is still awesome. You can read more about this feature in the release notes: https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter18/release-notes/rn_forcecom_flow_action.htm
So without further ado:
4 Steps to Using Flow Action in Lightning Experience
Step 1: Create the Flow

Step 2: Create the Action

Step 3: Add Action to Page layout

Step 4: Profit

Restrictions and Limitations
- You cannot re-direct the user when the Flow is finished. The Flow window simply closes and you’re back on the original record.
- You cannot manually pass values to Flow variables
- To query the record that called the action, you MUST use the variable “recordID”
- It only supports “Object Actions” meaning it has to be an action on an Account, Contact, Opportunity, or other standard or custom object. No Global Actions.
This is fairly minor, but I’m picky. I like my variables to be named like “vrAccountID” not just “recordId” what record is that for? So for the really picky like me, create a value called “recordId” and then have vrAccountID have “recordId” as it’s default value. Whew. Crisis averted.
I wish I could pass values into the action and I wish I could re-direct users. Regardless, this is hands-down my preferred way to use a Flow in Lightning Experience.
Are you using Flow Actions yet? What do your Flow do? Let me know in the comments!