#DF21 No More Workflow

It has come to my attention that many-to-most of my readers are not Salesforce people. To those people, I apologize for this post, because it’s knee-deep Salesforce nerd stuff.

For years, even decades, SF recommendations have been to use the least-complex solution to a problem possible. So you start with a Formula field, and when that can’t do it you bump up to a Workflow Rule, and from there to Process Builder, and then Flow, and finally to Visualforce, Apex, Aura (Lightning Components) or LWC. Now I’m hearing that Aura is basically dead, there’s this new thing called Lightning Web Runtime (LWR), and oh, by the way, at Dreamforce ‘21, they’re tell us they want us to abandon Workflow and Process and just use Flow, instead. In fact, they have an internal goal to stop providing more than one solution to any given use case; just provide one good solution. So I guess that means we’re going to consolidate the archaic and beloved Apex Data Loader and the Import Wizard into something new and wonderful, too. But wait, they own Mulesoft, so does that mean we’ll just have to become Mule experts and use Mule to load our data? Oh, but they also own Slack now, so we’re going to merge Chatter and Slack into one tool that can do both internal/private and external communication??? (And yes, I know that Slack can already do that, so shaddup.)

But wait, what??? Flow sucks!! There’s no way to tell what automation is wrapped around a given object. All Flows just sit there in this huge, monolithic list, and you srsly have to open every one of them and look at what it does to even tell if it touches the object that you’re trying to troubleshoot. Plus Flow doesn’t perform as well. I’ve seriously had cases where I have pulled stuff out of Process and Flow and put it back in Workflow just to make it perform better!! So I’m pretty flabbergasted that I have to now abandon workflow. But yeah, as of about Spring ‘23 or so, we won’t be able to add any more Workflow or Process Builder processes. I’m going to need a minute…

…more to come…