Process Builder OneView
Process Builder OneView
How often have you gone back to a Process Builder flow and tried to see what all of your selections and settings are?
Have you struggled with trying to create documentation for your Process Builder flows?
How many screen shots do you need to take to try and share your Process Builder?
See below for some of the challenges you face when reviewing your Process Builder flows.
- You need to hover just to see the full name or description of your Process Builder.
- You can’t see your full field names unless you hover over each one.
- Values and formulas are hidden as well until you hover over them.
- In order to see the full name of an action you need to click on it.
- Certain settings are not visible unless you click to expand.
- In order to see your Criteria logic, you need to deactivate, clone and edit your Process Builder.
I was frustrated with all the steps to go through just to see what I had already created in my Process Builder flows. I wanted a better way to look at and document my Processes.
Realizing that the details of each flow were stored in my Salesforce organization as XML based metadata, I wondered if there was a way I could extract this data then recreate an entire flow diagram and a descriptive report of all of my criteria, actions, formulas and settings.
I was able to extract all of my flow metadata into individual files using the developerforce.com Workbench utility.
The next, and biggest, challenge I faced was what to do with that data and how could I put it into a format that was readable and useful. I decided that Excel & VBA offered a way to parse the XML data and had the formatting power I was looking for to create the output I needed.
I started with the diagram itself. I wanted to be able to see the full names of the Criteria and Actions on the diagram.
With a lot of testing, I made sure I could handle multiple scheduled actions, different action types, large numbers of actions and different types of branching.
The diagram is only a small part of everything you need to see to document your flow so I extended the output with a complete description of all of the steps and settings in the flow.
Once I had the diagram and the details created, I added additional options to print the output or create PDF files, offer portrait or landscape orientation, wrap or shrink text to fit and scale to single or multiple pages.
I also provided options to display the diagram and the details together on the same page.
Diagram on Left Side
Diagram on Right Side
This was a challenging yet interesting project and with this utility, I can now see my entire Process Builder flow in a single, easy to follow document. It is truly OneView for your Process Builder flows.
Eric Smith - GWI