Process Builder, Workflow and Flow

Salesforce provides several declarative tools to implement business processes and custom user experience flows. End user operations such as creating, updating, or starting an approval process for a record; can be customized through two tools known as Workflow and Process Builder. When you need to implement a UI flow that provides a wizard or interview style user experience, you can use the Visual Flow tool. This tool can be used to define more complex conditional business processes that need to read and update records. Automation Flows or sometimes "headless flows" are Visual Flows that do not interact with the user and can be referenced within Apex code as well as Process Builder.

Process Builder is the successor to Workflow. It provides the same functionality as it plus additional features for updating child records for example and extensibility for developers. It is also easier for end users to build and visualize more complex processes with its more modern graphical layout. Though you can use both interchangeably its best to focus on one or the other, making it easier to locate and maintain customizations.

As an application developer, these can be created and packaged as part of your application. Such components are upgradable (provided that they are marked as Protected). Typically, however, package developers tend to leave the utilization of these features to consultants and subscriber org admins in preference to Apex and/or Visualforce, where more complex logic and user experiences can be created.

Tip

Just as these tools can be used by administrators to customize their orgs. You may want to consider exposing your Apex driven application business processes through Invocable Methods, to effectively extended the functionality available to admins through these tools. Put another way this allows users of the Process Builder and Visualfow Flow tools to invoke your application functionality through clicks not code. We will be revisiting this in Chapter 10, Providing Integration and Extensibility.