Get to Know Flow Orchestration
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Name the two orchestration types.
- Identify the three building blocks of an orchestration.
- Describe the Orchestration Work Guide.
Access Flow Orchestration
Flow Orchestration can be found in quite a few different places, depending upon your role.
If you’re an admin looking to build an orchestration, Flow Orchestration can be found under Flows. Here’s how to find it.
- From Setup, enter
Flowsin the Quick Find box, then select Flows. - Click New Flow, All+Templates, then Flow Orchestration.
- From New Flow, select one of two orchestration types: Autolaunched Orchestration (No Trigger) or Record-Triggered Orchestration.
Flow Orchestration also has two list views for monitoring orchestrations that are in progress. Orchestration Runs and Orchestration Work Items.
To get to these list views click App Launcher then click View All under Apps. You will see a list of the available items in your org in alphabetical order. You can find Orchestration Runs and Orchestration Work Items here.
If you’re an admin supervisor, you can monitor running orchestrations from the Orchestration Runs list view. You can also click the arrow next to any In Progress Orchestration run to either cancel or debug the runs.
If you’re an end user, you’ll mainly interact with Flow Orchestration through work items. When a user is assigned a work item, they receive an email notification. From this notification, they can click to the record page which contains the corresponding work. They can also access all of their assigned work items from the Orchestration Work Items list page.
Orchestration Types
Flow Orchestration has two main orchestration types: autolaunched and record-triggered. The difference is how they’re triggered. A record-triggered orchestration runs whenever a specified type of record is created or updated. An autolaunched orchestration can be invoked by Apex, REST, Processes, and more.
Stages, Steps, and Flows
Stages, steps, and flows are the building blocks of an orchestration. Let’s see how they work together to create an orchestration.
Here is a stage with multiple steps in it. Each step corresponds to a flow that has been specified to run when that step is executed.
Stages
A stage groups related steps, organizing them into logical phases. Stages are executed sequentially, and only one stage in an orchestration can be in progress at a time. You configure the conditions that must be met for the stage to be considered complete.
Steps
Steps are grouped in stages and can be run sequentially or concurrently. Interactive steps require user intervention. Background steps require no user interaction.
Flows
What both step types have in common, regardless of whether they are interactive or background steps, is that they each require a flow to be specified in order to run. An interactive step runs a screen flow, while a background step runs an autolaunched flow. You can use an evaluation flow to set custom criteria for starting a step or to mark an interactive step complete.
Flow Orchestration Work Guide
The Flow Orchestration Work Guide is a screen component that can be added to a page via App Builder. When an interactive step generates a work item for a user, it sends an email with a link to the specified record page to all assigned users. The assigned user receives email notification for the work and completes the work in the Flow Orchestration Work Guide on the specified record page. The assigned user can complete the work on the relevant record without wasting time switching between tools!
Now that you know how Flow Orchestration works, let’s see how a company can use workflow orchestration to optimize its case management process.
