#Spring230 discussing

I've been learning HTTP callout (more on that in a blog here), and there is a lot of good information in my action's output that I can't access (it's an array of strings called "places") pictured below:

I haven't been able to assign any of the outputs in "places" to a Salesforce object.  However, I am able to assign the values of strings that aren't part of "places" (i.e. country) to a salesforce object.

I noticed that it was listed as an apex-defined collection in the formula editor

I first tried creating an Apex-Defined variable. 

This lets me access all of the values in the apex class I made, but they are empty.

I tried again by creating an apex collection variable and assigning the outputs from my action to the variable:

This worked. 

But I'm entirely stumped on my next step.  How can I assign these values from the collection variable to the apex-defined variables or fields on standard objects?  Thanks for your help.

#Flow #Spring23

Here's my rearranged and (in some cases) restated version of the Spring '23 Nonprofit Release Notes. Please rely on the official docs: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sfdo.Nonprofit_Cloud.htm&type=5. Feel free to share. Hope this is helpful:

Sections:

 - Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

 - Program Management Module (PMM)

 - Case Management

 - Grants Management (Grant Making)

 - Marketing Cloud Engagement (renamed from "for Nonprofits" to "for Industries")

 - Elevate

--

Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

1. Fixed Batch processing icon displaying longer than necessary.

2. Added ability to indicate that first installment of a Recurring Donation is *paid* on Batch Gift Entry form 

3. Added support for Partial Refunds in NPSP. Learn more in Refund Donation Payments.

4. Currency GAU Allocations are converted to percentages when you initiate a partial refund.

5. Added ability to add Recurring Donations to a batch of Elevate gifts in Gift Entry.

6. Fixed issue: Elevate field bundle was not loading into Gift Entry in sandbox and scratch orgs that have Enhanced Domains enabled.

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sfdo.Nonprofit_Success_Pack_Release_Notes.htm&type=5

--

Program Management Module (PMM)

1. Idea delivered: Enabled Program Management app on mobile.

2. Enabled the Attendance Component on the Salesforce Mobile App.

3. Made improvements to the Bulk Service Delivery Tool (BSDT) participant selector to view a selected list of Program Engagements in a specific stage.

--

Case Management

1. Updated the Client Note Layout with the Files Related List for Case Management.

--

Grants Management (Grant Making)

1. Added three new Budget objects: Budget Category, Budget Period, and Budget Category Value.

2. Deprecated the Parent Budget field that used a hierarchical lookup relationship and replaced it with a new field called Budget Parent that uses a standard lookup relationship.

3. Enabled a Grants Manager to set a field set while configuring a Review record to support multiple scoring rules.

4. Idea delivered: Support for Multiple Review Templates (e.g., for financial or programmatic review

--

Marketing Cloud Engagement

1. Updated product terminology and documentation to reflect change in name from "Marketing Cloud Engagement for Nonprofits" to "Marketing Cloud Engagement for Industries."

2. Moved Deploy Assets to a separate tab.

--

Elevate

1. Critical Change: Elevate-connected Recurring Donations can now receive a Failing status when your gateway can't process a recent installment. To see this status update in Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP): Add or activate “Failing” in the Status picklist on the Recurring Donation object. If you previously added “Failing (Retrying)”, update that picklist value to “Failing”. In NPSP Settings | Recurring Donations | Status to State Mapping, map the Failing status to the Active state.

Elevate Gift Entry Enhancements:

2. Enter a batch of Elevate-connected recurring donations using Gift Entry. To use this feature in your org, give your users Read and Edit access to the Allow Recurring Donations field on the NPSP Data Import Batches object. Learn more in Enter Gifts in Gift Entry.

3. You can now use ACH as a payment method when entering batches of gifts.

4. Elevate Advanced Edition users can now select the processing gateway for batch templates in Gift Entry. To use this feature in your org Turn it on in NPSP Settings | System Tools | Elevate Gateway Management. Adjust the gateway in the Elevate Field Bundle in Gift Entry templates.

Elevate Gateway and Payment Method Enhancements:

5. Process ACH bank transfers with Stripe. To use this new payment method, edit your Stripe gateway and turn on ACH as a payment method. Learn more in Manage Gateways. Stripe charges an extra verification fee for ACH transactions; contact Stripe to learn more.

6. Donors can now select ACH bank transfer as a payment method on Giving Pages set up with the Stripe gateway. To provide this payment method for your donors, turn on the ACH payment method in individual Giving Pages. Learn more in Create or Edit a Giving Page.

7. Customize the frequency and number of times Elevate tries to process failed recurring donation installments. Learn more in Configure Elevate Settings.

8. Elevate now automatically updates credit cards for recurring donations that are processed by Stripe, iATS, Worldpay VAP Platform, and Paya Sage. If your donor's card number or expiration date changes, Elevate receives the updated information without a lapse in installment payments.

9. Elevate Advanced Edition admins can now add Paya Sage as a gateway.

Other Elevate Enhancements:

10. Pause an Elevate-connected recurring donation within NPSP. Learn more in Pause a Recurring Donation.

11. Issue partial refunds of Elevate-connected donations in NPSP. Learn more in Manage One-Time Donations in NPSP. 

📣 How To Secure Apex Code With User Mode Database Operations | Spring 23 Release 📣 

Apex code runs in System Mode by default, with elevated access. If you want to run apex code respecting the running user’s permission, now after Spring 23 release, you can do that. With Spring 23 release, Salesforce is bringing the option to execute apex Database and Search methods in user mode instead of default system mode. In this blog post, I will share some examples demonstrating how to use this feature.

📌 Video: https://youtu.be/1agImQ1MWJs

📌 Blog: https://sudipta-deb.in/2023/03/how-to-secure-apex-code-with-user-mode-database-operations-spring-23-release.html

#Spring23 #Security

@The Blog Group @Developer Group, Kitchener, CA @Salesforce Developer Group, Dubai, UAE @Admin Group, Namakkal, IN @Bangalore Developer User Group @Central India Salesforce Developer Group @Kolkata User Group @* Release Readiness Trailblazers * @Admin Group, Bhubaneswar, IN @Developer Group, Dhaka, BD @Admin Group, Jaipur, IN @Admin Group, Jaipur, IN @Kolkata User Group, India @Admin Group, Navi Mumbai, IN @Developer Group, Toronto, CA @Toronto Salesforce Developer Group

🔔 How To Find Out Which Apex Classes Implement The Interface | Spring 23 Release 🔔

In this video, I will be showing you how to find out which apex classes have implemented an interface. And after finding what we can do with that information. So let’s explore this with some examples. ApexTypeImplementor is now generally available and has been updated since the beta release. It represents Apex classes that directly or indirectly implement an interface. Using a SOQL query this object gets information about public or global classes and only global classes for installed managed packages. IsConcrete - Indicates whether the implementing class is abstract (false) or not (true).

📌 Blog - https://sudipta-deb.in/2023/03/how-to-find-out-which-apex-classes-implement-the-interface-spring-23-release.html

📌 Video - https://youtu.be/Y9kgPGByL2s

#Apex #Spring23 @Kolkata User Group @Kolkata User Group, India @The Blog Group @Developer Group, Kitchener, CA @Salesforce Developer Group, Dubai, UAE @Developer Group, Dhaka, BD @Developer Group, Toronto, CA @Admin Group, Namakkal, IN @Bangalore Developer User Group @Central India Salesforce Developer Group@* Release Readiness Trailblazers * @Admin Group, Bhubaneswar, IN @Admin Group, Jaipur, IN @Admin Group, Navi Mumbai, IN 

I have a report that shows the number of activities completed by a certain team. On my dashboard, the component is showing "No Date", but when I click "View Report", the corresponding report does show data.

I've tried refreshing the dashboard and updated the viewing user to myself, with no luck.

Here's the component on the dashboard:

Enabling or Discovering Spring 2023 Top Challenges and Features

The arrival of Spring ‘23 was apparently a tough one for many, including me. Software deployment by Salesforce didn’t go as planned or on schedule, and my instance got into a state where we weren’t OK–poor performance, limited sandboxes, and confusing messages. Hopefully it’s fixed now. The rollout ended up occurring mid-week so I couldn’t do the usual thorough weekend checkout before operations saw the new stuff. And that day’s Salesforce help page shows a lot of suggested articles that makes me think the roll-out has surprised a lot of people around MFA and enhanced domains (and increased site security). And to top it all off, the Salesforce help site was super slow with problems of its own. It was so poor that I had to go back to the PDF release notes to navigate. This is one of the reasons we all look ahead to the pre-release notes.

My goal in sharing my log is to help small organizations with their ennoblement and roll-out. When we get behind our users suffer. And if we get behind enough, governance suffers. Organizations even end up sending out messages like “We’re so far behind that we decided to start over” or even worse “our board decided to go with a different solution.” This is very costly! Let’s help one another stay up and save all that money and energy for better things in our mission!

As always, my work started with the super important section called “How and When Do Features Become Available?” You’re looking for any disruptive things that end users just see right away, any great features that require you to enable them so you don’t get behind, and any big features that are going to require scheduling later work to deal with. Here’s what I found related to Power of Ten license grant software. Sometimes I don’t find much, but this time I found quite a bit to mull over or respond to immediately even as a small org with Power of Ten licenses:

• MFA enabled automatically. It’s finally required. You can call Salesforce and opt out for a short time, but your users and you are on a short time-line to get minimum features up and running. My own org uses the Salesforce Authenticator app tied to phones. The hardest part is getting people to download the right Authenticator. There are some closely named similar downloads on the app stores that sometimes cause a false start.

• Email senders must have verified their address to send. This one again is something that may catch some of your users off-guard and do some damage! It did me! We have org wide addresses, and some showed up as unverified. Emails sent by automation apparently could not be sent because we didn’t have a verified noreply address. I’ve never even heard of that, but there it was in the Org-Wide address setup page.  Apparently those emails stopped from the upgrade moment until I discovered and fixed it! Read more about it in thge actual blog. There are important things you NEED to check (at least I did). https://mighyforce.dreamhosters.com/2023/02/enabling-or-discovering-spring-2023-top-challenges-and-features/

• Additional subscribed report limits per person. Power of Ten license grants are Enterprise Edition and  you have to contact Salesforce to get an increase in this limit. Our users don’t necessarily need more but our admins sure do! Note: We raised a support ticket with Salesforce and they “raised the “The Maximum Number of SFX Scheduled Reports & Dashboards” limit to 15 for our org! Yay!

• Stay in Lightning for Report Building. End users no longer see “edit in classic” as an option when editing reports. This may throw off some of your long-time power users who edit reports. Just be aware they may need help. Some experts are saying this was premature but it happened anyway.

• Important CHANGE for In-line Editing for Reports: We want our users to use in-line editing in reports and list views to save time and help keep data clean whenever they first notice a problem. However, users no longer automatically see pencil icons on the report fields that can be edited! They must first toggle on in-line field editing mode. I DO NOT LIKE this change. This will throw many users and will require some additional education. Many will not go back to the top and enable and then find the field again. But we supposedly get faster loading of reports.

• Vastly Updated Activity Composer. The word of the year at Salesforce is “dynamic.” The dynamic activity composer (lightning presentation of tasks, logging calls, and email)  is VERY different for all users effectively immediately. This is the method of sending one-to-one email within Salesforce and also browsing past and current tasks associated with a record. This is a pretty big change, looks quite different, and has fewer words visible so it is likely a bit non-intuitive initially. See the blog for more details: https://mighyforce.dreamhosters.com/2023/02/enabling-or-discovering-spring-2023-top-challenges-and-features/

That took an hour to read through and find all the things are new and on immediately. And (much) more than three hours of troubleshooting and exploration to learn to explain it well. It also produced quite a few surprises that I must still follow-up on. Hopefully it saves you some time.

Normally I continue on with the Top Ten List, but this release is special in a number of ways. The difficulty of the unexpected or “just there for end users” features causes pause. Then the top feature deserves their own blog. So Part 2 will cover great features: Mobile, Flow Editor, Automation Flows, Dynamics, Screen Flows, User Import, and Reports of Subscriptions to Reports. Part 3 will cover: Possibly the biggest Spring 23 Feature: Flow Migration Tool

@Hub Heroes@Nonprofit Hub@MVPs & AppExchange All Stars@Nonprofit and Education MindShare@The Blog Group@Salesforce.org MVPs #Spring23

Enabling or Discovering Spring 2023 Top Challenges and Features – Part 3

In Part 1, I covered the features that just appeared without intervention in Spring 23 that you need to be on the lookout for. It was a much bigger list than usual.

In Part 2, I covered great features: Mobile, Flow Editor, Automation Flows, Dynamics, Screen Flows, User Import, and Reports of Subscriptions to Reports. I also mentioned some things that didn’t make me very happy.

Now in part three, we’ll look at the feature that will probably be most talked about for a long time: The Flow Migration Tool! To clarify, it's available to all in production or sandbox.

We already received a Workflow Rule migration tool, and, rather than build two tools, they combined them into one flow migration tool. The tool (available in the setup menu by searching for migration) shows you all the “legacy” automations with sort options on each column. This allows you to figure out things like how many Workflow Rules you have or how many Process Builders. Or how many on each object of any time. And which are active or inactive. Nice!

Using the tool, I learned that I have 9 pages of legacy automations, 1/3 process builder and 2/3 workflow rules. Sorting by objects, I reviewed objects that I have performance concerns about. I’ll prioritize moving from Process Builder to Flow in the coming months.

Workflow rule migration to flow is one-for-one. The workflow rule is disabled and the flow activated automatically. That’s simple, although not all workflow rules can be migrated (e.g., cross object formulas are not yet handled.)

Process Builder rules are more complex. (That was their purpose... a set of workflow rules collected together with different conditions on one object.) They are made of a series of nodes that may file, continue or may stop. (Remember the advice to have one Process Builder per object? As a result, we have a lot of tangled up business processes that are very hard to maintain. For clarity: One flow per object is NOT advised.) When you migrate a Process Builder rule, you are shown the different nodes by name and given some advice. (Thank goodness for those names!) You can migrate all the nodes, or you can migrate one or several nodes separately. Thus one Process Builder rule can migrate to multiple Flows. For this reason, the Process Builder rule is not deactivated nor the Flows activated automatically. Some process builder nodes cannot yet be migrated with this tool as of yet due to the type of actions they perform.

I tested the migration on some single node Process Builder rules and it worked. (As do migration o workflow rules.) The decision was set as the trigger conditions. The Process Builder update actions became Flow updates actions  It was very easy to read and would be no problem to maintain. You’ll want to rename it and add some good descriptive information so you can begin to care and maintain it. Again, very nice!

When I converted a much more complex flex, "en masse, "it resulted in a huge long flow. It would be possible to understand and maintain it since each node has the original labels. But that’s not the only difference There are no trigger conditions for the Flow! So it would be inefficient (although still ten times faster than Process Builder). It didn’t seem too awful and if it represents only one business process you can add some trigger conditions and you’ll coulbe be done.

But I’d still prefer to migrate different business processes in parts. As an example, it’s pretty easy to see three separate business processes on our contact handler: deceased handing, newsletter and SMS opt-in handling, and creating automatic referrals and affiliations from a lookup. Those make so much more sense. And if none of those few involved fields are updated, none of them will run, as compared to my Process Builder rule which runs thousands of times a day on every update to a contact. The green energy savings alone wants to make me do it soon!

I tested what happens when I convert a few nodes of a complex Process Builder rule, in this case, all nodes that relate to a contact being marked as deceased or a specific date of death being set. It’s a pretty legible process. No trigger conditions are provided, but since there are three decisions, it would be simple to add conditions and it would be pretty efficient! Note that I’d have to modify the legacy Process Builder if I wanted to activate this new flow. Having both active would likely be bad.

Despite the potential to save energy (our software in the cloud uses a lot of energy!),  I won’t be migrating soon without a reason just because I have plenty to do! I’m adding the items that are probably slow to my technical debt list and will work on them together with other items when I need to modify automation on an object. If I need to change a business process automation, I’ll move any Process Builders or Workflow rules to Flow. I see no urgency to hurry. Decomposing the multi-node Process Builders may take some thought and time, especially the validation and testing steps.

I’m sure lots of experts will start giving us tutorials and strategies on how to migrate best. I can’t wait to hear from them!

As a further example of how you might start thinking about it all, I have EIGHT process builders on one custom object that we use once per client visit every date. There is a noticeable lag when you save records. They are mostly “single node” Process Builder rules so conversion is straightforward by migrating directly to the same named flows, one for one. However, one of them has a high maintenance churn because it has to be updated every time we change team member assignments. We’ll not convert that but instead implement in flow using a business process that can use metadata and not require hard code updates. Some limitations from legacy automation are better addressed in a new way, like this one! I have FOUR process builders on Volunteer Hours, which we use for every service delivery to clients (10,000 times a year). Most of those are multi-node performing unrelated business processes. I’ll want to convert those a few nodes at a time so that I have flows that make sense and I can make full use of flow trigger conditions to keep things efficient. This will also take some planning. This will require quite a bit of planning and testing.

@Hub Heroes@Nonprofit Hub@MVPs & AppExchange All Stars@Nonprofit and Education MindShare@The Blog Group@Salesforce.org MVPs #Spring23