Salesforce Winter 21 Release Highlights: Dynamic Forms & Flow Builder Enhancements

Nov 30, 2020

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The Salesforce Winter ‘21 Release is here!

We’re sharing our 2 favorite enhancements so far:

Dynamic Forms  

Let’s start with Dynamic Forms - the update we’ve been waiting for.

You can now create more customizable and intuitive page layouts that work best for you and your team! Insert fields and sections anywhere on the page, allowing for more flexibility and control for your admin and end-users.

Previously, there were often many extra fields on the page that you didn’t use or need and may get in the way of working productively. Now, you can modify your layout and drill down to see only the handful of fields that might be most important for you, making your layout more simplified and less cluttered. Find the information you’re looking for at your fingertips without scrolling through extra sections or empty fields.

Using visibility rules with Dynamic Forms is a big upgrade that will not only save your Admins time, but will also increase end-user efficiency. Users will see only what they need, when they need it. For example, you can show or hide sections at different stages of a sale - if a button has no use during an opportunity stage, but it does during the contract stage, you can modify it to only appear where it’s relevant!

Previous to this release, to account for different profiles needing unique views, you would need to create a new page layout for each, which can become abundant depending on the amount of profiles you have. No longer! Using Dynamic Forms, you can now modify a single page layout and create multiple views with visibility rules.

Note: Dynamic forms currently only work on Custom Objects. Standard Objects are on the roadmap.

Flow builder enhancements

Another great release update is with Flows. Although a lighter release update - there are still some enhancements we’re excited about:

The first thing you’ll notice when you go to create a new flow is the option to choose between Freeform (old) and Autolayout (new). This enhancement does not change any functionality of the flow, but does provide a cleaner and clearer way to build it. When building with Autolayout, you will no longer see the list of available elements in the left sidebar, but instead you will see a (+) plus sign directly in the flow which pulls up a list of all available elements and auto-creates the flow from there. No drag and drop needed.

The option to use either layout is still there, so this comes down to preference, but we think this is a nice feature to make things more organized and possibly save some time.

The next biggest change is the ability to trigger a flow on deletion of a record. Previously, you had the 3 options to trigger flow - create, update, or create and update - now you will see a 4th option - record is deleted.  This was previously a large gap so we’re excited to finally have this functionality available. A simple example would be for a manager to receive an email every time a record is deleted a certain status, possibly catching errors or learning patterns about the sales team.

Lastly, you can now debug a flow as a different user. In an existing flow, you can click debug and select ‘run flow as another user’ - enter their name and you can now see it from their view. This will ensure no errors are received by multiple user instances.

Kira Centola