Happy Saturday! Today’s issue will be short and sweet.
We’ll cover six Troubleshooting tips to help you when debugging flows.
You can use these after you’ve built your first iteration, and before it’s working 100% perfect i.e. while debugging.
1) Define the problem
You must have a clear, defined, goal for what the flow should (or shouldn’t!) be doing in order to understand how to troubleshoot. Write it down if needed.
It could read: “The account record should be updated when the flow finishes and it’s currently not being updated.”
2) Form a Hypothesis
Use any and all the information you’ve encountered so far to make an educated guess as to what’s going wrong. Examples:
“The account isn’t being updated because another flow is running after mine is and overwriting the field.”
“The update record element isn’t doing the proper update because my get element isn’t finding any records.”
3) Test & Get Data
Now what?
Set up a test record that you can use in tandem with the Flow Debug tool. Run the record through the flow debug tool.
This step is critical. It forces the Salesforce system to tell you everything the flow is doing when it runs. This is the data we’ll use to find the problem.
4) Process of Elimination
Start from the very beginning of your flow debug log, and read through each element in the log.
“Think inside” the record you selected, and imagine the record going through the flow. Review each possible step, and each condition in each step, to understand how your record would behave.
Pay special attention to anything that falsifies your hypothesis.
Example: “The get element is in fact finding records, therefore the get element isn’t the problem.”
5) Evaluate & Repeat
Take the information you’ve learned from reviewing each step in the debug run and go back to step one.
You’ve completed one full debug cycle. You will now repeat debug cycles continually until the problem reveals itself to you and you crack it!
6) Google
If at any point in the process you experience a specific flow error message that you haven’t seen before such as:
FIELD_FILTER_VALIDATION_EXCEXCEPTION
Then copy the error directly from the Salesforce UI and search it on Google. There is almost always a post online about the error and how to solve it.
And that’s it! This is my troubleshooting system and it consistently takes me from a place of confusion to a place of clarity. I hope it does the same for you.
See you next Saturday!
