In part 1, I built out the change of thinking that we will need in this blog post to amp up our data parsing using flows. For a quick recap:

1. The scenario is that we have questions and answers
2. The flow does the parsing by treating questions as keys
3. We are using a text input in a flow to simulate the action of a user copy / pasting question answers into a text field

As demonstrated in the last post, this works within the context of a flow, but now in this post, I am going to show you how to apply this. To demonstrate this, I am going to add a text box onto both the lead record and contact record to receive data, two text boxes that will receive the parsed answers and a checkbox to display an error state. To launch this flow I am going to use a process builder on the lead and contact.

New fields on the layout

Process Builder

The process builder functionality is the same on leads and contacts. The ID will be passed to a variable in your flow. This variable is used by the flow to determine which update action to use. The input is also passed over to a variable. This does mean that for those following along at home that they will need to change their formulas from using a text box to using the formula. This is in addition to the changes needed to make it an autolaunched flow (Removing screens, etc).

Now, I did mention the whole error checking thing in my last post, so baked that in as well. The key here is to first check for errors THEN figure out which record needs to be flagged.

The end result will be something like this:

So, how does this work? Fan-Tas-Tic. With just two processes and a flow, I am able to do parsing on each record.

Adding this parsing logic to a new record would just be adding a new process and updating your flow. This is a great example of how you can use flows to harness the power of apex with the ease and lower support cost of configuration.

Now, this is setup for a pretty specific example…A rep would be pasting in data from an external source, but the methodology would be the same as long as you had a source of text. So, with tweeking you could use this on fun stuff like inbound emails or maybe even chatter posts!

How does it feel? Not quite like this, but close.