3. First Flow

We have covered a lot of information and have yet to actually create a single flow. You might have been wondering if you were ever going to get to the actual “how to” of this book, but alas here you are. Thank you for going through this journey of learning about graphical programming and the history of workflow in Salesforce. A major goal of this book—and something that I think makes it unique compared to any other book you will come across like it—is the goal to not just be a “how to” book. It is not all about walking through step-by-step instructions of building flows but instead to impart years of knowledge of development experience and apply them to developing flows. You see, while Visual Workflow is rather new to the Salesforce.com line of features, the concept of programming—whether it is through text-based code or graphical flows—remains the same. There are tried-and-true best practices and ways of thinking that can be a part of Visual Workflow development. These best practices can make the flows you develop easy to maintain and stand the test of time to be less brittle. Instead of going through all these best practices in one big swoop, we will instead start simply.