Automation: Part 1

4 min readAug 9, 2021

How Keebler Elves can update a field!

Yes, your Salesforce instance comes with Keebler elves! Instead of making crackers & cookies, they can perform tedious tasks within your business process. Once you build an automation, they’ll do it and won’t say, “Oops, forgot to do that.” When you create an automation rule, it’s like having a personal assistant right at your side when you say, “Keebler, send this person an email,” or “Keebler, update the field on this tab with the same value as the field on another tab,” or “Keebler, create a new record with this new information we just received,” or “Keebler, do automation “Y” when this field says, “cha-ching.” Poof, it gets done!

In a previous story I wrote “Top Secret: Case,” where I discussed the Web to Case HTML form that created cases in the Hawaii Literacy project. We also built an automation through Process Builder + Flow to perform tasks whenever a new case is submitted. Once the automations are built, the tasks are completed on their own and we get to eat bon bons. Just kidding! But it did save the organization a lot time because they didn’t have to create records or update fields with the incoming information from the monthly reports. Behold, this is the Process Builder automation.

In this Process Builder, it’s triggered whenever a new case is created (New Case = True). When the condition is met (aka trigger), an immediate action is performed — to “launch a flow” called “Case- Set Campaign Field.” (this process of nesting an automation within an automation is also known as invoking a flow within a process builder)

Immediate Action = Launch a Flow called “Case- Set Campaign Field”

What does the Flow do? 1) Updates the Campaign Name field on the new Case submitted, 2) Creates a Volunteer Job record and 3) Creates a Volunteer Hours record. In this story, we’re only going to review #1.

Update the Campaign Name field on the new Case submitted:

From the Monthly Report form that’s submitted by the volunteer tutor, there’s a field called “Month”

This information is mapped to the Month Picklist field on the Salesforce Case. “Current Year” is a formula field set to auto-populate the current year in the field.

From these 2 fields on the Case, we create the Campaign Name using a formula. This will be used to identify the condition in the next step.

In this step, we’re creating a record variable — when the Campaign Name created by the formula matches a Campaign Name found on the Campaign object, then the Keebler elf is instructed to store this cases’ Campaign Name. Think of it as a sticky note (#1) with the Campaign Name that we set aside. We will use this record variable very soon.

Then we create a variable called recordID to store this cases’ ID. Yup, it’s another sticky note (#2) with the Case ID. This will be referenced when defining the condition in the next step.

In this step, the Keebler elf is looking for a case record that matched the case record written on sticky note #2. When it matches, the elf will update the newly created Cases’ Campaign Name field with the campaign name that’s written on sticky note #1.

Woo-hoo! Here’s the updated field on the case! We just auto created the field that will determine where the information from the Monthly Report will go. This is the first step needed to get the information from one object (Case) to other objects (Volunteer Jobs and Volunteer Hours) in an organized manner and without any manual data input!