Winter ’21 – Introducing the Before Delete Record-Triggered Flow

In Winter 21, Salesforce introduces the Before Delete record-triggered flow. This allows you to automate changes to related records or actions prior to deleting the record.

A few things to know about Before Delete flows:

You cannot use a before delete flow to prevent a record from being deleted like you can with a Before Delete trigger.
You cannot call subflows out of the box. However, until Salesforce provides that ability in Flow Builder, you can install an apex action Call Subflow created by Narender Singh.
You cannot use the debug feature with record-triggered flows. Like processes, you need to activate the flow and test it in the sandbox.

Here are a few lessons learned from implementing this use case:

Learn how to create a before delete flow.
Provide descriptions, where provided, in Salesforce. This may be tedious step, I know, but your future self will thank you when you are trying to remember what you configured or assist other/future admins when troubleshooting or enhancing what was built. This includes variables, the purpose of a flow, what each flow element does, etc.

Business Use Case: Addison Dogster is the system administrator at Universal Containers. Mary Markle is the Director of Sales. She would like the account or contact owner know when an opportunity in closed lost stage is deleted by updating the description field of the associated account or contact record and sending an email to the associated account or contact owner.

Solution: Before the closed lost opportunity record is deleted, we want to update the associated account or contact record and send an email to the account or contact owner of the opportunity. Using clicks instead of code, Addison is going to use the Before Delete Record-Triggered flow to handle the task.

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The outcome looks like this:

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This flow does the following: starts when a opportunity record is deleted where the stage is Closed Lost. (1) It determines whether the opportunity is associated with an account or contact, (2a) if it is associated with an account, update the description field of the account record and (3a) send an email to the account owner or (2b) if the opportunity is associated to a contact, it will update the description field of the contact record, get the contact owner’s email address, and (3b) send an email to the contact owner.

Steps:

1. Let’s create the before delete flow.

For those using Salesforce Classic, flow can be found in Create | Workflows & Approvals | Flows. In Lightning Experience, it is found under Process Automation | Flows. Click on “New Flow.” Select the Record-Triggered Flow and Next.

A. In the flow, we need to create a text template which text that we will use to updated the description field of either the account or contact record.

Best practice tip: Provide a description so you and other/future admins know what this flow resource is used for.

This is how that flow resource would be configured.

Resource Type: Text Template
API Name: DescriptionTT
Data Type: Text
View as Plain Text
Body: {!$Record.Name} (a closed lost opp) was deleted by {!$User.FirstName} {!$User.LastName} on {!$Flow.CurrentDateTime}.

B. Select the Edit link in the Start element for the Trigger and select “A record is deleted.”

C. Next, select the Edit link for the Object in the Start element. Configure as follows:

Object: Opportunity
Condition Requirements: All Conditions Are Met (AND)
- StageName Equals Closed Lost

D. We need to decide whether the opportunity is associated only to an account or contact using a Decision flow element called Account or Contact Association.