Showerthought: I was cleaning up our Salesforce flows and found a weird trick with formula fields.

Our support team kept getting tickets about missing data in customer records. The issue was that our onboarding flow would stall if a certain custom field was blank, but the field wasn't mandatory. I spent a day trying to add more validation rules, which just made the flow more complex. On a whim, I built a simple formula field that checks if the custom field is empty and, if it is, pulls the default value from the account's industry field instead. I set the flow to reference this new formula field as its trigger condition. It took about 20 minutes to build and deploy. Now the flow runs every time without fail, and the support tickets on that issue dropped to zero. Has anyone else used a dummy formula field as a workaround for flow logic problems?

3 comments

3 Comments

ivan_murphy801mo ago

Yeah, @ivan774, that trick also helps avoid hitting governor limits in complex flows.

ivan7741mo ago

My buddy had a similar thing with a lead scoring flow. It kept breaking when the lead source field was null. He made a formula field that basically said "if this is empty, call it 'Web' by default." The flow just checks that formula now. It's been running smooth for months.

paige_owens51mo ago

That "call it 'Web' by default" move is a solid fix. It reminds me of setting default ringtones on old phones so they wouldn't just stay silent. You build a simple backup plan so the whole system doesn't get stuck on one empty value. It's a small thing that keeps everything moving forward.