Another release full of Flow features with a few other great ones as well! Let’s get into my favorite features from Winter ‘23.

Salesforce Flow

Cut and Paste Flow Elements

I’m all for improvements to the Flow Builder, and making it easier to move elements around and taking clicks away to recreate existing elements is a win in my book!

Formula Builder in Flow

One of the difficulties of Flow Builder was previously the need to piece together your expressions by hand. Now with the enhanced formula builder built into flow, that becomes much easier!

Use Record Triggered Flows to Update Related Records

Great to see one of the limitations of record triggered flows going away, namely the ability to update not just the record(s) that fired the flow, but related records as well!

Use IN and NOT IN in Flows

Another element of Apex comes to Flows! By using the IN and NOT IN operators, you’re able to save on queries, thus reducing the risk of hitting a limit, and improving performance. Now you can specifically query for records whose property, such as an ID, exists within a collection, instead of needing a separate query to get each record. It sounds like it doesn’t quite support record collections just yet but I’m guessing that will come in a future release.

Block New Workflow Rules

We knew this was coming for a while but now moving forward, you’ll no longer be able to create new workflow rules. It’s the end of an era for sure, but probably for the best. Workflow Rules were always one of my favorite declarative features for their simplicity, but their limitations meant that it was only a matter of time before they were replaced.

Development

Use New Modal Component

For a long time, we’ve had to build our own modals with various workarounds so it’s nice to see Salesforce is providing us a separate component to do that for us.

RefreshView API for LWC (Pilot)

This is another one that we needed workarounds for in order to refresh the view, or resort to using Aura components. Being able to reload the components without having to refresh the page, is definitely something that would make applications easier to use. This is just a pilot for now but hoping this becomes GA very soon!

System.Assert class for Test Asserts

Tests are getting a grammar upgrade! Instead of System.assertEquals, you can now use the assert class for methods such as Assert.areEqual. Should definitely make tests a bit more readable.

View Sandboxes to be Upgraded Early

I’ve always thought it’s more complicated than it needs to be to figure out which sandboxes will get upgraded to the new release early and which ones won’t. With this feature, it should be a lot easier to quickly tell the difference without having to check individual pod statuses.

Code Builder (Beta)

The built in-platform developer tool that should eventually replace the Developer Console is now in Beta! I’ll admit I haven’t used this tool yet since I’m already familiar with the non-platform tool VS Code and my old friend, the Dev Console, but definitely glad to see Salesforce is focusing on building some on-platform tools that don’t require any messy installation. Definitely watching this space closely. For now, it needs to be installed via the AppExchange.

Everything Else

Set FLS on Permission Sets instead of Profiles (Beta)

This may be the feature I’m most excited for this release! A must-have feature for switching from Profiles to Permission Sets! Now you can toggle the ability to add fields to perm sets instead of profiles when you’re creating new fields. Looking forward to this feature become Generally Available and more ease of use capabilities for perm sets. 

Dynamic Forms on Standard Objects

Account, Contact, and Opportunity objects can now use Dynamic forms! I just started using dynamic forms a lot more recently and it’s a great way to replace the need for duplicate layouts that are similar! Great to see the capability on standard objects now too.

Scoping Rules

I mentioned that this was a feature I’ve been watching for a few releases now but glad to see you can create scoping rules on your own now! You can essentially create dynamic list views and reports by implementing scoping rules to only show specific records at a time. You can also use the USING SCOPE keywords to use scoping rules in your SOQL.

Custom Address Fields 

Definitely a feature that I would have found useful over the years. Rather than creating separate fields to capture Street, City, State, Postal Code, etc. on custom objects, now you can capture it all at once with custom address fields! Note that there are quite a few limitations with this feature for now though.

View Custom Report Type’s Structure During Report Creation

This seems like just a nice to have feature but I like the idea of surfacing hard to find information. While as an Admin, I may have a great concept of how all my objects connect, that may also not be the case for the business users. Seems like a quick win to help explain the data model!

Named Credentials Lightning UI Setup

This might just be me, but I’m a big proponent of converting everything in the Setup from Classic to Lightning. I’ve been told that it’s on Salesforce’s long term roadmap and here’s some incremental proof!