LIMIT N and WHERE clause together in flows! #Spring20Delight

Hello there! 😀

Before we start, let’s take a quick trip down the memory lane. In one of my recent posts, I shared how we can Query only first N records in Flows. Soon after, I received a request from few folks saying what if we wanted to have an additional filter on a field. For example, get first 50 Accounts with Rating ‘Cold’.
That’s exactly what we are going to address in today’s article.

I would recommend reading the aforementioned post before continuing further because I will be skipping some ‘must know’ details about the Spring 20 updates, which are important to this understand this solution.

Safe harbor, stuff that you are going to see in this post is not GA yet. But soon you will be able to use it once the Spring 20 is released to production environments. I am using a pre-release org for the demo purpose.

How do I start?

Well, we start by creating an Apex class with the following code.
FlowLIMITandWhereClauseActionClass.apxc

public class FlowLIMITandWhereClauseActionClass {
    static final integer MAX_QUERY_RECORDS_LIMIT = 50000;
    
    /* Class definition for throwing custom exceptions */
    public class FlowApexActionException extends Exception{}
    
    @InvocableMethod(label='Get N records with WHERE clause filter')
    public static FlowOutputParameters[] filterRecords(FlowInputParameters[] input){
        FlowOutputParameters[] result = new FlowOutputParameters[]{};
            
        if(input[0].numberOfRecords > MAX_QUERY_RECORDS_LIMIT)
            throw new FlowApexActionException('You cannot query more than 50000 records.');
        
        string query = 'Select '+ input[0].fieldsToQuery + ' FROM ' +  input[0].objectApiName + ' WHERE '+input[0].whereClause +' LIMIT ' + input[0].numberOfRecords;
        system.debug(query);
        
        try{
            sObject[] recordList = database.query(query);
            
            FlowOutputParameters obj = new FlowOutputParameters();
            obj.records = recordList;
            
            result.add(obj);
        } catch(Exception e){
            //system.debug(e.getMessage());
            throw e;
        }
       return result;
    }
    
    /* Input parameters for the Apex action */
    public class FlowInputParameters{
        @InvocableVariable(label='Api name of the Object' required = true )
        public string objectApiName;
        
        @InvocableVariable(label='Fields to query(Comma separated)' required = true)
        public string fieldsToQuery;
        
        @InvocableVariable(label='Where Clause' required = true)
        public string whereClause;
        
        @InvocableVariable(label='Number of records to query' required = true)
        public integer numberOfRecords;
    }
    
    /* Output parameters of the Apex action */
    public class FlowOutputParameters{
        @InvocableVariable(label='Record Collection')
        public sObject[] records;
    }
    
}

Now you should be able to use this class as an Apex action in your flows.

How to use in flows?

• 

  Apex Action Configuration

** {!varNumberOfRecordsToQuery} is number type flow variable. To understand more about the usage of WHERE clause refer this article: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.soql_sosl.meta/soql_sosl/sforce_api_calls_soql_select_conditionexpression.htm

And that brings us to the end of this post. I hope you find this useful!

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