Over the last couple of days I have seen a profiletation of blogs or twitter status mentioning the new Process Builder on the salesforce.com platform. Like many in the field, I am slightly cautious of recommending new platform features to my clients. I first came across the process builder at dreamforce 2014 and for me I didn't pay much attention. It was my first DF and the whole experience was overwhelming. So today, I wanted to see where process builder can be utilised. In this post, I take a common trigger use case that would require custom code and see how it can be done using Process Builder.

Use Case

Creating a child record after an action on a parent record. Over the last couple of years, I have come across several requirements where a need for a child record to be created automatically and have some of the fields pre-populated adds real value to end users.

Clicks over code

This is the salesforce mantra. So this is where I think the process builder can add real value. What common requirement would we normally code, which can now be done using Process Builder. For me, I try to look past all the fancy promotion materials when it comes to salesforce features and ask the question: how will this benefit the users and for process builder that answer is clear.

Process Builder

Creating a child record, based on certain criteria I won't detail all the steps required because there are very well written articles out there and Trailhead is proving to be a great resource to get up and running on salesforce.com.

Overview

Process Builder Overview

Object and when to start the process

Process Builder 2

Filter criteria

Process Builder 3

This is important if you want to conditionally create child record or you can choose to not have any filter

Process Builder 3

Action Create record and pre-fill. The key field is the Contact, if this is not set then you are just creating orphan records.

There so much more to Process Builder, but I am already sold. If I can replace a common requirement which I had to write code for with a config solution, then that's perfect.