Between Assignment Rules and OmniChannel, there are plenty of out-of-the-box options for how records get owners assigned to them in Salesforce. As always, there are also many things that require customization. As it has frequently been the case that a "round robin" assignment be part of companies' business rules, Salesforce Round Robin aims to easily add support for round robin-type assignments to both Flow and Apex.
Here are some of the benefits to using this package:
- Ease of setup. All you have to supply (via Flow or Apex) is which records qualify to be part of the round robin (e.g. which records are part of the "ownership pool") and the records you'd like to have owners assigned
- Speed and transactional safety - there are many pitfalls with naive round robin implementations, but the biggest one is unfair assignment (where some owners receive more records than others). This skew is typically caused by the tracking for how owners have been assigned getting out of date with how many records each person has already received. This package offers truly fair assignment across transactions
Something to be aware of when using Flow as the starting point - until Apex Invocable actions are supported from the "before create/update" part of Flow, one should be aware of the possibility for recursion when making use of the bundled invocable action with Record-Triggered Flows. Put simply - because this action can only be run after create/update presently, any other parts of your Flow(s) may run twice.
Here's a basic look at what a simple Record Triggered Flow would look like using the action:
And then the configuration for the action:
Object for "Records to round robin" (Input)
- for Record-Triggered Flows, this should correspond to the object the flow is for. For anything else, this should correspond to the SObject name of the record collection you're looking to pass inAlternative to query: API name of class that implements RoundRobinAssigner.IAssignmentRepo
(optional) - for Flow developers working with Apex (or with Apex developers), you may have more complicated business rules for which Users or other records qualify to be used in the assignment than the Query property can provide you with. For advanced users only!Owner Field API Name - defaults to OwnerId
(optional) - which field are you looking to assign to? Not all objects haveOwnerId
as a field (the detail side of M/D relationships, for instance). Use the field's API Name for these cases.Query Id Field - defaults to Id if not supplied
(optional) - used in conjunction with theQuery To Retrieve Possible Assignees
property, below. If you are using the round robin assigner to assign lookup fields other thanOwnerId
, this allows you to override which field is pulled off of the records that theQuery To Retrieve Possible Assignees
returns.Query To Retrieve Possible Assignees
(optional) - either this orAlternative to query ...
must be provided! This query will pull back records - like Users - and grab theirId
field (or the field stipulated using theQuery Id Field ...
property) that should be included in the "ownership pool" for the given round robin.Records to round robin - either this or single record is required
(optional) - set this equal to a collection variable that is either the output of aGet Records
call, contains$Record
in a Record-Triggered flow, etc ...Single record to round robin - either this or records to round robin is required
(optional) - for Record-Triggered Flows, skip assigning$Record
to a collection variable and just pass it directly using this input property!Update records - defaults to false
(optional) - by default, the collection supplied via theRecords To Round Robin
property aren't updated; set this to{!$GlobalConstant.True}
to have the action update your records with their newly assigned owners
You have quite a few options when it comes to performing round robin assignments from Apex. I would highly recommend performing round robin assignments in the BEFORE_UPDATE
Apex trigger context so that owners are assigned prior to being committed to the database.
Here are a few ways that you can perform assignments:
-
You can re-use the static method
FlowRoundRobinAssigner.assign
by creating syntheticFlowRoundRobinAssigner.FlowInput
records -
You can call use the bundled
RoundRobinCollectionAssigner
:// in a Trigger / trigger handler class RoundRobinAssigner.IAssignmentRepo queryRepo = new RoundRobinCollectionAssigner( 'SELECT Id FROM User WHERE Some_Condition__c = true', 'Id' ); RoundRobinAssigner.Details assignmentDetails = new RoundRobinAssigner.Details(); assignmentDetails.assignmentType = 'cacheKeyMustBeAlphanumeric'; new RoundRobinAssigner(queryRepo, assignmentDetails).assignOwners(someListOfSObjectsToBeAssigned);
-
Or you can supply an implementation of
RoundRobinAssigner.IAssignmentRepo
that retrieves the records that qualify for the ownership pool via thegetAssignmentIds
method:
// inside RoundRobinAssigner:
public interface IAssignmentRepo {
// note that the provided implementations of IAssignmentRepo
// don't make use of the "assignmentType" argument passed here,
// but this helps to decouple your logic for returning assignment Ids
// in the event that you want to provide a single implementation that
// can respond to multiple assignment types!
List<Id> getAssignmentIds(String assignmentType);
}
The assignmentType
property that comes from the invocable action (FlowRoundRobinAssigner
) is always the Object Type.Field Name
; so something like Lead.OwnerId
for a typical Lead round robin.
Note that the records are not updated by default in RoundRobinAssigner
; if you are updating a related list of records (where updating them in a BEFORE_UPDATED
context wouldn't just persist the updated ownership values by default), you should call update
or Database.update
on the records after calling the assigner.