As February creeps ever nearer, it feels wrong to be saying this but… Happy New Year! The blog has been a little quiet lately, so this is our first post in a little while. But hey, I can explain!
Along with the usual suspects of Christmas and New Year, one of the reasons I’ve been away from the blog for a while is simply that I’ve been busy getting stuck in to some of the exciting new features coming in Spring ’15, which is now in virtually all sandboxes and is only a matter of days away from being rolled out to most production servers.
But of course our own experimenting only teaches us so much and, as is often the case, many of the lessons we learn are courtesy of the wider community. I wanted to share one of these lessons with you in the hope that it helps anyone who is as perplexed as this community member was:
When I saw this post my first thought was that this must be some unusual browser quirk. But the poster confirmed she was able to replicate it across multiple browsers. So I tried to replicate it myself and, sure enough, when you begin defining your process and selecting an object, the whole Scheduled Actions section vanishes.
But – and here is the crux – this only happens if you select the option to fire the process when the record is ‘created and edited’. Go with just ‘created’ and the Scheduled Actions section stays right where it is. And if we dig a bit deeper on that, we find our answer.
Just as with classic workflows, scheduled (or time-based) actions cannot be used when the process is set to be evaluated on ‘every edit’. But whereas before, with the old workflow builder, we got given a three-way choice – created; created and edited to meet criteria; created and every time it’s edited – when beginning to set up our process we only get two options: created, or created and edited. This is because that third option, really a variant of the second one, is presented in a different place in the Spring ’15 GA version of Process Builder – at the stage where you define each of your criteria:
If you select ‘Yes’ here, to confirm that you want the process to run only when relevant changes are made to the record – i.e. not every single time it’s edited even when it already met the criteria, look what happens – the Scheduled Actions magically reappear!
This makes sense to a large degree. You can’t add a scheduled action with this evaluation criteria, so why present the option on the screen? However, it isn’t immediately obvious – and anytime you see something disappear in front of your eyes you’re going to wonder why. So although this isn’t a bug, as the question-asker believed, it’s probably best filed under ‘undocumented feature’!
Thanks for the detailed explanation. It really helped me in the learning process