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Flow Approvals for Lightning Knowledge
Add and manage more complex, multi-stage approval processes to your knowledge base. Use Flow Orchestrator approval processes for easier customization, flexibility, and reporting on article approvals.
Required Editions
| Available in Lightning Experience. View supported editions. |
| User Permissions Needed | |
|---|---|
| To view Knowledge Settings in Setup: | Knowledge User license |
| To open, edit, or create an autolaunched approval orchestration in Flow Builder: | Manage Flow, Run Flow, and “Read” access to the Approval Submission object |
An approval process automates how records are approved in Salesforce. An approval process specifies each step of approval, including from whom to request approval.
Typically, an approval process for Knowledge articles includes specifying who reviews a new or updated article before it’s published. Unlike traditional Salesforce approval processes, with Flow Builder and orchestrations, you can create complex business logic processes that work with many users and systems. For example, you can create article approval processes that fetch a variety of data from user or article records. Based on that data, you decide what happens next or who approves the article.
When an orchestration runs an interactive step, the designated user receives an email with a link to their assigned action. The assigned user clicks the link to go to the record where they complete their action in the Work Guide.
Admins add the Flow Orchestration Work Guide and Approval Trace Lightning App Builder components to Knowledge page layouts. This makes it easy for approvers to keep track of where articles are in an approval process. Approvers can also use the Approvals app on the App Picker to review their work items or history. Additionally, they can create and run Lightning reports to see which approvals are in progress, how long it takes for approvals to be completed, and who is approving the most articles.
Depending on your business needs, there are many ways in which you can use Flow Builder and orchestrations to create article approval processes. But generally, you:
- Build an Orchestration: Use Flow Orchestration to build sophisticated business processes by combining and coordinating flows.
- Use Decision Elements in an Orchestration: Control when an orchestration takes a specific decision outcome.
- Define Requirements for Stages and Steps in an Orchestration: Use requirements to resume an orchestration when a record changes. Define up to three requirements to determine when a step is ready to start or when to mark an interactive step or stage complete.
- Assign an Interactive Step in an Orchestration: When you create an interactive step, you assign it to a user, group, or queue. A user can be an internal user. Groups or queues can include internal users. You can also assign an interactive step to a resource that contains a username, group API name, or queue API name when the orchestration runs. When the active screen flow associated with the interactive step runs, an assigned user completes the flow on the related context record.
After you build an orchestration, activate it, and then test it to make sure that it’s working as you expect.
- Sample Flow Approval Process for Lightning Knowledge
To help you get started creating your own Flow approval process for articles, here’s an example.
