Using Notification Builder in Flows

Howdy! 😀

Summer 19’s Notification Builder is beautiful! And we can use it quite easily in Process builder. But what about flows?

[Update March 2020]

You can now directly query the ID of the CustomNotificationType object via Get Records element. So no more hassle to find the IDs of the Custom Notifications. 🙂

My first thought to this was “That should be easy!”. Surprise surprise, that ain’t easy. Why so? That’s because if I have to use the custom notification feature in flows, I need to pass the ID of the Notification Type in the Send Custom Notification action of the flow, and this is where it all gets messed up! Before continuing further, read this post: How to get the ID of Custom Notification Types in Salesforce?

Now that you have the ID, the question is can we make it dynamic instead of hardcoding the ID? Sad news again! Apparently the CustomNotificationType sObject is not exposed at the query level(not accesible at the API level). So you can cannot query the ID using the Get records element.

So before moving further, I request you to kindly upvote these two ideas.

Expose the ID of the Custom Notification Types on the UI or in URLs

Make CustomNotificationType sObject accessible in SOQL and Flows’ queries

How to simply use the ID in the Action?

For now, to avoid hardcoding the IDs you can use Custom Metadata Types or Custom Settings. Why Custom Settings? Check Meighan’s comment below.

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