A while back, the product manager for Flow, Varadarajan Rajaram, published on GitHub a series of Flow-based plug-ins and tools to make life easier using Flow. Truly, they were some of the best plug-ins ever made to facilitate Flow in Salesforce. Why they never made it into Salesforce’s core Flow offering, I’ll never know.
Now, however, Rajaram is no longer with Salesforce, and the GitHub page has been taken down. Thankfully, I did manage to download some of the source code, so I am making it available to the public here. It’s in the form of Apex classes and plug-ins, so you’ll likely have to use something like Eclipse and the good ol’ fashioned copy-paste to get them into your system. ANT can also be used, if you know those ropes.
I repeat: All of the following content is Varadarajan Rajaram’s, and not mine. I did not write any of this; I am just making it available in his stead.
And as always, install into your sandbox first!
FlowPicklistSync – Allows you to use existing Picklist definitions without re-creating them as Choices in Flow.
FlowShowAsYouGo – Shows how to create a dynamic Visualforce page that can get information from the flow as the flow progresses.
FlowPluginPack – Contains some of the plugins found in the AppExchange pack, plus a couple others: Submit for Approval, and Zip Code Verification.
The Swamps of Salesforce-Dagobah 
Pingback: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Test My Flow | The Swamps of Salesforce-Dagobah
Totally new to flow and this is the one area that i just cant seem to get around. I don’t understand how to use what you have given and hope you can help?
I have nearly completed call scripts using text boxes for filling in the opportunity etc sections in SF but as with most people I have areas which i need the callers to have to pick from options already in the opportunity section.
Will the above help with this?
Thanks in advance,
Hazel
Hazel, sorry I didn’t respond sooner!
It sounds like you’re referring to picklist fields that are already on your opportunity object. If you need your Flow to repeat those options in a Flow Screen, unfortunately there is not a way to just say “hey take all of the fields you’re using in Field.X and give them the same choices”. Yet. I believe they’re working on it, but it’s not ready yet.
There is a manual workaround. You’ll have to make a choice in your Flow for each possible picklist option you want available, and put them in the right Screen question. If you end up changing the picklist values, you’ll have to change them in your Flow choices as well. It’s not perfect, but it works!
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Is there any way to have a vf page update the flow? (basically the opposite of FlowShowAsYouGo) I have a need to use a colorwheel colorpicker and pass the hex code to the flow for saving, but I only want to show the picker at the appropriate step in the flow. Is this at all possible?
If your vf page contains your flow, you can use the tag inside your tag, with the name argument containing the “name” of the Flow’s variable, and the “value” argument having what you want to push up to it. Like so:
Thank you so much for posting these. I am new to Salesforce and thus do not know Apex, etc.
In relation to Hazel’s question about picklists – do you know if it is possible to have a Choice display a stored value on a screen? I.e., say that you want to look up and update customer info and you want your flow to display a field value that is a picklist in Salesforce?
There is a way, though it’s not pretty. The Choice framework doesn’t allow for this very well, because as a default value, the only thing you can enter is one of your choices. Therefore we need to make it one of your choices.
When you are creating your choices, you can actually plug a variable into the Label and Stored Value fields. Manually type the following into those fields:
{!varYourVariableName}
This will show whatever you had in your variable in that choice, and that choice can be selected as the default option. So long as you get the field’s current value into the variable, it’ll display the value correctly.
The main downside to this is that it is likely to show your default option twice – once for the default, and twice for the defined picklist value in the choice field. So this may be a bit disconcerting. I suggest actually putting “Current Value – {!varYourVariableName}” in the Label field (but not the Stored Value). With this, it is at least apparent why the value is present twice.
Thanks for posting these. I just downloaded the “FlowPicklistSync”, but I’m having problems, specifically when I try to save the “ManagePicklistForFlow.cls”: Error: Test Methods Must be in test classes…. Anyone else had success with this? If I understand correctly, with this download I am bringing in a Custom Object called “PicklistForFlow__c”, and a class called “ManagePicklistsForFlow.cls”. Is that it?