Showing the Business Process Flow Stage in the all records view

One interesting aspect requested recently was the ability for a user to quickly see, when looking at an all record view the stage a record is at in the business process flow. That would make it easier for users to not only see quickly where their records are, but also have the ability to filter for only records at a particular stage to focus on.

This can be achieved easily, with a no code configuration. Let’s see how.

First off, I’ll be making the assumption you already have the Business Process Flow created. If not, go ahead and create it. Mine has 3 stages: Collect, Review and Conclude.

Next, start by creating a text field to capture the Process stage. I’ve set this one up as a single line of text, with a size of 5 (the reason is 5 is because I want to display it in the format xx/xx. Note that I’m expecting the associated Business Process Flow will not have more than 99 steps. (It’s unreasonable to think a Business Process Flow will ever have this many steps, but this accounts for the odd situation where you could have more than 9 steps. You might want to reconsider your design if that’s the case.)

You could show this field on the form if you really want to, or just leave it off the form. You only need to show it in the all records view.

Next, go ahead and create a workflow. Depending on your need, you could leave it asynchronous, or make synchronous.

Set the Entity on your workflow to the Business Process Flow you will be monitoring the steps on. For triggers, select the Start when to Process is applied and also to Process changes –> Active Stage. this will trigger an execution both when the record is created (Process is applied), as well as when the step changes.

For the actions, check the active stage, and populate the Process Stage text field we created earlier with a value like 1/3 (stage 1 of 3). It will look something like this:

Finally, go to the all records view, and add the Process Stage text field.

Now, when you create a new record, or change the process stage, the workflow is triggered and the all records view shows the updated stage for each record.

This is just a simple configuration to quickly get the relevant info in front of the users.

Enjoy!