As we know few years ago Salesforce acquired Vlocity. Vlocity offers industry solutions along with great productivity tool like DataRaptor, OmniScript, Integration Procedure etc… After Acquistion Salesforce started plugging these great features in Salesforce application. Salesforce packaged some of these productivity tools under umbrella of OmniStudio.
Salesforce is offering OmniStudio with most of the industry applications like Health Cloud, Automotive Cloud etc…
OmniStudio would be getting more and more features with every Salesforce release but the some of the most widely used and core features are OmniScript, Flex Card, DataRaptor and Integration Procedure.
All these tools are built on top of Salesforce, but it requires understanding and learning. Using basic features are easy and they are drag and drop but some of the advanced features may take several months to master.
In this article I would introduce basic definition and we would be adding more articles to give you more awareness and exposure of these tools. We would be starting with basics for beginners.
DataRaptor
DataRaptor is a great tool in OmniStudio. This is used to perform actions on Salesforce Objects. It is offered in four different variations. :-
DataRaptor Extract
As the name suggests, this is used to extract the information / data from Salesforce Object. It provides ability to filter, sort, limit and apply formulas. This supports queries multiple objects using direct or indirect relationship. Extracted data is presented in JSON format. Basic understanding of JSON is must to properly use DataRaptor. It provides limited ability to extract the data as per our requirement. We can define fields, type and structure of extracted JSON.
DataRaptor Turbo Extract
This is performance efficient version of DataRaptor Extract, but it supports extracting data from one object at a time. It can be useful if we are extracting large number of records from single objects. It is not as flexible as Extract action, but this is something to explore if you are looking for high performance.
DataRaptor Load
Other two Extract is used to pull the data from Salesforce and as the name suggests this one is used to load the data or push the data in Salesforce. This accepts JSON as input and returns JSON as response and it returns ID of created / updated records. This also provides error details if it fails because of any data or validation error or any other trigger error.
It can run in insert of update mode. We can define the upsert key to indicate if we want to insert a record or update existing records.
DataRaptor Transform
This is a great addition to Salesforce capabilities. I have been missing a feature that I saw in other CRM that provides ability to do basic transformations like value transformation or complete structure transformation. This is going to make integration so easy as you do not have to write complex APEX to create or transform JSON structure. We manage to create some transformations that we initially thought would be very complex for APEX. This is easy to learn but would take time to master.
Integration Procedure
This is other productivity tool packaged in OmniStudio that you would love to explore and use. OmniStudio provides several actions and we just reviewed one above (DataRaptor). Integration Procedure works as a container to place one or more actions, string it together, orchestrate as per requirement.
We have large number of actions that can be added to Integration Procedure. I have been developing Integration procedure since last 4 years but did not use all the actions so it would be ongoing learning with your project work.
Integration Procedure can be executed from OmniScript, FlexCard, APEX and several other tools. We would not surprise if in coming days Salesforce provides ability to execute IP directly from Salesforce Flows.
FlexCard
This is other innovative productivity tool offered by Salesforce in OmniStudio. If you recollect Salesforce record page, it provides lot of widgets that we can simply drag and drop. If we do not find a widget as per our requirement, then we have to develop a custom LWC that internally calls SOQL under APEX with some business logic
This is relatively new tool and still going through lot of enhancements, but this is going to help you to meet those requirements where you have to develop an LWC.
It is no code and click and configure tool that can use a SOQL, DataRaptor & IP to perform backend actions and business logics. For more complex business processing it provides ability to call APEX also.
This is going to meet your basic need, but you may need to write CSS if you want to more customized user interface.
You can develop a sophisticated user interface with actions. Actions can be as simple as navigating to a website or as sophisticated as launching an OmniScript that provides complete guided experience.
OmniScript
The last OmniStudio feature we are going to add here is OmniScript. This is going to provide guided experience to user. you can co-relate this with Salesforce Lightning Screen Flow, but this is much more powerful than Salesforce Lightning Screen Flow.
As a developer or an architect, you have to take a decision if you are going to use Salesforce Lightning Flow or OmniScript. There is no defined guideline, and we can write a complete article to compare pro and cons. You need to take a decision based on requirement, how are you planning to execute it, long term maintenance. Flow is much lighter than OmniScript and relatively easy to develop but it does not offer the utility that OmniScript provide. OmniScript conceptually can do everything that a Screen Flow can do but we cannot say same otherwise. Flow is getting feature rich day by day so do not know if in future we would be requiring two productivity tools for same purpose.
We can combine power of DataRaptor, Integration Procedure and Flex Card with OmniScript to provide a great guided solution for our user.
OmniStudio provides much more features than highlighted above and objective of this article was to summarize soke key features based on my experience.