Reducing Manual Tasks in Salesforce DevOps

 🚩Focus: Automating the Deletion of Old Flow Versions

❓One of the most frequently asked questions I get as a DevOps Consultant is:
“How can we reduce manual tasks during deployments?”

A common manual task is deleting outdated Flow versions in Salesforce. Here’s why automating this step is valuable:

🚨 Why Automate This?
Deleting old Flow versions is a best practice that helps in several ways:

Improves overall performance
Reduces clutter in the environment
Makes the system easier to manage, especially during continuous development and iteration
How to Automate Flow Deletion
Deleting old Flow versions is fairly simple in itself, but doing it manually across multiple orgs during forward or backward promotions can become a tedious and error-prone process.

🚩Here are a few ways to automate it:

1. Using Salesforce Inspector Reloaded or Other Tools Supporting Tooling API
You can run a query to fetch obsolete Flow versions and delete them using tools that support the Tooling API.
2. Using Anonymous Apex Script (Post-Deployment Task)
You can also write an anonymous Apex script to delete old Flow versions and execute it as a post-deployment step.
Using Copado for Post-Deployment Automation

Let’s dive deeper into the second approach.

Copado supports executing anonymous Apex scripts as part of your post-deployment steps. Since Flow deletion requires using the Tooling API, the script needs to interact with the destination org’s endpoint URL. This URL will vary depending on the target environment, so hardcoding it is not ideal.

🚩Here’s the good part:
Copado allows you to use environment variables within your scripts. You can define a placeholder variable in the script and set the actual endpoint URLs as environment variables in the pipeline. Copado will then dynamically replace the placeholder with the correct URL during deployment.

This way, you can seamlessly automate the deletion of old Flow versions in every deployment without manual intervention.