Avoid Duplicate Records Using Flow

In this blog post lets see how to avoid duplicate records in Salesforce using the powerful feature – Flow, As the word says, flow easily flows to fulfill the requirements with ease.☺  Many think of appexchange solutions and source code to avoid the duplicate record in salesforce, But the method I'm going to explain here is completely different and very simple. It helps you to reduce your code and can easily rebuild for other objects with different field logic with simple clicks.

Lets jump into the solution, we will use flow to check duplicate record logic and use apex trigger to initiate the Flow whenever a record is created or updated.

Visual WorkFlow:[Click]

First we will create the Flow to check the duplicate records based on the name and store the result in the variable. In this example, we will use the Account object for the dupe check.

Step 1 : Create a new visual flow with the Name ‘DuplicateAccountCheck'
Step 2 : Click and drag the RecordLookup into the flow window and Name it as ‘DuplicateCheck'
Step 3 : Select the object as ‘Account'
Step 4: In the Fields select “ID" and condition as "does not equal” in the value and create new variable ‘varAccountId’.
Step 5: Select Field as “Name” and Operator as “equal” in the value and create new variable ‘varAccountName'.

Note: Set Variable Input/Output Type as InputOnly

trigger DuplicateCheck on Account (before insert,before update) {

  for(Account acc: Trigger.New)
  {
    Map<String, Object> params = new Map<String, Object>();
    params.put('varAccountName',acc.Name);
    params.put('varAccountId',acc.Id);
        
    Flow.Interview.DuplicateAccountCheck duplicateAccountCheck = new Flow.Interview.DuplicateAccountCheck(params);
    duplicateAccountCheck.start();
 
    // Obtain the results
    String returnValue = (String) DuplicateAccountCheck.getVariableValue('varReturnAccount');
    if(returnValue != null && returnValue != '')
      acc.Name.Adderror('Duplicate Account Found with the same Name: '+returnValue);
  }
}