Scheduled Flow Bulkification

Question

There is not much documentation yet surrounding the release of Scheduled Flows (Winter 20).

This article (https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter20/release-notes/rn_forcecom_flow_fbuilder_start.htm) states that "When your flow starts, a flow interview runs for each record that matches your filter—no looping required. The matching record is stored in the $Record global variable, so you can reference the variable or its fields throughout your flow."

So my question is this. Does anyone know how this relates to bulification? If it runs the interview via the $Record global variable, then do I assume that I don't bulkify my update to a set of records, but rather have an Update Record element in the flow for every record, and then assume that the schedule automatically wraps these up into a single Update?

Also, do I assume that the $Record global has access to all fields on that object during the interview? Since I am not performing a "Get" and therefore are not able to specify the fields I need to complete my operations?

Answer 1

A user from the Process Automation group came back to me with this:

1Q: Yes. Design the flow as if you are working on a single record. And scheduled flow does the bulkification for you.

2Q: Yes. You have access to all the fields on the record.

3Q: Scheduled Flow is run as the "Automated Process" user. This is different from Default Workflow User

Answer 2

You are correct; for anyone else who would stumble upon this thread, I would just add that when you debug the Flow, it seems as though it only runs on the first record (I struggled for hours on this). You actually have to activate it for it to run on all the records specified in the Start Element. Therefore, if you want to test it, schedule it to run in the next couple of minutes.