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hope someone can help me understand what am I missing here.

I have a pretty simple requierement. We have a flow that, among other things, creates a record for a custom object type ("Provider Order") with a Name that concatenates AccountName and today's date. So the formula previously was

{!AccountLookup.recordName} + TODAY()

However we started having issue with Account names that were too long, on which trying to create a Custom Order with the Account Name + today's date resulted in more than 80 chatracters. So I just modified it like this:

LEFT({!AccountLookup.recordName}) + TODAY()

After the modification I expected it would shorten the names correctly, but for some reason looks like Flows was just ignoring the LEFT() in my formula and leaving the Account name and the date.

I then tried creating a resource of type Formula, using the following formula in it:

LEFT({!AccountLookup.recordName}, 65) + TEXT(TODAY())

And, for testing purposes added a screen element that would display it before creating the object. The flow eneded up looking something like this:

Nodes

enter image description here

Formula creation

enter image description here

Forumla usage in Screen element

enter image description here

Formula usage in Create Provider Order node

enter image description here

What I cannot understand is why in the first step (the screeen) it displays as expected, but in the second step (the object creation) it's still failing.

enter image description here enter image description here

The original account name is

over 69lcmlsdmclskmcskmclksmdclksmdlskmlcksmdckmclskmdclksdmclksmdlcksmdclmklmclksdmclksdmc

The name displayed in the screen element is the following (note it's correctly cropped):

over 69lcmlsdmclskmcskmclksmdclksmdlskmlcksmdckmclskmdclksdmclksm2023-01-05

And finally the name shown in the Error log is this (note the date is correctly added but it's not cropped at all)

over 69lcmlsdmclskmcskmclksmdclksmdlskmlcksmdckmclskmdclksdmclksmdlcksmdclmklmclksdmclksdmc 2023-01-05

Hope someone can give me direction on what I'm doing wrong and how can I achieve this functionality.

Thank you!

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11
  • Are you using the Formula resource in the Name field assignment in the Create Provider Order node? I suspect not. And you probably want to add the space to your formula: LEFT({!AccountLookup.recordName}, 65) + " " +TEXT(TODAY())
    – Thomas Taylor
    Jan 5 at 19:15
  • 1
    Yes I am. I'm using exactly the same variable in both (updating the post to show the way I'm using them)
    – David de León
    Jan 5 at 19:26
  • Any custom triggers on the Account object that could be overriding your Flow?
    – TSmith
    Jan 5 at 19:30
  • There are custom triggers actually, but I'm testing this flow by debugging, I understand custom triggers don't interfere there, do they?
    – David de León
    Jan 5 at 19:40
  • Very odd! When you debug the Flow, what is it showing for value assignments in the Create Provider Order node?
    – Thomas Taylor
    Jan 5 at 20:07

2 Answers 2

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Thanks to everyone for your help.

I answer myself because I found the cause of the issue. This was actually indeed lack of knowldege from my side, since as cropredy pointed out, all other business logic will execute when you debug a flow.

And indeed, there was a workflow rule active doing exactly the same thing that my flow was doing!

Since it was doing just that, taking the Account name and adding the date, I just added the LEFT() to the Field Update on that Workflow and it worked as expected now!

Thanks again!

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0

This sounds a lot like the scenario described in this Help document.

When you have a field update from a workflow rule that updates a text field using another text field with higher capacity, you'll encounter an error "data value too large." This only occurs in Lightning Experience.

I was able to reproduce the problem in a sandbox. In my case I used a source field of length 80, a target field with length 50 and a flow formula resource defined as

LEFT({!$Record.Name}, 35) + TEXT(TODAY())

However, when I changed the formula to

LEFT({!$Record.Name}, 50)

There was no problem assigning the value and creating the new record.

I added a new flow variable resource (Text) and added an Assignment element to the flow to populate the variable from the original formula. Then I changed the record creation to assign the variable to the short field and everything worked.

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