Visual Workflow Lookup multiple values for a field

Question

I'm having users select values with a multi select picklist (the worst) in the flow that correspond to values in a field on the account, let's say industry. They select Industry1 and Industry2. I want to do a fast lookup where it finds any account that has either Industry1 or Industry2 selected.

Is there any way to do a lookup where one of the values can be either or?

I've tried delimiting the field input value with ; and , and neither worked. As it stands I need to do a lookup for all accounts, then Loop through them all and check if they have the appropriate field value based on what the user selected.

Answer 1

The only place an OR can be applied currently is either in a Formula or a Decision. That being said, you can use a formula to separate the values based on the delimiter, and run each result separately. This blog post has some excellent information on parsing multi-picklists and working with the data there.

https://rakeshistom.wordpress.com/2015/02/03/add-record-to-multiple-chatter-groups-parsing-multi-select-picklist-fields-flow/

Answer 2

I ended up using a lot of collections. One collection for my account (or a subset) and then another collection for the different Industries (custom setting). And let them select which Industry they are interested in. Then looped through each relevant account and nested looped again through each Industry selected. Works like a charm and wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.

Edit: I've decided to uncouple these. I had so many different collections because I have some objects being master-detail with other objects several layers deep. I decided to get rid of most of these levels, and the ones I still needed I made a lookup relationship. This way I could have them automatically created as an after update using flow and process builder. Separate makes it much easier to see everything that is going on.