Workflows

Often, our application needs the ability to send e-mail alerts, create and assign tasks on creation and modification of records, or update some of the fields depending on user input.

A common life business scenario could be that on the closure of a case (more specifically, when the status of the Case field changes to the value closed), I would like to assign a task to a service rep to inform the customer that their case has been closed and also send an e-mail to the contact (customer) that their case has been resolved.

To achieve all these functionalities, Salesforce has provided us with a toolset named workflows.

To start building a workflow, navigate to Setup | Create | Workflow & Approvals | Workflow Rules, as shown in the following screenshot:

The workflow itself has two main parts; I generally call the first part the header and the other part, the action. The header consists of three mandatory parts: rule name, evaluation criteria, and rule criteria. The action will involve...