FlowLens: Salesforce Flow Inspector
The Context Switching Challenge
If you’ve built Flows with Apex Actions, this will sound familiar. You click into an Action and all you see is a method name that doesn’t really help. To understand it, you’re straight into your editor, searching the repo, finding the class, reading the method, then coming back to your Flow. It’s not difficult, but it slows you down and breaks your focus every time.
All that switching back and forth adds up, especially on projects where Flow and Apex are closely connected and you’re always moving between them. Teams often deal with this, even though it slows everything down. After repeating this process so many times, it started to feel like a problem that shouldn’t exist. That’s why I built a simple but powerful Chrome extension. It shows the Apex class and method behind a Flow Action right inside Flow Builder, so you can see what’s happening without leaving the canvas.
Keep your Head in the Flow
When you click on an Apex Action, the extension uses your session ID from the current tab to log in to your org. It reads the metadata from the configuration panel to find the class and method, then pulls the Apex code using the Tooling API, formats it, and highlights the method being called.
The extension then adds this output right into the Flow Builder UI, just below the panel you’re working in. This way, you can review the logic in context instead of jumping between different tools.
If you prefer opening the class in a separate tab, the option’s still there. This just removes the extra step when you don’t need it.
Where this helps
Flows now handle more tasks than before. In many projects, they work right next to Apex and are part of the main business logic, not separate from it.
Because of this, knowing what happens behind an Action becomes part of your daily work, not just something you check once in a while. The sooner you understand it, the easier it is to make good decisions as you build. FlowLens shows how we like to solve these problems. If something keeps slowing people down, it makes sense to fix it instead of just finding ways around it.
There’s still more we can do, especially to help people understand how automations work and what they rely on. But the first step is simple: keep people focused and remove anything that gets in their way. Often, the biggest improvements come from removing small daily obstacles, not from making big design changes. FlowLens will be out soon, so keep an eye out. In the meantime, you can see what else we’ve been working on here.