How to Control the Target Behavior of Links in Flow

Using Salesforce Flow, you can perform countless tasks. Sometimes, you might want to create a link to a record in the flow. For example, in a screen flow, you can show a link to a record so users can navigate to it by clicking the link. In some cases, you might want to display other types of links. For instance, a link of a website or a specific page in Salesforce. After creating the link, it is possible to add a display text component to a screen and display the link that you created. To do so, highlight the text that you want to turn into a link and enter the resource that you created. When the users click on it, their browser will open the destination link in a new tab. What if you want to open it in the same tab? There is no parameter to control the target behavior of hyperlinks. However, there is a way to achieve this.

Read this post to learn how to create a dynamic record link in flow.

Create a Record Link Using the Api Global Variable

Api global variable stores the Enterprise Server URL and Partner Server URL values.

There are multiple Enterprise Server URL and Partner Server URL options in this global variable. However, they all start with the url of the environment. Therefore, you can use any of them in order to create the record link.

Create a formula resource and add one of the Api global variables. Next, use some functions to get rid of the unnecessary part. Finally, add the variable that stores the record's Id to the end of the formula.

Here is the formula used in RecordLink_Formula resource:

LEFT({!$Api.Partner_Server_URL_550}, FIND( '/services', {!$Api.Partner_Server_URL_550})) & {!recordId}

At the end of this step, you have a text that shows the record link. If you use it like this, the browser will open the link in a new tab. As you can see, there is no parameter or configuration to control the target behavior.

Text Template Resource and HTML

Text template resource has 2 modes: Plain Text and Rich Text. If you create a text template in rich text mode, it is still possible to switch to plain text. When you switch to plain text, you don't lose all the formatting that you did. You simply see them as HTML tags. Then if you switch back to rich text, you will see the formatting that you did before. It is because plain text supports HTML tags. Therefore, it means that you can directly build a text template using HTML tags in plain text mode.

If you are familiar with HTML, you can use the <a> tag with the href attribute to create a hyperlink. The href attribute is used to specify the destination of the link. The text or image contained between the opening and closing <a> tags is what will be displayed as the clickable link. In addition to the href attribute, there are a few other attributes that you can use when creating a hyperlink in HTML. One of the available attributes is target. It specifies where to open the link and it is exactly what you need to control the target behavior of the links.

Create a Text Template to Control the Target Behavior

1- Create a new text template resource and add this HTML code in Plain Text mode.

<a href="{!RecordLink_Formula}" target="_self">Click here</a>

If you want to create the hyperlink for a specific page, replace the {!RecordLink_Formula} with the link that you want. For instance, here is an HTML code to open Salesforce Time.

<a href="https://salesforcetime.com" target="_self">Click here</a>

2- Add a display text component to the screen element. Instead of adding a link to a text, simply add the text template that you created in the previous step.

At the end, the message will look like this and it will open the link in the same tab.

It is important to note that the text template itself is already clickable. Therefore, you shouldn't add an additional hyperlink from the display text component.

It is possible to apply a different behavior by providing a different target value. Here are the available target attribute values.

Value	Description
_blank	Opens the linked document in a new window or tab.
_self	Opens the linked document in the same frame as it was clicked.
_parent	Opens the linked document in the parent frame.
_top	Opens the linked document in the full body of the window.
framename	Opens the linked document in the named iframe.