Approval Process Diagram
An Approval Process Diagram is the graphical flowchart that the Salesforce Process Visualizer once generated from an Approval Process definition.
Definition
An Approval Process Diagram is the graphical flowchart that the Salesforce Process Visualizer once generated from an Approval Process definition. The diagram drew the entry criteria as a starting node, each approval step as a branch, the approve and reject paths between steps, and the final approval, final rejection, and recall actions as end nodes. Admins opened it from an approval process in Setup to confirm the configuration matched the business intent before anyone submitted a record.
This feature is retired. Salesforce retired the Process Visualizer with the Summer '19 release because it ran on Adobe Flash Player, which Adobe stopped supporting. There is no live View Diagram button on approval processes today. The underlying approval processes still work, but admins now read and document them from the tabular Setup pages instead of a generated diagram.
What the Approval Process Diagram was and why it is gone
What the diagram showed
The Approval Process Diagram was a read-only flowchart drawn from the metadata behind a single approval process. At the top sat the initial submission, fed by the process entry criteria, the rule that decides which records qualify. Below it, each approval step appeared as a node with its assigned approver and any step-level filter criteria. Lines connected the steps to show the approve path and the reject path a record could follow. At the bottom, terminal nodes represented the final approval actions, the final rejection actions, and the recall actions if any were configured. Because the picture came straight from the saved configuration, it reflected exactly what would happen at runtime. Admins used it to confirm that approvers, criteria, and routing matched what the business asked for. The value was speed of comprehension. A multi-step process with branching is hard to follow in stacked Setup tables, but a single flowchart made the path obvious to reviewers who did not live in Setup every day.
It was the Process Visualizer under the hood
The View Diagram button was the front door to a feature Salesforce called the Process Visualizer. The Process Visualizer rendered the approval flowchart as an interactive image inside the browser. It was never a separate object or a piece of metadata you could edit. It was a viewer that read the existing approval process and painted it. That detail matters for understanding the retirement. When the viewer went away, no approval logic was lost, because the diagram was only a rendering of configuration that lives elsewhere. People often conflated the diagram with the approval process itself, but the two were always distinct. The approval process is the automation. The diagram was a disposable picture of it. This is also why you cannot find the feature in current orgs even though every approval process you built years ago still runs. The engine stayed. The window you looked through it was removed.
Why Salesforce retired it
Salesforce retired the Process Visualizer with the Summer '19 release. The reason was technical, not strategic. The viewer was built on Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe announced the end of Flash. Browsers began blocking and then removing Flash support, so any feature that depended on it would stop working regardless of what Salesforce did. Rather than rebuild the diagram on a modern rendering stack, Salesforce removed the View Diagram entry point. The official retirement notice is blunt about it. The functionality of approval processes is unaffected, and admins continue to create and manage them through the Approval Processes pages in Setup, including the Jump Start Wizard and the Standard Setup Wizard. No replacement graphical viewer shipped alongside the retirement. If you learned approval processes before 2019 and remember a flowchart, this is what happened to it.
What replaced it for documentation
There is no one-to-one successor that auto-generates an approval flowchart today. Admins fall back to a few options. The most common is to read the process from the tabular Setup pages, where entry criteria, steps, approvers, and actions each have their own section, and to write the logic up by hand in a wiki or change ticket. Teams that want a picture draw it manually in a diagramming tool and keep it next to the configuration. A second path is relevant for newer work: Salesforce now lets you build approvals with Flow, and Flow Builder shows a live canvas of the logic as you assemble it. That canvas is not the old Approval Process Diagram, but it gives flow-based approvals the visual surface that classic approval processes lost. So the answer splits by era. Classic approval processes have no generated diagram, and flow-built approvals get the Flow Builder canvas instead.
The approval process itself never changed
It is worth separating the retired viewer from the living feature so nobody assumes approvals are deprecated. Approval processes are fully supported. An approval process still specifies the steps a record needs to be approved and who approves it at each step. The default initial submission action still locks the record so users other than approvers and admins cannot edit it while it is pending. Approval steps still assign requests to users and define the chain of approval. Final approval actions still fire only when a record is approved and no further steps remain, and final rejection actions fire when a request is denied. All of that is intact. The only thing that disappeared in Summer '19 was the generated picture. If your goal is to build or change an approval, you do that work exactly as before, just without a flowchart at the end to admire.
Why people still search for it
The term lingers in training material, exam prep, and older blog posts written before the retirement. Screenshots of the colorful approval flowchart circulated widely, so the image is burned into how a generation of admins pictures approvals. New admins sometimes go looking for the View Diagram button, fail to find it, and assume something is broken in their org. It is not. The button has not existed since 2019. Knowing the history saves a support case and a frustrating hunt through Setup. It also reframes a good habit: because Salesforce no longer draws the diagram for you, documenting an approval process is now a manual discipline. Capture entry criteria, every step, every approver, and every action in writing, and refresh that record whenever the process changes. The platform will not regenerate the picture, so the team owns keeping the documentation honest.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Process Visualizer RetirementSalesforce
- Guide to Salesforce Record Approval ProcessesSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Approval Process Diagram.
- Process Visualizer RetirementSalesforce
- Approval Processes (Salesforce Help)Salesforce
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Approval Process Diagram.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
Q1. What is the Approval Process Diagram?
Q2. Can an admin change the underlying Approval Process from within the diagram?
Q3. When does the Approval Process Diagram deliver the most practical value?
Discussion
Loading discussion…