Dictionary Manipulation

Overview

**NOTE: This plug-in is deprecated and no longer recommended for use for sites running on Appian 21.4 or later. The functionality of this component is available in Appian without installing the plug-in. You can use a!update() and a!keys() in Appian 21.4 or later.**

Dictionaries are one of the most useful data structures available in Appian. This plug-in provides tools to dynamically create dictionaries from key-value pairs, update dictionaries with new values (including nested dictionaries), and understand what keys are available in a dictionary to help with dynamic control.

Key Features & Functionality

FUNCTIONS

createDictionary - Takes a list of keys (Any Type) and a list of values (Any Type) and returns an Appian Dictionary representation of those data. The list of keys and values MUST be of the same length or an error will be thrown. If no keys are provided an empty Dictionary will be returned. This provides a high-performance, low difficulty means of creating dynamic dictionaries (no more fromJson())
updateDictionary - Takes a CDT or Dictionary to update as well as a CDT or Dictionary containing the keys and values to insert/update and returns the updated result. If the input was a CDT the output will be cast to the same type for data cleanliness. This can be used to update specific keys of the dictionary, or to merge two disparate dictionaries into one.
getKeysFromDictionary - Takes a CDT or Dictionary as input and returns a List of Text representing the included keys.

DEPRECATED FUNCTIONS

joinCdt: Analogous to a SQL join statement. Useful for manipulating CDTs which are never written to a database.
expandCdt: Expands a CDT with a nested list or CDT. It will create a new row for every value in a nested list or new column for every column in a nested CDT. Also, an expanded list's column will be cast to a scalar value.
updateCdt: Takes in a CDT, dictionary, or list of either and a dictionary containing the updated values and returns the updated CDT.

Michael Chirlin over 4 years ago in reply to Christina (Le) Hajost

Version 2.0.1 resolves this issue. I recommend upgrading.
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Michael Chirlin over 4 years ago in reply to Jonathan

Try to do

createdictionary(
{"a","b"}, {"d",createdictionary({"e"},{"f"})}
)
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Christina (Le) Hajost over 4 years ago in reply to kunal.hsbc

Do you have the latest version of the plugin? The Customer Success team is working on addressing the deprecated APIs for this plugin but I think the latest version is up-to-date.
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kunal.hsbc over 4 years ago

Hi Daniel,

Thank you for this plug-in, we have used it extensively in live environments...

Recently we started getting a high risk item in health check report for dictionary manipulation plug-in for version 2.0.0

Dictionary Manipulation (com.appiancorp.cdtmanipulation) references private Appian APIs
[private] com.appiancorp.type.DataTypeProperties.getTypeof()
[private] com.appiancorp.type.DataTypeProperties.isListType()

Can you please advise if this is removed or will be removed in future version of this plug-in?

Thank you,

Kunal
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Jonathan over 4 years ago

Having a problem with createDictionary. What if a dictionary value is a list?

Ex) createDictionary({key1,key2},{value1,{value2a,value2b}} I get an error saying there is a mismatch of of keys and values
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April Schuppel over 4 years ago in reply to Arpit Pipersaniya

Hi

updateCdt was deprecated and replaced with updateDictionary. You should upgrade the plug-in and use updateDictionary.
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Arpit Pipersaniya over 4 years ago

Hello,

I've started facing issues with updateCdt function after upgradation to the 20.2 Appian version.
Is this function not compatible with the 20.2 version of Appian?
(I've version 1.2.0 plug-in installed, do I've to upgrade plug-in with the most latest version?)

And do updateCdt and updateDictionary function in the same way?

Please help.
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Michael Chirlin over 4 years ago in reply to spandanat

You can't pass a list of dictionary into the expression, instead do:

a!forEach(
items: {
{
A1: 0,
test: 01
},
{
A1: 0,
test: 01
},
{
A1: 0,
test: 01
}
},
expression: updatedictionary(
fv!item,
{
A1: 1
}
)
)
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spandanat over 5 years ago

@ilan.gold

the function "updatedictionary" is throwing

error:Expression evaluation error at function 'updatedictionary': Could not cast from List of Dictionary to Dictionary. Details: CastInvalidCould not cast from List of Dictionary to Dictionary. Details: CastInvalid

for below code :( i am trying to update "multiple cdt/array cdt" )

updatedictionary(
dictionary: {
{
A1: 0,
test: 01
},
{
A1: 0,
test: 01
},
{
A1: 0,
test: 01
}
},
fieldsAndValues: {
A1: {
1,
1,
1
}
}
)
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Dan Tobias over 5 years ago in reply to Robert Travis

What is the need to have the keys in a particular order? The behavior of Appian objects & dictionaries is that there really is no concept of order among the keys. If you need a particular order, I'd recommend using a different data structure than just dictionary.
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