Best Practices

We have a requirement that when clicking a link, will start file download, at the meantime, we need to do some data update. Can anyone advice how to achieve this?

Hi All, We have a process model running at 8:30 AM daily which will perform some updates in the database, this process will take maximum up to 5 minutes to complete. During this time we need to freeze home page for 5 mins by showing some warning message then after 5 minutes we can display the home page. How to achieve this can someone help us with this kind of scenario.

Hi All, Can you please suggest if you have faced similar scenario, when a process is running in the background how can we show a warning message for 5 minutes and after 5 mins we have to show the page to users.

We have DEV, QC and Production Cloud based Appian environments. When developing on the DEV environment, and creating a new Record Type which then creates a new SQL table on our cloud database schema, it generates a SQL script for you to create the table. There is also a checkbox option to apply that SQL script immediately for you to your source schema.  The same happens if you update the Record Type fields. A SQL script is generated to alter your source table for you. I'm interested to hear how everyone handles their database changes across environments when using Record Types that generate the source tables for you? Do you download and store every single SQL script as you make changes to a Record Type? If so, where do you store them? Do you manually run those scripts on your databases for each environment? Do you deploy them as part of a package which only has the SQL scripts? Or do you deploy them as part of a package which includes both the SQL scripts and your ap

Hello!I'm having a doubt about the use of the function index(), as a best practice in Appian development.In the Appian documentation appears as: index( data, index, default ), but I know that we can use the function as: index( data, index, index, index... (as many as needed), default ), to navigate between an object and it returns the value needed. The question is: Should I use nested index() functions? or Is better to use just one index function with many indexes inside? Example: {CountriesES, CountriesUS, CountriesNL} -> Cities -> Town 1 - Index(CountriesES, "Cities", "Town", null) 2 - Index(lIndex(CountriesES, "Cities", null), "Town", null).

Hi I am Learning Appian development, i have doubt how to combine two text local variables please hep me on this a!localVariables ( localVar1: Text := "Hello,", localVar2: Text := " World!" ) local!combinedText := local!localVar1 & local!localVar2

Hi, please archive? thank you!

Hey everyone, I've been going through the Appian Documentation for the "Send E-Mail Smart Service", and I have a question about adding recipients in the "To:" field. The documentation suggests various methods for adding users or groups, such as typing their names, selecting them from a list, or directly inputting email addresses with semicolon separation (;). One concern I have is the design flaw when manually entering individual users, without using a group. Is there a way to find them later through some interface that allows me to find these users? My goal is to detect whether any of the manually entered individual recipients (e.g., the logged-in user, or any user that we will enter) appear in the "To:" field by searching through ALL the Process Models at once. Additionally, I'm uncertain if there is a way to search through all the Process Models (maybe by using: Process Modeller -> Tools -> Generate Documentation). If you have any insights

Hello I have this setup: - Inner interface that allows to view or edit a record, but it has no buttons - There are outer interfaces that include the inner one, adding to it action buttons or extra fields - The inner interface calculates a field (e.g. cost=number of parts * cost of each part). The result of this calculation is shown to the user in the inner interface, but it also should be stored in a field of the record type. The problem I have is that the inner interface cannot save the calculated cost to the record rule input, because it has no buttons and therefore it can't use a single a!save. The calculated field is shown to the user in a readonly or disabled textField, but its saveInto is innefective when its value changes after the calculation. saveInto works only when the field is enabled and the user types into it. The outer interfaces can update the record type using a!save in its buttons, but they must repeat the call to the calcu

We have 3 cloud based environments: DEV, QC & Production. When the Appian platform is being upgraded on the cloud, we can schedule the date/time it happens for each environment. General good practice is that you should upgrade your non-production environments first. After a period of regression testing on those environments, you upgrade your production environment. Now, if we upgrade our non-development environments first for a period of a week to give the developers and software testers time to do their regression testing, we cannot deploy any new features or bug fixes to production during this time as the Appian versions on DEV/QC are different to Production. This is a major problem if during that week of testing a critical bug is found in production that needs to be fixed and deployed to production ASAP. How do you all handle this?

In case of record sync failure, I want specific people to be informed instead of all system admins.

Hello, I'm working with a dynamik k¡link element who adds a row to a table and I was wondering why this text shows and if it possible to get rid of it: "A new grid row will be added to the grid behind you" Thanks!

Hello everyone, We are currently facing challenges when it comes to identifying users who are part of Constants of Type "User" or "User or Group". This poses a problem when we need to deactivate someone's account and remove or replace them from all associated groups and constants. We have successfully obtained the list of group names that a user (e.g., the logged-in user) belongs to using the following code snippet: a!richTextDisplayField( value: { a!richTextBulletedList( items: { a!forEach( items: getgroupsformemberuser(loggedInUser()), expression: group(fv!item, "groupName") ) } ) } ) However, we still encounter difficulties in identifying users who are part of Constants of Type "User" or "User or Group". We are considering the use of constant descriptions to improve the search process for these constants. If you have any

Hi, I have a google drive connected system, I use it in an integration to create folders in google drive. It works fine, but after a few minutes of inactivity or sign out my account, the authorization is canceled or expires and I have to re-authorize in my concept connected system for my integration to work again. How can I always leave it active, without the need to authorize it every moment?

Hi All, I wanted to understand how document is stored in Appian . Does Appian store it internally as a stream ? or there is some other sort of mechanism for same ? Please let me know if you have any sort of Appian forum links or you have some sort of understanding for this . This is just for my knowledge . Regards, Sparsh Shangloo

We recently had the following scenario on our cloud based Appian environment. 1. We do all our application building / designing / development on our development environment.2. We promote our applications to our QC environment and finally Production.3. Our development environment recently had issues where the Appian support team had to restore it to a point from the previous day.4. Once our development environment had been restored to the previous days recovery point, we had effectively lost all our application development from the recovery point to the time the server became unstable. Question: What is your process to avoid or mitigate this loss of work/code if your dev environment crashes ? I come from a non-Appian environment where we develop our source code and then commit it to a source code repository.From there it automatically checks the source code for quality, builds the application, and deploys it to our development environment.If our development environment crashes

In my current project I need to make a element button integrated in a interactive grid visible for screen readers and if it this posible get this code in HTML: " aria-label=”Delete” And, if this action is not posible, what recomends to use in te grid to eliminate an element? Thank you

Hi! I'm trying to achieve this HTML structure in appian text field: <label class="" for="un">Name</label> The main request to get it: The screen readers must be able to read the text into the text (placeholder aren't visible in their opinion) Many thanks!

Hi All,  What is the best practice/Appian recommended naming convention for database tables and fields? Previously the database table created by Appian were all lowercase, now in latest version, all (tables and fields) in upper cases. Is there any reason they changed it to upper case? For most databases, recommended naming convention in stored procedure is to keep the key words as upper case and fields in camel case/pascal case and table name in pascal case Please let's know your thoughts/recommendations. SG

I have a data type for a SQL view TOS_CMS_VW_ClergyTitleStatusTypeDSE.  It contains fields describing various clergy members.  I want Clergy Id and Clergy Full Name in a lookup on an interface.  ClergyID is an integer and ClergyFullName is a text field. I created a constant for the data type and I am not trying to create a expression to pull the two fields I want for the dropdown, ClergyID and ClergyFullName. a!queryEntity(  entity: cons!TOS_CMS_VW_ClergyTitleStatusTypeDSE,  query: a!query(    selection: {      a!querySelection(columns: a!queryColumn(cons!TOS_CMS_VW_ClergyTitleStatusTypeDSE.clergyId)),      a!qyerySelection(columns: a!queryColumn(cons!TOS_CMS_VW_ClergyTitleStatusTypeDSE.clergyfullname))    },    pagingInfo: a!pagingInfo(      startIndex: 1,      batchSize: 500,      sort: a!sortInfo(        field: cons!TOS_CMS_VW_Cle

DB view associated with CDT but don't have primary Key. We used DB View in a!ExportDataStoreEntityToExcel to extract data(20k Records) into Excel File and getting an timeout Error. Is there any way to apply Composite Key for few columns on CDT to extract data to Excel without errors ? In Appian Best Practices mentioned that there is a way to apply composite key but no example. If anyone knows the solution please replay here. Thank you.

I'm looking for suggestions for an Authorized Use Policy for individuals granted admin permissions in our Appian site. 

Hello Community,the more I am working on bigger scale projects with multiple devlopers, I am thinking about a kind of code merging functionality.Currently we have an "overwrite" principle. If i did changes to that interface/expression rule etc and press save then all changes previously done are overwritten. So if person a and person b are working on the same interface, the last one who saves "wins" and the changes of the earlier saver are essentially gone.Does anyone has insights if something in this direction is planned?I can see that difficult for records, decision tables or process models. But for interfaces and expression rules, it should be possible in my mind.Perhaps my idea is totally off the chart :)I am open to your opinions on that. kind regards form Hamburg Germany, Richard

HI I am fetching data from appian report. I have applied filter also so it won't fetch all the data everytime. but for the very first time it has to fetch everything  from the reocrd and then store in database. Now just to be on safer side I want to fetch the data in batches and then want to consume it.I am doing it with the following way a!localVariables( local!latestDate: cast( typeof(now()), index( rule!MO_GetLatestAuditDetails().data , "endTime" , now()-60) ), local!processModelUuids: rule!MO_GetAllProcessModels().processModelUuid, local!totalCount: index( rule!NEW_MO_ExtractProcessMetricsFromPortalReport( batchSize: 1, startIndex: 1, date: local!latestDate, processModelUuids: local!processModelUuids ), "totalCount", 0 ), local!numberOfIterations: = fn!ceiling(local!totalCount / ri!batchSize), local!listOfIntegers: = enumerate(local!numberOfIterations), a!forEach( items: local!listOfIntegers, expression: rule!NEW_MO_ExtractProcessMetricsFromPortal