Nested CDTs vs Non Nested CDTs

Hi everyone,

I am trying to understand in terms of Appian's best practice as to which way to go when creating CDTs and maintaining their relationships, and the use of nested CDTs.  Is it recommended to use nested CDTs per best practice, or is it better to stay away from that?  From my understanding, it's easier and better to create the tables in the database first then create CDTs from db where the relationship is maintained strictly in db and not necessarily in Appian.  Then there is the other way, in which the cdts are created in Appian, with the relationships maintained through the use of Nested CDTs for the foreign key etc..  Is it a matter of preference to create the CDTs from db vs the other way with nested CDTs, or is it Appian recommended? 

Any thoughts on this?

Regards,

Jerry

  Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible

Parents
  • Hi,
    As per Appian, if there is no other way, they suggest to go ahead with 1 level of nested CDT and nested CDT's are not a best practice and below are some points:
    1. We need to invest time in extra amount of coding due to nested CDTS's and also it will be a challenging task during process instance debugging.
    2. In some instances, we wish you fetch only data from parent table, in such case data from child table will also be fetched due to one-many relationships. Also, during data conversions, from JSON and vice versa, the complexity will be increased.
    3. Though in above scenarios there will not be a necessity of view creation but unnecessary complexity is increased. Hence, the best way is to go with normal CDT and create views accordingly which will accelerate the performance as well.

    Thanks.
Reply
  • Hi,
    As per Appian, if there is no other way, they suggest to go ahead with 1 level of nested CDT and nested CDT's are not a best practice and below are some points:
    1. We need to invest time in extra amount of coding due to nested CDTS's and also it will be a challenging task during process instance debugging.
    2. In some instances, we wish you fetch only data from parent table, in such case data from child table will also be fetched due to one-many relationships. Also, during data conversions, from JSON and vice versa, the complexity will be increased.
    3. Though in above scenarios there will not be a necessity of view creation but unnecessary complexity is increased. Hence, the best way is to go with normal CDT and create views accordingly which will accelerate the performance as well.

    Thanks.
Children
No Data