saving array into the field of an array cdt

RE: saving array into the field of an array cdt

Mike Schmitt — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 01:33:06 GMT

if the CDT array is starting out empty, you will need to do something to instantiate its size, regardless of what else you do I think. I mean, you could always manually construct a JSON string that would translate into roughly your CDT dictionary and then save that result back into the CDT, but I don't see that significantly deviating from the construct of looping over a constructor.

Note, I think you don't have to actually call the "type!" constructor itself for each item in the loop - you would need only set the property that agrees with the CDT property you want; the rest would be taken care of by the typecasting that happens automatically during the save. If that's still not sufficient, then I'm kinda out of ideas.

RE: saving array into the field of an array cdt

Jose H. — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:58:47 GMT

Hey Mike, thanks for the reply. I know your solution would work in the case that ri!test already has values in it. But in my case the array is empty.

I know I could have gone the route of looping through a list, creating a type constructor and appending to my ri!test

save(ri!test, foreach(items: list of values, expression: append(ri!test, type constructor with values)). However, for some weird requirement, I'm not allowed to do that, which is why I was trying to do it that other way.

RE: saving array into the field of an array cdt

Mike Schmitt — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:48:20 GMT

I'm a little unclear on some assumptions you're making here - for example where does the "items: {1, 2}" list come from?

What you have already written will save, over the entire array of ri!test, a list of "hey" text values for every "item" you iterate over. Apparently this saves this into each member of the array. I wouldn't have been sure without testing, but I'm not terribly surprised - Appian does certain array/set operations a bit unintuitively sometimes.

So instead, if we assume that your ri!test is starting with 2 members of the array and you want to save the value "hey" into both username fields, then you would so something more like

saveInto: {
  a!forEach(
    ri!test,
    a!save(
      fv!item.user_name,
      "hey " & fv!index  /* this would make the user_name populate with "hey 1", "hey 2", etc */
    )
  )
}