Interface - Activity Chaining Limit

RE: Interface - Activity Chaining Limit

Mathieu Drouin — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 10:25:13 GMT

This is not easily doable within Appian.

You could have tried using MS Graph API batch requests but Appian itself does not support downloading multiple files. The only viable approach (within Appian) is Mike Schmitt 's approach.

Alternatively, you could have tried leveraging MS Flow or Azure Functions to create a zip file containing all the files server side. But even then, I highly suspect that call is async so you wouldn't be able to chain it anyways.

RE: Interface - Activity Chaining Limit

Mike Schmitt — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 15:50:32 GMT

[quote userid="276711" url="~/discussions/f/general/37750/interface---activity-chaining-limit/141812"]How would this option integrate within a given interface?[/quote]

You can call a!queryProcessAnalytics() from any user-interactable component on an interface, like the saveInto of a button or link. QPA consumes a reference to the report in question (you'd create the process report then a constant pointing to it, then pass the constant into QPA on your form), and you'd filter by the process instance ID to get the values from the correct instance.

RE: Interface - Activity Chaining Limit

louisg165114 — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 15:25:05 GMT

I see, I have very limited experience with reports. How would this option integrate within a given interface?

RE: Interface - Activity Chaining Limit

Mike Schmitt — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 15:05:29 GMT

[quote userid="276711" url="~/discussions/f/general/37750/interface---activity-chaining-limit/141810"]Is there a way to download multiple documents from SharePoint [/quote]

I'm unclear, i haven't gotten a chance yet to get my hands into Sharepoint integrations sadly.

In case you're still desperate to do this on the original task - it gets a bit more tricky but should be doable, provided you're OK with some extra clicks. What you can do here is build a custom process report that adds the final generated zipped document ID as a data column. When calling the initial process, pass back not only the zip file ID (for times when chaining is allowed to complete) but also the process instance ID, to a new local variable. When you get a process ID but no zip file ID, show the user a "refresh" button / icon of some sort - pressing this can run a Query Process Analytics call on the report given the process instance ID, and when the zip is done being generated, you can pass its value into the desired local variable (at which point you switch over to the "here's your downloadable document" configuration you already have).

RE: Interface - Activity Chaining Limit

louisg165114 — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 15:01:02 GMT

Our current application does not make use of tasks and we do not wish to start doing so.

From what I can tell, it seems like the SharePoint integration to download a document can only handle one document at a time. I initially thought about going around this this by using an expression rule but this does not seem to work as I cannot seem to call the integration from an expression rule.

Is there a way to download multiple documents from SharePoint on Appian using a single integration/a single node within a process?

RE: Interface - Activity Chaining Limit

Mike Schmitt — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 14:44:34 GMT

Any reason you can't add a separate task that gets assigned to the launching user after all the file processing is completed? Using the trick where you pass the assembled document back to the original interface is good and all, but it does have reasonable limits which it sounds like you're hitting now.