Is there any way to search all our constants for constants with a particular value contained in their list of values?
Our options are By name/description, UUID or UI, or by expression.
None search the values of our constants.
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Sadly no.
Back when "by expression" searching was introduced, I had a fleeting moment of hope that it would search constant values too (since otherwise it has nothing to do with constants), but alas.
You could always file for a product enhancement with Appian, I suppose.
I normally use by expression for this kind of use case and hopefully, it's something unique enough that you will find it.
Similarly, I usually try to include descriptions that mirror what the constant contains (if/when possible), for this reason. Easily done for plaintext, IDs, process model (names), etc.
True, I did assume that you copied the value in the description.
But search by expression works on the contents of expression rules. Guess that could be an argument for using expression rules in lieu of constants.
I follow this practice as well.
Mathieu Drouin said:But search by expression works on the contents of expression rules. Guess that could be an argument for using expression rules in lieu of constants.
It's also a good argument for why it should work for contents of constants, lol. The one time I've been severely hampered by this lack is when sifting through the hundreds of constants created by my original dev team [which I was not a member of] pointing to DB IDs, and for which they hadn't followed the practice of putting anything meaningful at all into the descriptions.
It's not nice but you could export your constants in a patch and then search the XML objects for the value you're looking for using Notepad++ or similar.
You’re absolutely right—searching for constants based on their values would be a really useful feature, especially for optimizing workflows. It’s surprising that there isn’t an option to do this directly.