Create blank record type with all fields initialised

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

nathanp119 — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 21:36:49 GMT

Thanks. After the first few replies this is what I'd settled on too

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

nathanp119 — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 21:35:34 GMT

Marking this a the solution as it's seems that there is no way.

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

Jesse Knight — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 13:22:55 GMT

Given the rest of the conversation thus far, and based off of your context given, I think you're best off storing the record fields in an expression. If you're making a soft contract that the json schema will follow your data model field names, this should be fairly straightforward.

The reasons that storing record fields in an expression rule won't be as much of a headache:

The expression rule will show up as a dependent of the API, the record fields, and the overall record type
You can call tostring() on the field names to get the field name itself (not relationship names)
As a bonus, this decouples your app's data model from the JSON schema
- Loose coupling allows you to return different subsets of fields for JSON schema validation based upon complex business logic of the data itself (e.g. by a "type" or "status" field in the JSON) should you ever need to
- The clients of the API are agnostic to your refactoring efforts on the data model - calling tostring(<record>.<relationship>.<field>) returns <field>

It's not a good idea to put unnecessary data fabric calls on a high-frequency API (e.g. for the sake of a!keys() ). The data fabric can get overwhelmed fairly quickly if there are real-time record fields returned in the query or if the record type has even moderately complex row-level security. If this happens, the entire environment will slow down while the API's process.

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

nathanp119 — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 12:38:45 GMT

Thanks for letting me know. Makes sense as to why I couldn't find a reference to it

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

Mathieu Drouin — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 12:34:27 GMT

Actually that selectionFields function does exist, its new in 25.3. (which hasn't been released yet).

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

nathanp119 — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 04:27:02 GMT

Thanks for the option.I can't guarantee that there will be one row so will need another option.
And sorry for my assumption. I've just noticed that ChatGPT and the likes seems to include functions that don't exist in their code when it's generated.

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

Harsha Sharma — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 03:49:17 GMT

Yes Atleast one row data is the pre requisite for this. And in the code (that I wrote myself) only the record types and related record reference (line 3,6&9) is modified to hide the record I used. That needs to be replaced with respective record type that you are using!

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

nathanp119 — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 22:29:37 GMT

Thanks. From my understanding of that plugin (and please correct me if I'm wrong) I'd still need to store/manage the schema, which if I am going to do I might as well store manage the field names

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

nathanp119 — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 22:28:25 GMT

This solution will only work if there is data stored (and if I fix what appears to be the AI generated code). For initial requests when the table is empty this would fail

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

Stewart Burchell — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 13:53:32 GMT

If the requirement here is to meet the 'contract first' paradigm (where you validate incoming payloads as a prerequisite to dispatching for processing if valid or responding with HTTP 400 - bad data - if invalid), then I'd encourage you to use JSON Schema validation as this provides a declarative method for validating payloads. Cast or map your incoming message to JSON and then use the schema validation available in this plug-in to conduct your validations.

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

Harsha Sharma — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 13:33:27 GMT

If I understood the requirements correctly, the function a!keys() can help you dynamically get the fields from record. Using the output you can match the keys with payload keys. Here is a sample expression for reference.

a!localVariables(
  local!recordData: a!queryRecordType(
    recordType: recordType!recordName,
    pagingInfo: a!pagingInfo(1, 1),
    fields: a!selectionFields(
      allFieldsFromRecordType: recordType!recordName,
      includeRealTimeCustomFields: true(),
      includeExtraLongTextFields: true(),
      selectFields: recordtype!relatedRecordFields
    )
  ).data,
  a!keys(local!recordData[1])
)

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

Stefan Helzle — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 07:56:28 GMT

OK. Thanks.

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

nathanp119 — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 07:05:11 GMT

Validation of payload from external systems before writing the data, eg if payload from external system doesn't match the record type / CDT being written then return a 400.

With older apps that use CDTs, we can store the type #, then get the keys from a blank initialised CDT (using the cast method above) and compare it to the keys in the JSON payload.

With records, it seems we'd need store all the record field names to be able to compare them, which makes it more difficult to manage in the long run if fields change with code changes.

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

Stefan Helzle — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 06:33:41 GMT

Why is that important? What do you want to achieve?

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

Harsha Sharma — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 05:38:17 GMT

You are correct! To work with local variables of record type we need to reference record fields using reference everywhere needed.

[quote userid="13625" url="~/discussions/f/general/39558/create-blank-record-type-with-all-fields-initialised"]In this use case I won't know the field names to be able to use them. I only have the record type[/quote]

Typing in recordtype!recordName.fields.... is the only way to know the field names and use with local variables indexing.

I personally try to work as much as possible with rule inputs instead of local variables Or, call a reusable constructor rule instead of ad-hoc expressions wherever needed!

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

Shubham Aware — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 05:07:53 GMT

Got you!
There's no direct equivalent for Record Types. Unlike CDTs, you cannot initialize a record type with all fields set to null without knowing field names.

If you want to set fields explicitly, you must do it field-by-field like this:

recordType!Employee(
  name: "",
  age: null,
  email: ""
)

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

nathanp119 — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 05:03:14 GMT

This doesn't work. It simply returns a blank record type. None of the fields are initialsed

RE: Create blank record type with all fields initialised

Shubham Aware — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 05:01:27 GMT

Use the record type constructor with empty parentheses:

recordType!YourRecordType()

This creates a record instance with all fields set to null/default values, similar to cast() with CDTs.