saving dropdown

RE: saving dropdown

Stewart Burchell — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 08:44:04 GMT

What's the context here? The examples above don't use union, so I wonder why you're asking the question? Can you provide some more details about your specific scenario?

RE: saving dropdown

umaisak0002 — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 08:28:41 GMT

why used union for choice labels and choice values

RE: saving dropdown

davel001150 — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 17:59:03 GMT

Baby steps, each one of them verified to be working as intended, are key to getting complex things up and running .

RE: saving dropdown

Mike Schmitt — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 17:47:48 GMT

Agreed - and further, a common pattern i've been noticing more and more lately is that newer devs will try to handle these somewhat more complicated UI formulas, without really having a good understanding of what the logic is actually doing, and why. More learning and practice (and simplified example setups like the one you suggest) would go a long way into helping in most peoples' cases.

RE: saving dropdown

davel001150 — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 17:32:40 GMT

Perhaps for the sake of simplicity, we take a step back, and you simply try to implement a cascading dropdown with nothing else in a separate rule.

Create a test interface on your dev environment. (I find a very good practice is for all developers to have their own test folders for trying out things in Appian)

Try making a dropdown with 2 choices, "One" and "Two"

Try making another dropdown that either shows "One point One" and "One point Two" OR "Two point One" and "Two point Two", depending on the value of the top dropdown. Also, think about what you want the bottom dropdown to do when you haven't selected anything in the top dropdown.

Save the result of the top dropdown to an ri! and the result of the bottom dropdown to another ri!

When you get that working, apply what you've learned to the far more complex problem you have before you.

Good practice when you have anything troubling you to boil down whatever you're trying to accomplish as far down as you can boil it. This limits the possible sources of errors until you can get the simplest version working. Then gradually add complexity back, checking often to make sure it still works.

RE: saving dropdown

Mike Schmitt — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 17:23:37 GMT

What is the data type of ri!selectedTask? If it's not type cast to a CDT, then you will probably need to change the "value" line back to how you originally had it (the commented out portion of the code I last posted).

RE: saving dropdown

Siddharth Thiagarajan — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 17:21:25 GMT

it threw an error again

RE: saving dropdown

Mike Schmitt — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 16:51:12 GMT

Try this. BTW i think for the "value" of the second dropdown we can just directly access the ri property, as it likely won't have the issue of the property not existing (rule inputs are typecast to their CDT type, so the property will exist whether it's null or not).

if(
  ri!taskCode = cons!IC_TEXT_TASKCODE_RESERVE_NO_FOREWARD,
  {
    a!columnsLayout(
      columns: {
        a!columnLayout(
          contents: {
            a!dropdownField(
              label: "Pull Zone",
              value: local!pullZoneValues,
              choiceLabels: local!pullZoneList,
              choiceValues: local!pullZoneList,
              placeholderLabel: "Select a Value",
              saveInto: {
                a!save(local!pullZoneValues, save!value),
                a!save(
                  local!getLocnId,
                  rule!IC_QRY_getLocnidFromMSTLocationHeader(local!pullZoneValues)
                ),
                a!save(
                  ri!selectedTask.locnId,
                  null()
                )
              }
            )
          }
        ),
        a!columnLayout(
          contents: {
            a!dropdownField(
              label: "Location ID",
              value: /* property(ri!selectedTask, "locnId", null), */ ri!selectedTask.locnId,
              choiceLabels: union(local!getLocnId, local!getLocnId),
              choiceValues: union(local!getLocnId, local!getLocnId),
              disabled: isnull(local!pullZoneValues),
              placeholderLabel : "Select a Value",
              saveInto:a!save(
                ri!selectedTask.locnId,
                save!value
              )
            )
          }
        )
      }
    )
  },
  {}
)

(but, the important change I made is this:

)

RE: saving dropdown

Siddharth Thiagarajan — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 16:38:45 GMT

if(
      ri!taskCode = cons!IC_TEXT_TASKCODE_RESERVE_NO_FOREWARD,
      {
        a!columnsLayout(
          columns: {
            a!columnLayout(
              contents: {
                a!dropdownField(
                  label: "Pull Zone",
                  value: local!pullZoneValues,
                  choiceLabels: local!pullZoneList,
                  choiceValues: local!pullZoneList,
                  placeholderLabel: "Select a Value",
                  saveInto: {
                  a!save(local!pullZoneValues,save!value),
                  a!save(
                    local!getLocnId,
                    rule!IC_QRY_getLocnidFromMSTLocationHeader(local!pullZoneValues)
                  ) }
                    
                )
              }
            ),
            a!columnLayout(
              contents: {
                a!dropdownField(
                  label: "Location ID",
                  value:index(ri!selectedTask,"locnId",null),     
                  choiceLabels: union(local!getLocnId,local!getLocnId),
                  choiceValues:union(local!getLocnId,local!getLocnId),
                  disabled: isnull(local!pullZoneValues),
                  placeholderLabel : "Select a Value",
                  saveInto:a!save(
                    ri!selectedTask.locnId,
                    save!value
                  )
                 
                 
                )
              }
            )
          }
        )

      },
      {}
    )

This is the current status of the code. It would be really grateful if you modify saveinto and show on the first drop down

RE: saving dropdown

Mike Schmitt — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 16:27:57 GMT

So that's a different issue altogether - to handle that, you need to add a new save into the saveInto of the first dropdown, to save a blank value into the value of the second dropdown anytime it's changed. This is a fairly standard requirement when developing cascading dropdowns where the selections in one depend on the value chosen in a previous one.

RE: saving dropdown

Siddharth Thiagarajan — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 16:12:57 GMT

If I just use index. on the very fist user interaction, im able to select the pull zone and location ID but on the next instance if i try to select a different pull zone, I started to get an error. In order to avoid that error I used the if condition.

RE: saving dropdown

Mike Schmitt — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 15:57:22 GMT

I notice you've re-added the if() statement here for some reason -- so we're back to the original problem that your "isnull()" statement is checking the value of local!pullZone, which (at least in your earlier code example) never gets assigned a value. I think you may have meant to put local!pullZoneValues in that isnull(), because otherwise the second dropdown will never display any value.

RE: saving dropdown

Siddharth Thiagarajan — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 15:52:52 GMT

I cleared and edited like you said and tried to select the values from pull zone again. when I select the pull zone and pick a location ID. You can see that the value is stored in rule input for the location ID. But in the column field it disappears.

RE: saving dropdown

Mike Schmitt — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 15:44:15 GMT

That error isn't due to property - it would be the same if you switched back from "property" to "index" (they both work the same way); the reason you're seeing this error now is because, now that the if() statement is removed from the value (which was preventing the value from showing anything at all before), the dropdown is attempting to resolve the value "00009057" against the choice values, which as the error message states, does not contain that choice.

If you edit the value of ri!selectedTask and clear out the value of "locnId", the error will probably go away.

RE: saving dropdown

Siddharth Thiagarajan — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 15:27:23 GMT

This is the error I get when i use property

RE: saving dropdown

Mike Schmitt — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 14:23:18 GMT

Did you understand and implement the fix for the main issue I pointed out above?
If so, is it still not working?
Can you post (in a new comment) the current state of your code?

RE: saving dropdown

Siddharth Thiagarajan — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 14:19:27 GMT

I did change. Once after making the change it started to threw error. Thats why I reverted.

RE: saving dropdown

Mike Schmitt — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 20:16:21 GMT

In your revised code I don't see any sign of you trying my original suggested change - i.e. you're still only showing a value in the "Location ID" column when local!pullZone is not null, but nowhere else in your posted code is saving a value into local!pullZone, so we would not expect the dropdown to show a value even if you try to set one.

Instead what I was asking for you to try should look more like this:

RE: saving dropdown

Mike Schmitt — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 20:01:20 GMT

property() works the same way as index() -- the real thrust of my change was that i removed the if() statement you had it enclosed in.

(i put in property() instead of index() in my change, because I prefer using property() when referring to a cdt property, just for code readability).

RE: saving dropdown

Siddharth Thiagarajan — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 19:53:33 GMT

I tried implementing the property syntax. There is no change though. I've modified the question bit more, can you please look at it and let me know.

RE: saving dropdown

Siddharth Thiagarajan — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 19:37:20 GMT

Thanks a lot for the info. Let me try implementing your solution and see.

RE: saving dropdown

Mike Schmitt — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 19:34:26 GMT

As a side note - posting code like this looks a lot better (and retains its formatting/indentation better) if you do it within a code box; Insert -> Insert Code. For people reading these to help troubleshoot, that makes code a lot easier to read, too.

RE: saving dropdown

Mike Schmitt — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 19:32:22 GMT

Replace the value parameter of the second dropdown with this and see what happens:

value: property(ri!selectedTask,"locnId",null),

In general what you have above is forcing the second dropdown to not show its value when local!pullZone is blank, however nothing from either dropdown that you've shown causes any value to be saved into local!pullzone. Maybe the if() statement should have been checking for the nullness of local!pullZoneValues instead, but I can't tell for sure based only on what you've provided.