Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

Richard Michaelis — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 11:47:21 GMT

i was looking for online documentation :)
I know how to search for specific function at the documentation (appian.com). My question targeted towards fn! functions specifically. we have a list of several functions provided by appian. Are all of them available as fn!

functions?

my code would have looked something like this:

a!localVariables(
  local!trimmed: trim(ri!inputString),
  local!split: split(local!trimmed, " "),
  local!lower: lower(local!split),
  local!union: union(local!lower, local!lower),
  local!result: a!forEach(
    items: local!union,
    expression: if(
      fv!isFirst,
      concat(proper(fv!item), " "),
      concat(fv!item, " ")
    )
  ),
  concat(local!result)
)

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

AKASH T — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:39:33 GMT

Works well But the result will be displayed in lower case.

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

Stewart Burchell — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:36:19 GMT

There are a couple of resources I typically use:

In the expression designer interface you can access this list as follows:

There is also online documentation:

https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/21.1/Appian_Functions.html

(if you're not on 21.1 then you can navigate to https://docs.appian.com/ and then choose your version)

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

baji mekala — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:33:52 GMT

Hi AKASH T,

can you try this one

a!localVariables(
local!string:union(split(lower("Hello hello Hello there there past pastures")," "),split(lower("Hello hello Hello there there past pastures")," ")),
substitute(tostring(local!string),";"," ")
)

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

Richard Michaelis — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:30:56 GMT

hi stewart, is there an guide for fn! functions somewhere ? not all functions are available as fn! but is there any simple rule like all functions without a! or a page to explain them.
Just curious....

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

Stewart Burchell — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:26:51 GMT

There maybe more elegant ways, but something like this:

a!localVariables(
  local!trimmed: fn!trim(ri!inputString),
  local!split: fn!split(local!trimmed, " "),
  local!lower: fn!lower(local!split),
  local!union: fn!union(local!lower, local!lower),
  local!result: a!forEach(
    items: local!union,
    expression: if(
      fv!isFirst,
      concat(fn!proper(fv!item), " "),
      concat(fv!item, " ")
    )
  ),
  fv!concat(local!result)
)

Notes:

fn!trim() removes all unnecessary spaces (in case you have more than one space between the individual strings)
fn!split() breaks up the input strings into an array so they can be processed independently
fn!lower() makes all of the strings into lower case so that, for example, all "Hello" items are the same
fn!union() removes duplicate strings from the array
the a!forEach() allows us to treat the very first item in the array differently from the others, so we can use fn!proper() to capitalize the first letter for just the first string. For all items we add single space so that...
...we can then concatenate all of the items in the array to a single output string

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

AKASH T — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:26:49 GMT

Union will return
Hello hello there past pastures

But the result should be Hello there past pastures

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

Richard Michaelis — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:23:39 GMT

good approach. perhaps user lower() or proper() in combination with the split results to avoid "hello" and "Hello" treated as different values.

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

Harsha Sharma — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:23:01 GMT

you can first do split() on spaces and then take union() of the split array to filter out repeated strings. Lastly concat the result with spaces in between.

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

Stefan Helzle — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:18:50 GMT

You use split() to turn it into a list and union() to remove duplicates.

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

Richard Michaelis — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:14:03 GMT

in any case there is no "simple" method or function to archive that.
1.) You need to cut it into pieces (word for word)
2.) compare the different values to each other
3.) remove the values you don't want to have.

Spontanously I would suggest an expression with extract(), search() perhaps cleanwith()
Sorry no final solution for that issue on hand.
-> docs.appian.com/.../Appian_Functions.html

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

AKASH T — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:03:11 GMT

single string

RE: Remove the duplicate values from a text rule input?

Richard Michaelis — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 10:02:33 GMT

is that an array of string values or a single string?