How do I save multiple selections in a checkboxField? I tried displaying the cho

judym598

Certified Senior Developer

over 9 years ago

How do I save multiple selections in a checkboxField? I tried displaying the choiceValues using a rule (e.g., rule!psh_getAllFruits) that pulled data from a cdt (PSH_Fruits). The CDT is associated with a table (pshfruits) that has 2 columns: id (auto-generated integer) and fruitType (text). I wanted to store the selected id(s) in a field in another CDT (specifically newList_cdt.fruitType). I originally had 'fruit' as an integer. When that didn't work, I decided to change my approach to displaying the choiceValues using a constant (cons!PSH_FRUITS) and using a checkboxFieldByIndex; couldn't get that to work, so I went with the following and changed the data type of the column in the table (and CDT for this item) to 'text'. It works as long as I only select one item. (I actually have 8 choices so I'd really prefer to pull the choiceValues from a CDT - lookup table). I cannot get it to save or display multiple selections. At one point...

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0 narasimhaadityac
A Score Level 2
over 9 years ago

@jack, agreed, ideally, if we are having the reference data updates, we will not be removing the old reference ids, as they might be referenced once, so generally what we do is to have a active_in flag which will provide the details related to the validity of the choice value. please refer to - /search?q=OriginalPostID-183051
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0 judym598
Certified Senior Developer
over 9 years ago

Thank you both for your suggestions and all the info provided. I would much rather pull the choiceValues from a lookup table (CDT). Can you confirm for me that the only way to capture multiple selections would be to use a nested CDT?
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0 jackm829
A Score Level 3
over 9 years ago

@nara, Your code previously suggested splitting the string and comparing to: choiceValues: {"B", "A", "P", "G"}. I think this approach would have the drawback I describe (name changes of "B" to "BN" and such). However, if you are suggesting storing the ID in a delimited fashion (i.e. 1;2;3;4), then yes I think that would be immune to name changes. In this case, we likely would not be able to use foreign keys, and this may have some effect on querying, though using various query filters there may be workarounds.
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0 jackm829
A Score Level 3
over 9 years ago

Personally, I would avoid nested CDTs, but that's just me.
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0 narasimhaadityac
A Score Level 2
over 9 years ago

@judy, I second Jack on nested CDT's, nested CDT's are performance intrinsic and Appian as well recommends to avoid them. in the Appian health check they are found as memory consumption objects. as per my knowledge using Nested CDT's we can achieve. but its a trade off to decide to store in same table or go for nested CDTs.
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0 judym598
Certified Senior Developer
over 9 years ago

I could store the id (1, 2, 3, 4...vs a letter) which is how I had it originally (I actually changed the example to 'fruit' because the actual item was 'datatype' and didn't want to confuse the issue!). In any case - when I tested it using the 'split' approach, I got an error? If I can do it that way - any idea why I got the error I got?
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0 narasimhaadityac
A Score Level 2
over 9 years ago

@judy, in my example, ri!fruitType is Text (single and not multiple).
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0 narasimhaadityac
A Score Level 2
over 9 years ago

there is a space after the semicolon in split(ri!fruitType,"; ")
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0 judym598
Certified Senior Developer
over 9 years ago

Thank you @narasimhaadityac! That space after the semicolon is what was causing the error!
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