Hello Everyone, Does anyone know of a way to get the a!fromJson function t

@jpheh One way I would generally prefer to do it is casting. Let's take the example which is quoted by you and this is how we can work around it:

load(
local!dict: {Values: {1, 2, 3}},
length(cast(101,local!dict.Values))
)

To the best of my knowledge, the structure {Values: {1, 2, 3}} is a custom structure created on-the-fly, and it is similar to label-value pairs. When it comes to CDT, we designate a field in CDT to hold particular type of data (such as Integer, Text, Text Multiple etc) at time of its creation. But in case of these Label Value pairs, they are just dictionaries that will store data in 'Any Type' format as we don't designate the data type of them. So we should cast the data to a desired data type prior to using the values in them.

@jpheh as suggested by @sikhivahans we might need to convert the column to desired type before any evaluation. Please find in the modified code for the example you provided.
load(
local!dict: {Values: {1, 2, 3}},
length(apply(fn!tointeger,local!dict.Values))
)

To be more dynamic on datatypes you could use the reduce() function and a simple rule that just increments an integer by one.

load(
local!dict: {Values: {1, 2, 3, 4, "a", 1.5}},
reduce(rule!CountItemsForReduceFunction, 0, local!dict.Values)
)

CountItemsForReduceFunction(value (integer), item (any)):
=ri!value + 1

Thanks Kathikn, your suggestion of using the apply even though the key/value pair in the dictionary is listed as a single value instead of an array appears to work.

For anyone searching in the future:
load(
local!dict: {Values: {1, 2, 3}},
length(apply(fn!tointeger,local!dict.Values))
)
will return an array of length 1 which is consistent with the behavior in my original post. However removing the length returns an array as I had originally expected.

Stefan, thanks for the suggestion however I'm actually looking for a more general solution. The use case I provided was a simplified example and was meant to demonstrate that even though I'm creating a dictionary where the value of the key is an array Appian is still reading it as a single value.

Sure, this is one of the edge cases where data type handling in Appian is not very consistent. Just try not(null) and if(null, 1, 0).

ha, I completely agree. I have a whole list of appian-isms myself but this is the first time I've had to do anything even remotely complex with dictionaries/JSON.

Hi jpheh,
You can use the split() function to get the array returned from the single valued string. For example -
load(
local!dict: {Values: {1, 2, 3}},
length(split(local!dict.Values,";"))
)