transient

Could you clarify what you mean by this?

Hi [mention:cb55bee857194035a126a4b134ac0e8f:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05],

Transient annotation in an XSD makes the field to be ignored when verifying it against the datastore. It is most commonly used to store the data temporarily in a process.

An example use case is this thread that was initiated by you -https://community.appian.com/discussions/f/process/21429/transient-value-is-not-getting-saved-after-the-process-model-is-debugged. Here you have used the transient value to temporarily store the index reference until writing the actual data to the database. 

- Could you please throw some light into what you mean by the other approach?

Note: If a transient value is used in a CDT, then while querying from that particular table, we should be using selection columns in the query entity to avoid an error.

community.appian.com/.../kb-1404-queryentity-fails-when-an-xsd-has-a-field-marked-as-transient