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shahidsalamk0001
May 23, 2025
Question

How to Create a Dynamic Grid with Month-Year Columns Based on Date Range selection in Appian?

  • May 23, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 0 views

Hi Community,

I’m working on a requirement where I need to create dynamic columns in read-only grid in Appian and would appreciate some guidance.

Problem Statement:

I have a database table with the following columns:

  • ActivityName

  • ForecastDate (Date field)

  • ForecastAmount (Decimal)

Requirement:

I want to display a grid where:

  • Each row represents an ActivityName.

  • Columns dynamically represent Month-Year values (like Jan-2025, Feb-2025, etc.), based on the date range selected from interface.

  • Each cell should show the corresponding ForecastAmount for that activity and month, if available.

So the table should “pivot” the data such that ForecastDate drives the column structure dynamically.

Note: Any Date range between 2020 to 2030 can be selected and searched.

Questions:

  1. What’s the best approach to dynamically generate these month-year columns in an Appian interface?

  2. Should I preprocess the data in an expression rule or CDT before passing it to the grid?

  3. Any examples, ideas, or plug-ins that might help achieve this?

Any help or guidance would be highly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

3 replies

stefanhelzle0001
stefanhelzle0001
May 23, 2025

If you plan to use a normal read only grid, you can create any number of columns dynamically. 

My approach to such tasks is, to first build a small prototype, assuring myself that I understand the challenge and I have solutions to all the tiny problems making up the whole thing.

E.g. to get the dynamic list of months, you can use code like this:

a!localVariables(
  local!start: today(),
  local!end: date(2026, 11, 15),
  local!numMonths: (12 * year(local!end) + month(local!end)) - (12 * year(local!start) + month(local!start)),
  local!months: a!forEach(
    items: enumerate(local!numMonths),
    expression: a!addDateTime(
      startDateTime: local!start,
      months: fv!item
    )
  ),
  local!months
)

S
shahidsalamk0001Author
May 23, 2025

Hi [mention:a11f77a729fb4db2af76b09948583328:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] Thanks for the support so far!

I’ve made good progress — I’m able to:

[emoticon:599cc6d89e2145289084ee73d7cb364b] Generate all dates between the selected date range

[emoticon:599cc6d89e2145289084ee73d7cb364b] Display dynamic Month-Year columns in a grid

[emoticon:599cc6d89e2145289084ee73d7cb364b] Populate each cell with the correct ForecastAmount for its respective ActivityName and Month-Year, using an expression rule

However, I’m facing a performance issue now.

Since the dataset contains millions of records, and each cell in the Month-Year columns is calling an expression rule to get its value, the performance has become very slow.

My Question:

Is there a better or more efficient way to display these Month-Year forecast values without making individual rule calls for each cell?

Would it be better to:

  • Preprocess and pivot the data in a single rule before binding it to the grid?
  • Use a different design approach or plug-in to optimize performance?

Any suggestions or best practices for handling large datasets with dynamic grids would be really helpful.

stefanhelzle0001
stefanhelzle0001
May 24, 2025

You cannot display millions of anything in an Appian interface. This is not what Appian is made for.

But, as far as I understand, you do want to display only a small subset of it. Did you do an estimation of how much data you need to display?

Then, calling rule in a loop is no problem in general, while doing database queries in a loop is.

Did you consider using Process HQ to support this use case?

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