Plans to add One to Many support to Branching?
I've got an FTP transfer ("export") that contains child records and needs to be processed downstream as a one to many. Branching doesn't appear to have a way to support one to many scenarios and I'm wondering;
- Am I wrong? Is there a way?
- Assuming I'm not wrong, are there any plans to add support anytime soon?
Regards,
Steve
0
Comments
We do not currently support the ability to do branching at a child record level (i.e. where different children within the same parent record go down different branches). Is this what you need?
I am curious about your use case. Do you need to process the parent records first in your flow (i.e. at the parent level), and then process the child records (where different child records go down different branches), and then do you need to process the combined parent record again after this? Depending on if you need all of this, there might be a way to accomplish what you want via multiple flows and JavaScript hooks.
Hey Scott,
This particular use case is X12 997 (functional acknowledgment) with multiple transaction sets as children. So I may have a 997 that is acknowledging a couple 940s and an 856, for example.
My flow needs to:
No need to process the parent before or after, I could move the 997 control number (currently in the parent) into the array of child transactions. My current plan is to setup two imports configured as one to many (SO and PO) and utilize input filters.
After thinking more about how branching would need to work, I do see why it's not supported and how differently the flow would need to run. This also makes me think it could be a useful feature to have the ability to "Make children the primary data set" (I don't know what to call it) but basically push the child records through the flow as first-class records. Just thinking out loud...
I'm definitely interested in any other ideas you may have for my use case? The only other option I could think of was to call an IIO API/flow in a one to many HTTP import, but I've not much experience with that stuff yet.
I def like the idea of bringing the "One to many" concept into the source exports somewhere, and then also having the option to include fields from the parent record in the child records, and then the child records become the primary record for the entire flow, etc... I will pass this along to our PM team.
My recommendation for now is to use a preSavePage hook on the source export to do the above using JavaScript. The preSavePage hook allows you to turn 1 record into any number of records, and then the records you return in your hook will be the primary records for the flow, and you can also transform each child record to include data from the parent, etc...
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