Nested Loops and API calls

[jernejp]

Hi,

I'm building an application to add employee activities to our ERP, and then assign attendees to those activities.

First I have to make a call to our ERP to add an activity, which then returns the Activity ID from ERP. Then using that, I'm supposed to add all of the attendees to the activity.

Theres multiple activities that can have multiple attendees.

During the process, I'm saving all of the Activities to a table in my database, and Attendees to another table (and they're connected by activity_id field in Attendees table.

Then I make a call to get AllActivities into a collection to loop through.

This is what I currently have:

ForAll(
    AllActivities;
    Collect(
        AddedActivity;
        'My API'.AddActivitiesToBusinessPartner(
            {
                /* API CALL HERE */
            }
        )
    )
)

My database schema is as follows, and below is the collection that gets created:

What I can't figure out is: how would I go about nesting another ForAll loop in there, that would make the other API call to add attendees to the activity?

So basically:

1. add activity
2. get ID from the ERP
3. loop trough database and see if there's attendees
4. add attendees to ERP

[v-xida-msft]

Hi @jernejp ,

Do you want to use the AddedActivity (rather than AllActivities) within yout second loop?

Based on the needs that you mentioned, I afraid that a triple nested loop could not achieve your needs. Please consider take a try with above solution I provided.

On your side, you could consider create a ForAll loop firstly to retrieve all added activities using the following formula:

ForAll(
    AllActivities;
    Collect(
        AddedActivity;
        'MyApi'.AddActivitiesToBusinessPartner(
            {
	    }
        )
    )
)

Then add another ForAll loop to go through the all attendees that attended the activity, and add them to above retrieved added activities using following formula:

ForAll(
         AddedActivity,
         ForAll(
                Filter(
                        '[dbo].[attendees]';
                        activity_id = AddedActivity[@id]
                );
                'MyApi'.AddAttendantsToAnExistingActivity(
                {
                  ....
                }
              )
         )
)

So your whole formula should look like below:

ForAll(                   /* <-- Seperated ForAll Loop */
    AllActivities;
    Collect(
        AddedActivity;
        'MyApi'.AddActivitiesToBusinessPartner(
            {
	    }
        )
    )
);;
ForAll(                          /* <-- Nested ForAll Loop */
         AddedActivity;
         ForAll(
                Filter(
                        '[dbo].[attendees]';
                        activity_id = AddedActivity[@id]
                );
                'MyApi'.AddAttendantsToAnExistingActivity(
                {
                  ....
                }
              )
         )
)

Please take a try with above solution, check if the issue is solved.

Best regards,

[jernejp]

Hi @v-xida-msft 

The problem is, that in my AllActivities, the ID of activity would be (for example) 60 (as it's taken from my database), but from ERP, the response is an id of (for example) 4000231. So If I understand correctly, the second (nested) loop wouldn't work, because 'activity_id' is not the same as AddedActivity[@id].

Could I add a column to AddedActivity in the first loop, and add AllActivities[@id] to it? How would I go about that? I think if I can add the database's ID of activity to AddedActivity, then the second loop would be finished, right?
Hope I'm making sense

[v-xida-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @jernejp ,

Yeah, you are right. I have made a test on my side, please consider take a try with the following formula:

ForAll(                   /* <-- Seperated ForAll Loop */
    AllActivities;
    Collect(
        AddedActivity;
        {
           ActivityID: AllActivities[@id],                /* <-- add a column to store the id value from the AllActivities */
           ResponseRecord: 'MyApi'.AddActivitiesToBusinessPartner( { ... } )
        }
    )
);;
ForAll(                          /* <-- Nested ForAll Loop */
         AddedActivity;
         ForAll(
                Filter(
                        '[dbo].[attendees]';
                        activity_id = AddedActivity[@ActivityID]
                );
                'MyApi'.AddAttendantsToAnExistingActivity(
                {
                  ....
                }
              )
         )
)

Please consider take a try with above formula, check if it could help in your scenario.

Best regards,

[jernejp]

Oh my god, THANK YOU SO MUCH! IT WORKS!

[jernejp]

[EDIT] Removed the post, as it was working. The problem was with my internet connection apparently.