Using the Mapping EditorLast Updated: 12/02/2015 Introduced in Verision: 2.0 |
Each step in your application’s flow accepts a data input and returns a data output for use in the next step. For some steps, multiple sources of data may be available to use as inputs. Use the Mapping Editor to select which data source to use as the input for a selected step in your flow, as well as define how those inputs should be used before proceeding to the next step.
To access the Mapping Editor, select a step in the Flow Designer workspace, then click the Show Mapping Editor link in the Properties panel.
Example
In the example, we will be working with the flow, Implements Account Rule.
In Implements Account Rule, the step ForEach Step 1 should accept an array of accounts that were generated in preceding steps. To ensure that this is the case, select ForEach Step 1 in the workspace. In the Properties panel, click the link Show Mapping Editor.
On the left side of the screen, we see a pane for mapping our data inputs. On the right, we see a pane for mapping our data outputs. Since we don’t want to rename or transform our data before passing it to the next step, we will leave the data outputs alone and focus exclusively on our inputs.
On the left side of the input mappings pane, we can see a list of four possible sources, along with their internal parameters, should we choose to expand them. On the right side of the input mappings pane, we can see an empty collection object, the use of which is “Unknown”. This means that our application knows that ForEach Step 1 should expect a collection of data as its input, but it does not yet know what that data is or how it should be used.
To tell our application which data source will be used as the input for ForEach Step 1, we can drag a connection from our intended source to the empty collection. In ForEach Step 1, we want to pass our array of accounts along to some filters that will remove records which don’t match our criteria of: Active, Can use portal, and belongs to yahoo.com domain. We will ignore the three irrelevant data sources – Flow Data, CreateorCopyData1 and Account and use GetAll1_Output as our input by selecting it and click-dragging its anchor to the empty collection. Once the connection is made, we will see the empty collection update with the path GetAll1_Output and a default usage of Select Value.
We have just assigned the Accounts array as the input for ForEach Step 1. Now, our flow knows that it should expect input to come in the form we’ve already determined for the Account array, and its internal path is GetAll1_Output. If we want, we can also determine how exactly ForEach Step 1 handles this data. We want the data to remain unchanged going to the next step, so we will leave its mapping type as Select Value, but if our flow required, we could use the data differently by treating it as a constant, exposing its input, nullifying it, ignoring it, or any one of the other options available for this input collection.