New! Generic Data Table Filter Utility Component published to Digital Exchange!

[andymenon]

Hello Blue Prism Community,

As most of us know, we have several out of the box Collection manipulation actions available in Blue Prism. That said, almost every collection operation requires us to output the results into a collection. And if we perform several operations on a collection using two or more of these Collection manipulation activities, then we need to output results to one collection or the other on every step. 

What if you want to perform multiple filter operations on your collection before you output the results?  If so you may want to check out the latest component I published to the Digital Exchange here.

If you have a relatively wide collection with several types of fields, then you can query this collection by writing filter conditions that will allow you to do several things in a single step such as:

1. Combine several conditions using the AND and OR operators
2. Query columns containing spaces or special characters in their names
3. Perform inline data conversions when specifying filter criteria
4. Query Date-like columns to extract data based on date ranges
5. Retrieve only the filtered data count without having to fetch the filtered data
6. Return all columns or just a subset of columns of the original data set
7. Use the DISTINCT operator to return a set of distinct filtered rows
8. Sort results in a specific order using the ASC and DESC operators

The companion documentation comes with at least one example that demonstrates the capabilities listed above. Check it out! And I'm hoping this helps you in your projects!

Cheers!

------------------------------
Prashanth (Andy) Menon
------------------------------

[LeonardoSQueiroz]

Hello,

Very cool, thanks for sharing, this will help me with developments.

Regards,

------------------------------
Leonardo Soares
RPA Developer Tech Leader
Bridge Consulting
América/Brazil
------------------------------

[andymenon]

Thank you for the feedback Leonardo! I'm glad that it will help you! 

-Regards,

------------------------------
Prashanth (Andy) Menon
------------------------------

[abuislam]

Exciting to see this new utility! It really simplifies collection operations in Blue Prism. The ability to filter multiple conditions in one step will save a lot of time. I can’t wait to try it out! Thanks for sharing with the community! And if you need a little break while working, check out some funny puns https://allfunnypuns.com/ for a good laugh!

[david.l.morris]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your work on this. I have a few pieces of feedback/questions.

1. Why is it set to default as "Exclusive" mode? I see it is noted in the DX asset details, but why do this when it should be Background? Other utilities have begun to get corrected, so why wouldn't this get set correctly from the start?

2. Blue Prism creates separate copies of collections when done like this. I think it'd be a good improvement for your object if you made global, reused collections. I know there are only 3 actions in this object, so it isn't as big of a deal here. But still this object could essentially have between 3 and 5 times as much data being held in memory compared to what it really needs to do. Two of the actions use a different collection for the incoming and outgoing collections, but there's no real benefit to doing this. From what I can tell, you could put a single global collection into this object and have that be the only collection used across it and this would greatly minimize the amount of memory being held up in this object.

3. The name of the utility itself doesn't match the standard that Blue Prism has been using for years which is to put "Utility - " at the beginning of the name. It is also using the term "Data Table" which no one is going to search for if it were in a Blue Prism environment. Blue Prism developers are used to the word Collection. A better name for this object would be "Utility - Collection Filtering".

4. I don't think it's a problem at all to have extra objects, so this isn't a big deal, but I want to mention it. Are you intending to expand the functionality with more actions? The fact that it is only 3 makes me wonder why this isn't included in Utility - Collection Manipulation. I suppose the reason may be to keep from adding more actions to it.

5. Another small question here. Why not write this in C#? Even the Initialise page's description says it uses C# RowFilter syntax.

[david.l.morris]

@abuislam Can you confirm you are not a bot?

[andymenon]

LOL! No, I am not! 🙂

[andymenon]

Hello David,
I usually set these to background. I may have missed it on this one. Thanks for pointing that out. 

On the naming convention, my thought was not to confuse the users ability from distinguishing core Blue Prism Collection utilities from this one. At least the name would be helpful reminder that they are using a VBO that is not part of Blue Prism core VBOs collection.

Thanks

I've since changed to C# on the code I write. If I do contribute any future VBOs then I they would likely use C#.

[david.l.morris]

@andymenon I said the bot thing to abuislam. Your two usernames both start with 'a' and are similar length so I'm assuming that's why you thought I was saying that to you. I know you're not a bot. 🤭 The other person on the other hand I believe may be, based on their non-human-like wording plus the random plug for a website about puns. 🤣

As for the feedback I gave, while I do still think the same things, I actually didn't realize until after I posted that you hadn't just made your original post. Someone necro'd it, and I just didn't check the original post's datetime haha.

[andymenon]

Hi @david.l.morris ,

I think I still owe you explanation on this point:

5. Another small question here. Why not write this in C#? Even the Initialise page's description says it uses C# RowFilter syntax.

The Syntax that is specified when filtering a collection follows the C# DataView RowFilter syntax as provided by the .NET framework. This syntax is used regardless of whether the VBO code in itself is written using VB.NET or C#. 

The syntax that .NET framework specifies when creating DataView filters on Data Table follows the C# syntax.  The documentation that accompanies this VBO has several examples of how to use this syntax with this DX component. 

Thanks,

Andy