Managing Records

You must be the Data Table owner to access the Data Table records. You are not allowed to manage the records in Data Tables that belong to your sub accounts. Data Table records are structured as a collection of fields with values. One of the fields is designated as the Key Field which is defined when the Data Table is created. See Managing Data Tables for more information regarding the Key Field. A design feature of Data Tables is that each record can have a different number of fields and/or field names. Only the Key Field must exist in each Data Table record. Data Table records are stored in the JSON data format. It is not necessary to understand the JSON data format but if you want to gain a better understanding, further information can be found here.

Data Table Record Manager

To access the Data Table Record Manager, select the 'Manage Records' item from the drop down menu for an existing Data Table in the Data Table Manager.

The Data Table Record Manager will be shown:-

The screen shot above shows the Data Table Record Manager for a table named 'Test Table' and the Key Field Name for that table is 'ServiceNumber'. The Data Table is currently empty so there is an informational message in place of where the records would be displayed.

There is a search box available that allows the Data Table Key Field to be searched for a specified value. Pressing the [ Search ] button will return all the records where the Key Field contains the value entered in the search box.

Create a New Record

The new record input form will initially only contain the Data Table Key Field. This is because the Data Table does not contain any records. When the Data Table has existing records, the input form is dynamically created using the fields in an existing record and will display an input for each field. A value must be entered for the Key Field before the record can be saved.

Adding Fields

Press the [Fields] button to display the field manager:-

Enter the required field name into the input box, then press the [Add] button. Fields can be removed by removing the check in the box to the left of the field name. Once you have added the desired fields, you can click the [Close] button to dismiss the field manager. You will notice the check box to the left of the Key Field is disabled. This is because the Key Field is mandatory and must exist in each record.

The input form will have been updated to display the inputs for each field.

Field Data Types

To the right of each field is a drop down list that allows you to select the type of data the field will contain. The Key Field is an exception as it is always stored as a string and its data type can not be changed.

The available field data types are shown in the table below:-

Date and Times

It is a common scenario to be using the date and time based nodes within the Service Designer. You may have a use case where you want these nodes to use the values stored in a Data Table. This would involve reading the values stored in a Data Table record into Custom Service Variables, which would then be used within the date and time based node configurations. Date and time values need to be stored using the string data type. To ensure date and times are evaluated correctly within Services they must be stored in the following format:- Date: dd mmm yyyy Time: hh:mm:ss (24 hour format) Example Date: '02 Sep 2019' Example Time: '15:33:22' It is possible to create a record with a date value of '01/02/19' - but the platform will not be able to determine if this is 1st February 2019 or 2nd January 2019 so you must ensure the correct format is used to avoid unexpected behaviour. Once you have entered values for each field, press the [Save] button to add the new record to the Data Table. You will notice the input form does not get dismissed or cleared when saving the record but the new record does appear in the Data Table Record Manager. The input form is not dismissed intentionally to assist in the quick entry of multiple records that contain similar field values. To manually dismiss the input form simply press the [Close] button.

Data Table Record Manager Context Menu

Pressing the menu button in the Data Table Record Manager menu column will reveal a drop down menu showing the available options for a selected record.

• Edit Record Displays the input form to allow the record to be updated. Data Table records are flexible in that they do not need to contain the same field names defined for each record. Adding a new field to an existing record does not automatically add the same field to the other records in the Data Table.

• Delete Record Delete the record from the Data Table. This operation can not be undone.