Forcing Parent BO to Save

customaware

Compliments of the season to all.

I have a Parent BO (A) which owns a Reference BO of multiple childen (B)

I have a need to actually force a Save of the Parent A each time a Child B is either created or modified.

I have a dynamic Rule in the Parent....

1=1
FIND B WHERE B IN A.B ORDER BY B.Order
UPDATE B

If I Create or Modify a Child B I can force a Parent A Refresh but not a Save.
If I actually physically click the Save button on the Parent Form after I Create or Modify a Child B record then all is good.

However, I don't want to have to rely on that. I would prefer it perform a save immediately the Child B record is saved.

I have tried the Rule above with things like A.B WAS CHANGED without success
I have tried moving the FIND and UPDATE to a Process and calling from a Child B Rule... no luck either.

Would appreciate and ideas please.

4xjbh

I can only think of having a number field in the parent that you increment by one or a Yes/No that you change and then save.

If you can provide some context as to why this needs to be saved there may be another alternative.

customaware

Hi James,

Thanx for the input. I will have a look at that.

Here is what I am doing.

Each Child B record can take a number of forms...

A straight Value (VALUE)
A Percentage (PERCENTAGE). User selects a number of Peer Child B records . Rule calculates the Value=SUM of the Peer Values and X by the Percentage amount / 100
A SUM (SUM). User selects a number of Peer Child B records. Rule calculates the Value=SUM for the Peer Values
A Count (COUNT). User selects a number of Peer Child B records. Rule calculates the Value=COUNT for the Peers
An Addition (A+B). User selects two Peer Child B records as Operands. Rule calculates the Value= OperandA.Value+OperandB.Value
An Addition (A-B). User selects two Peer Child B records as Operands. Rule calculates the Value= OperandA.Value-OperandB.Value
An Addition (AxB). User selects two Peer Child B records as Operands. Rule calculates the Value= OperandA.Value*OperandB.Value
An Addition (A/B). User selects two Peer Child B records as Operands. Rule calculates the Value= OperandA.Value/OperandB.Value

So... as an Example... User enters

Record 1: Salary Value = 50,000
Record 2: Site Allowance (type PERCENTAGE) User Selects Record 1 as Peer and Percentage value 30% => Rule calculates Value at 50,000 * 30 / 100 = 15,000
Record 2: Sub Total (Type A+B) User Selects Record 1 and Record 2 as Operands and Rule calculates Sub Total (Value) as 50,000 + 15,000 = 65,000

etc etc.

So, this works perfectly and if user changes Record 1 from 50,000 to 60,000 no amount of refresh will cause Record 2 and 3 to update.
However, once I save the Parent Form (which has the Rule described in the previous post in it) then all get updated and calcs are correct.

So, in short.... this is like a mini spreadsheet but can have, like, 20 different rows for things like benefits, tax, super etc.

customaware

Tried your previous suggestion James.

Cannot stop it getting into an endless loop. 🙁

tford

Mark,

The attached BSV is very rough looking, but I think it accomplishes your goal.

AParent.zip

37.08kB

customaware

Hi Tom,

Thanx for that.

However, from what I can see that forces an update on the parent but does not force an update for all of the Parent's Children.

If I use you suggestion but add a Rule in the Parent....

FIND Child WHERE Child IN Parent.Children
UPDATE Child

Then that causes the Child Rule as you have it to be executed again and hence endless loop.

tford

Then that causes the Child Rule as you have it to be executed again and hence endless loop.

Could you put a flag attribute in the Parent and Children that is used to allow the updates process to fire only once? The flag attributes would of course then need to be added as a condition to the execution of the updates processes.

customaware

Hi Tom,

I have tried that already. I have even tried with the flag in LoggedInRegularUser to avoid false triggering. No go.

tford

Try this one Mark. I think you will find that the time stamps get updated for both the parent and all children any time there is an update to the Parent or to either of the "variable" attributes of any of the child records.

AParent2.zip

37.55kB

customaware

Hi Tom,
I have tried that and still got an endless loop.

To better test... I have disabled those changes and I have extracted the offending part from the app and attach a demo bsv.

MParent.zip

42.59kB

Load up the bsv and run it.
You will see a Query of Results of All Remuneration Templates

Edit the record DEMO REMUNERATION Template.

You will see this Remuneration Template Form with it's Remuneration Template Components in the child Reference table.

The Base Salary is just a value.... 100,000
The Project Allowance is a Percentage.... edit it and you can see it is set to 30% of the SUM of the Aggregates Components
The SubTotal is of type A+B and the Operands are set to the Base Salary and the Project Allowance.

So... now to the issue...

Edit the Base Salary and change it to 200,000 and save it.

You will see that the new value is reflected in the Result and , interestingly, the Sub Total row updates to show
200,000 + 30,000 = 230,000.

However, the Project Allowance row did not update. It should change to 60,000 being 30% of 200,000. And accordingly, the Sub Total should
then be 260,000.

That is what I am trying to get it to do.

Now.... Click the Save button on the Remuneration Template Form.

Notice how the Rule on the Remuneration Template BO gets executed and all of the Remuneration Template Component lines get recalculated properly.

Hence, the original question..... How to Force the Remuneration Template BO to save (and thereby executing the update of the child components) without having to click the Save button?

tford

Try this one, Mark.

MParent2.zip

43.18kB

Here's what I did (Hopefully I remembered all the pieces I added):

Added a timestamp attribute RecalcTrigger to RemunerationTemplateComponent
In each of the seven Get ___ Result rules in RemunerationTemplateComponent,I added this condition to each rule: RemunerationTemplateComponent.RecalcTrigger WAS CHANGED
Added rule "update parent" to RemunerationTemplateComponent

If (RemunerationTemplateComponent WAS CHANGED OR RemunerationTemplateComponent IS NEW) AND NOT(RemunerationTemplateComponent.RecalcTrigger WAS CHANGED) Then
UpdateRemunerationTemplate

Activated the rule "UpdateRemunerationTemplate"
Activated the rule "UPDATE Components using trigger" in the BO: RemunerationTemplate. Also removed the UPDATE and added the following line to this rule:

RemunerationTemplateComponent.RecalcTrigger=CURRENT_TIMESTAMP

Anxious to find out if this is what you were trying to accomplish, Mark.

customaware

Bingo! Excellent Tom!

Yep.....that works. Just need to figure out the logic of how you did it.

Much appreciated my Friend.

More beers deposited. 😉

I will put this up on awareimdevelopers.com to your credit Tom. Some VERY interesting and useful concepts in that little BSV.

Thank You.

tford

Great to hear that it worked, Mark! I love solving AwareIM logic challenges & this was certainly one of the more intriguing ones I've seen. Like you, my reaction was "there certainly has to be a way to do that .. I just have to find it".

A brief description of the solution:

The key to eliminating the circular loop was adding the RecalcTrigger timestamp attribute to the RemunerationTemplateComponent BO. Through careful updating and evaluation of that attribute, rule firing is carefully controlled.

The chain of events of updating and saving are started when any instance of RemunerationTemplateComponent is changed by the user. This change causes the parent BO RemunerationTemplate to be found and updated. Note that this process of finding and updating the parent BO only happens when one of the Components is changed and RemunerationTemplateComponent.RecalcTrigger was NOT CHANGED. RecalcTrigger is NOT changed by the user .. it's updated only by a rule that will be described in a moment. Bottom line is that the key Component attributes are NOT updated initially when the rules of fire when the Component is updated by the user.

When the parent BO (RemunerationTemplate) is found and UPDATEd, a rule on the parent now FINDs all of its Component children and updates RemunerationTemplateComponent.RecalcTrigger with a CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. NOW, with RecalcTrigger being updated all of the Component rules are now triggered to fire once and only once .. no looping back to the parent BO.

customaware

Indeed an ingenious solution Tom.

The fact that you found a way to turn the updating upside down with each component updating itself after the timestamp is updated is very neat.

Thanx again.