Removing null value from collection
I managed to add a null value to a text collection, and found a way to remove it.
How did I end up with this mess?
I have a loop that splits a comma separated string, and adds each item to a text collection. This string is normally a bunch of external IDs, but I ended up with
Result{!vaCSTextToSplit} = "70140000000cokEAAQ,, master_AshokaUpdates,news_USA,"
see that extra comma in there before ‘master’ - when that ran through the split-o-matic it created a collection that had a null / blank value in it. i use blank/null intentionally here, as i really was not sure which one it was.
{!collCampaignIDs} = "[70140000000cokEAAQ,,master_AshokaUpdates,news_USA,MASTER]"
and that was causing some (silent) havoc downstream when we looped over the collection to get a campaign record filtering against that external ID. the flow would pull a random campaign that had a blank external ID, since it was filtering on a field that was blank/null.
I updated the filter on the get records to filter out any blanks, using isnull equals false,but i also needed to remove the blank/null element from the collection.
How did I fix it?
I tried to use the removeall operator in an assigment to remove globalconstant.emptystring from the collection
no change - the collection remained the same.
ASSIGNMENT: asstEndOfLoop
{!collCampaignIDs} Remove All
Result
{!collCampaignIDs} = "[70140000000cokEAAQ,,master_AshokaUpdates,news_USA]"
So it must not be an empty string, must actually be null. But there is no option in the assignment element to remove a null value. So, I created a text constant, and did not give it any value.
And removed that constant in the assignment
ASSIGNMENT: asstEndOfLoop
{!collCampaignIDs} Remove All {!conNull}
Result
{!collCampaignIDs} = "[70140000000cokEAAQ,master_AshokaUpdates,news_USA]"
And that appears to have removed the null element! See the result above! No extra comma!
The ‘code snippets’ above are from the flow debugger, formatted automatically by this blog-o-matic thing I use.