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Now we want to get to the point of this and use the list. Here we
select a set of Folders from a listbox, and then edit each in turn,
all in the same session. We keep a count of the element used.
Each time around we set the Folder Id of the next one and
process it until we have done them all.
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We have two simple processes.
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The first creates a Folder, and lets you select any number of child
folders from the second process.
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The second is merely a create and delete for the child folders we
will be going to select.
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We have three forms.
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One for the first action on the main process.
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Here we select the folders from our fabricated ‘child’ Process. This
variable will contain a tab delimited list of folder Ids.
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For the Child Folder we have a plain form with a subject and three
variables.
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We have a very similar form for the main process, in fact with a
little fancy footwork we could use the same form, but we are
going to keep this simple.
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Here you can see the Business Objects we have applied to the
form. Most importantly for our purposes, we have the Business
Object for the D_ListChild process, and we are passing in the
CurrentChildId variable as the Folder id.
What we are going to do is process the list of Folder Ids we have
stored, and assign each one in turn to the CurrentChildId variable
in order to allow us to edit the data for that Folder.
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This is the only place in either Process where we do anything in
code.
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Here you can see that we are calling the function we created in
the first section, and passing in the ‘SelectedChildren’ variables
that we fill from the listbox in the first Action.
There are two things to note here:
Firstly we are able to use the square bracket “[n]” operator to get
a specific item from the returned array. That is not terribly clear,
but to those used to C# (or C++/C, I am going to call these Cx
from now on) it is common enough shorthand. Get used to this
type of shortcut in Metastorm BPM 9, as we are now in C# land,
and you will have to become a ‘semi-colonist’ like the rest of us.
Secondly we have used the “++” operator to increment the
CurrentChildNumber counter variable at the same time as use it.
“--” will decrement a number, by the way, and either operator
before the variable it will apply the increment/decrement before
using the variable (actually a surprising number of Cx
programmers are unaware of that one). I’ve never seen both used
at the same time, but in theory it is valid!
What is nice is that these operators are implemented for
Metastorm number variables.
In ‘normal’ Metastorm BPM style, in theory, we would have
assigned the return to a variable, used the square brackets
operator to get the value we wanted, and then incremented the
counter by adding 1. The problem is immediately seen that once
we assign the return value to a variable it will become a tab
delimited string straight away, and the square brackets will not
work. Hence our little shortcuts here. The alternative is to do it in
C#, and we were trying to keep it simple.
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The only other thing we do with our list is decide what the next
chained Action will be.
Here you can see the test is if the CurrentChildNumber counter is
less than the number of items in our list we perform the Edit
Child Action, otherwise we perform the ‘Finish’ Action. Bear in
mind we are dealing with is a ‘zero-based’ arrays, so if it has 5
elements, element ‘0’ is the first, and ‘4’ is the last.
The only point to note is the “.Count” after the function call.
Again, this is a shortcut. The function returns a List object, and
one of the properties is Count, which is the number of items in
the list.
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Creating our List
