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External object value list - value deletion with automatic filling of properties perservation

Hi,

we have an external object with company employee functions (CEO, CFO, etc.) in it's value list. We also have few classes and properties that are automatically filled with those functions. Sometimes what happens is that an employee leaves the company and that function gets deleted from the external source, so therefore it gets deleted in the object's value list aswell.

What happens next is that the automatic filling of those properties gets "destroyed", because the value they were filled with no longer exists (it exists in a deleted state), so I always need to change the calculation rule (Set Value) to the next employee, who is responsible and can stand in for the employee that left.

Is there any easy way to do this automatically?

I thought of an improvement idea, where you could set up an if statement on a value calculation rule, like "if IsDeleted". It would ask if the calculated value produces error from not being able to find the value from a value list, and if there was an error, it would go into that if statement, where there would be another Set Value.

Thanks for any feedback provided.

Dominik

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  • If at all possible you should use a "Group" rather than a person for this scenario - even when that group would only have one person as a member. This way you can change the CEO group member and still get the right connection after the switch. I can't think of an easy way to handle it in your setup.

  • Thank you for the advice, but this would not solve the problem. The issue is that those two people have two seperate company functions, so even if I created two groups for each person, I would still need a way to implement an "if" clause, where it would say "if group1 IsEmpty: group2; else: group1" or something like that.

    This is what I am trying to do now anyway, only difference is that my "group" is not the M-Files user group we all know and love, but it's a company function group. For example, I work as a Information system analyst, together with few other people in the company. We are all in the "Information system analyst group", but the group is actually an object in M-Files and it is imported into M-Files from an external source.

    Someone could probably change the logic behind this in that external source, but I wanted to find out if there is a solution possible in M-Files first, before making any major changes elsewhere.

  • Sorry, can't think of a smart solution for this. Hope someone else can chip in?

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