Gracefully Handling Not Present Columns

brianscott

Hello gurus and aces - 

I've have this situation:

User is prompted to enter a value. 

Value is sent to dynamic input. 

Results of dynamic input goto a cross tab.  New column is created, aggregating a 1-M dataset.

Results of cross tab are joined back up to output of dynamic input for master data stream. 

Perform a function on results of the cross tab. 

Now, if the user enters a value that returns for the dynamic query , everything is golden and we have saved the day.  But.  If the user enters a value that does *not* return anything from the dynamic query, my operation of performing  a function on the results of the cross tab fails complaining about an unknown variable.  

I'm banging my head against this.  What I really need to do is detect this situation and abort on the primary processing stream, and do something else like tell the user that they're query didn't come back with anything.  But having an error tends to muck everything else up.  I feel like the solution is simple, but I cannot figure it out.  

See attached work flow for a close enough mock up. 

Can anyone help?

Thanks.

brian

RandomFailure.yxmd

jrgo

Hi @brianscott

I've encountered this a lot. Attached is how I usually solve. I'll add a Text Input box with the fields i need, NULL values within them. The select tool that comes after will change the field types to what they should be (come through as Bool since there's nothing in them) and union together.

I didn't add this in, but after it passes the tools that would error out if there were no records, use a Filter tool to filter the record placeholder out of your data set.

Hope this helps!

Jimmy

RandomFailure.yxmd