How to order operations coming off a join?

[brianscott]

Hi everyone - 

Edit:  It looks like I got this to work by putting blockers on all three outputs from the join and ordering my operations from top to bottom as delete and append/append/append.  Is there any way to force visualize the order of blocks and/or physically set the order of operations within the tool as opposed to go top to bottom.  Or am I just getting lucky with the configuration that is currently running?

I've got a denormalized data set as one of my starting points.  In it, each person can have N records where N == the number of types of phones they have; i.e., if one person has a cell phone and a home phone, they'll have two records in the source data set, with a phone type identifier and a phone number for that phone type.

My desired output file is excel and needs to support:

1) people with only a cell phone getting a cell phone column populated
2) people with only a home phone getting a home phone column populated
3) people with both cell and home phones getting *both* columns populated

Now, I've been able to get *almost* all the way there by splitting the input based on phone type, populating a column that identified phone type, then joining them back together, and then throwing all three outputs of the join to a different sheet in Excel.  (see attached .png)  I'd really prefer to put everything into a single sheet, but I couldn't find a way to get the block tool to pay attention when I've essentially got three processes coming out of the same source that I want to order.  The upshot being that I couldn't have a guarantee that:

1) the file wouldn't be in use.
2) if the timing worked out, that I used the appropriate mixture of one tool getting delete+append and the rest just getting append orders. 

I think I must be missing something easy.  Can someone help?

Thanks!
brian

[ChadM · Accepted solution]

Hi Brian,

Maybe I'm simplifying this too much, but if you want all three data streams in one spreadsheet, could you simply use a Union Tool and use the setting Set a Specific Output Order for each incoming data stream?  This would of course require that each of the three data streams have the same schema, but based on your image above, this may not be an issue. 

[brianscott]

Hi cmartin -

You have an easier solution again. I had to do a little bit of formualing downstream of the made join, but otherwise worked well.  Sorry for that, it must have been so easy that I figured it couldn't work.  

Thanks!

brian