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Support Native Retrieval Of Primary Key At Insert New Time

Hello AlteryxDevs - 

 

Back when I used to do more coding, some of the ORMs had the ability to return back to you a natively generated primary key for new rows created; this could be really useful in situations wherein you wanted / needed to create a parent / child relationship or needed to pass the value back to another process for some reason.  

 

As it stands now, the mechanism to achieve this in Alteryx is kind of clunky; all I have been able to figure out is the following:

 

1) Block until done 1.

1a) Create parent record. Hopefully it has an identifying characteristic that can be attached to. 

2) Block until done 2.  

2a) Use a dynamic select to go get the parent record and get the id generated by the database. 

3) Block until done 3. 

3a) Append your primary key found in 2a.  Create your children records. 

 

I mean it works.  But it is clunky, not graceful, and does not give you any control over the transaction, though that is kind of a more complicated feature request. 

 

Thanks!

 

2 Comments
mlange
6 - Meteoroid

I agree that native functionality to retrieve trigger-generated keys for rows inserted by Alteryx would be super helpful.  The lack of this functionality makes it feel that we need to turn to SSIS, or other non-Alteryx solutions for some internal database structures that rely on trigger-based primary keys to tie parent-child tables together.  We have a lot of those in our organization.  This is especially true when no column exists in the parent table by which we can easily identify a batch of inserted records.  Then we can't even use a dynamic select to pull records inserted to remap to our Alteryx data before inserting related records into a child table.

AlteryxCommunityTeam
Alteryx Community Team
Alteryx Community Team
Status changed to: Accepting Votes