First release in ’24 with another great set of refinements on almost all features the platform provides.

Make sure to watch the product announcement webinar on Youtube.

In this post, I will cover only three of the updates, but discuss them in more detail.

Write Records Smart Service

This smart service seems to be stuck in a roller coaster. Since its introduction, the node output “Records Updated” always contained the full record with all fields, including the generated primary key value when the record was new.

Then, with version 23.4, Appian introduced a great feature that allows us to write data across relationships in one go. This means we can write an order record including its order items with just one node. But this raised the difficult question of what data to return. It will not work, to return the record and include all other records across all relationships. For an order, this would be:

• Order
• Customer
• Adresses
• Order Items
• Articles
• Article Variants
• …

So the product development team decided to only return the primary key of the new inserted or updated record and left it to use to query the data we need in a separate node.

Now, with version 24.1, this behaviour changes again. The data returned will now contain the primary keys, plus that exact data that you passed into the node.

I think this is a good compromise going forward.

But beware!!! You can now have a process model with three Write Records nodes, where each behaves different, depending on when it was added. This really calls for trouble, as there is no way to distinguish one version from the other. I already wrote a post about partially populated records including some hints on how to deal with this.

Update on February 27 2024:

Kevin Gajevski, Product Lead at Appian mentioned:

In 24.1, Write Records smart service nodes will display a banner on the Setup tab that lets you know if it is not the latest version of the smart service. Hope this helps differentiate the different versions that have been released over time as we’ve added new functionality!

Pane Layout

We already have columns layouts to define the high-level horizontal screen structure, and side by side layouts to control the layout of a single row of components in detail.

To split the screen into horizontal sections, including individual scrolling behaviour, we could only use card layouts. But, as these only allow scrolling when defining a fixed height, we could not create two columns where one fills the entire height of the screen and stays static, while the other column can scroll independently.

Say hello to the new “Pane Layout”!

Just like the other top-level layouts, it cannot be nested.

When added to your interface, you can define two or three panes of fixed or variable width, and all can scroll independently.

As of now, the scrolling behaves a bit weird in the interface designer. I hope this will be fixed soon.

When opening that interface in a site, this looks just gorgeous! The background color fills the pane all to the bottom of the screen and the right-hand area scrolls while the left-hand pane stays static.

Dynamic Translations

Appian just recently introduced more robust support for translations, which I covered in my version 23.4 post.

I was missing one of the most important features of translation, which is dynamic translation. In a translation string, I can define placeholders or variables, which are then later replaced with their actual values. The differences in the grammatical structures of different languages require that.

Just add placeholders, enclosed by curly brackets, and Appian picks them up.

To wrap up translations, I want to mention an issue I experienced. I had created a translation set with the primary language set to German, but had the locale of my user set to English (US). Then I wondered why the type-ahead lookup of translations did not work.

It seems like this lookup only works for translation sets that have their primary language match my account’s language. I am not sure whether this is intended, but it really took me a while to resolve this.

Summary

A great start into a promising year. We will get a new process execution engine, rewritten from scratch to dynamically scale. And, I am sure, the more than 600 developers in the Appian product teams can’t wait to surprise us with more.

Stay tuned and keep rocking our digital transformation!