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… Read More Appian 24.1

First Principles Reasoning Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there. Most of our life, we reason by analogy, copying what other people do with slight variations. Elon Musk While Elon Musk is considered an innovative person, the idea of first principles reasoning goes back to the ancient greeks and Aristotle.… Read More First Principles Approach to Appian

Thank you very much for your patience. It took a while to get access to this new Appian feature, which is part of the 23.4 release. In this post, I want to share the experience I made while chatting with my data, the greatness, and weirdness of large language models and thoughts on possible use… Read More Chat With Records

In the last few versions, Appian learned to deal with partially populated records for reading and writing data. We can now query just the data that we need, which reduces the amount of data fetched from an external system, saving precious CPU cycles and memory. And, when writing data back to a database, we have… Read More Partially Populated Records

Put yourself in the role of a user of your process driven Appian application. By process driven, I mean the application conducts the process and assigns a task to you because your specific human capabilities are required. There is a ist of tasks … click … understand task user interface … think … think …… Read More What to Expect Next

While using Google Suite, I had this crazy idea! I wanted to replicate some of this email address entering magic in my next Appian application. As I would rather not bother you with all the loops I had to go through, let’s put some plutonium and banana peels into our flux compensator and jump a… Read More The Master of Email Address Fields

The last new version in 2023 again delivers an exciting set of expected features and a few surprises. Check out the details here: Appian 23.4 Release Notes. In this post, I focus on these 5 changes: And I try to share some of my hands-on experience and thoughts on how this new version impacts our… Read More Appian 23.4

To fetch the value of a certain field in a nested data structure, you might want to use the simple dot-notation. The issue is, that when there is no address, this breaks. The solution is, to use the index() or property() function. Both work in the exact same way and the only difference is that… Read More Use the Index Luke!

Did you know that you can turn this into this or easily create a great-looking invoice You’re interested? Follow the white rabbit! Or stay in the matrix, and let’s create great PDF documents together. Plugin Install the HTML-To-PDF plugin on your Appian environment and get to know the documentation of the utilised Java library openhtmltopdf.… Read More Great PDFs with Appian

Update: Only a few weeks after this post, Appian released version 23.4 with a built in translation feature. While this post might still be interesting, because of some remarkable implementation details, I suggest to use translation sets. According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes to the… Read More The Tower of Babel