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Flowing Media Attachments up through Standard Operations, Routing Templates, Etc.

  • 28 September 2023
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Working in IFS Cloud

I am looking into implementing Work Instructions in Workbench through Work Guidelines. Our current routings structures are very template oriented, including Standard Operations as much as possible.

I am trying to work out how to get Media attached to lower level objects to flow up to the next level, ie Pictures connected to a Work Guideline Template to move to a Standard Operation when attached, then to a Routing Template Operation, etc. Ultimately the goal is for media attached at any step in the chain to be connected at the Routing level and ultimately within the Operation Guide in Workbench.

A few of these connections are standard functionality and work as expected, a couple I have had to manually enable MediaLibrary service and create Object Connection Transformations to connect these items, and in certain cases I can bypass the intermediate steps and make it work, for example anything with a Work Guideline Template connected works. 

However I can’t make the connections between Standard Operations to Routing Templates and Routing Templates to Routings because the required Source LU Keys do not exist in the Target LUs.

Is there a better way to have Media connect to a related object in this way? Or is there a different Transformation Method entry I can use to make these connections work?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

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Best answer by Mathias Dahl 29 September 2023, 07:26

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Mathias Dahl
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Hi,

It seems like you have done what you can using the built-in features. Since I don't know the Manufacturing area I cannot say if you have missed any existing Object Connection Transformation rule.

Object Connection Transformation is nice, and solves many problems that we previously used to solve with proper business logic (specific code). We can even support returning multiple records by using purpose-made transformation rules (PL/SQL methods, you probably already use some of them), when a simple column-to-column mapping is not enough.

It has limits though. For example, Object Connection Transformation rules cannot be "chained". That is, the "output" from one rule cannot be used as "input" to another. It might be possible to achieve that, in theory, but it might also cause problems. At any rate, it's not available now.

So, what do you do? If you have found all the available Object Connection Transformation rules that fits your use case, there is one more option: custom events. It more work but, more or less, you can get whatever media or document connection "flow" wherever you like. Basically, you need to figure out the trigger point, that is the point in time when you want the media (for example) to "flow" to some other object. Then you create a custom event (which uses Oracle table triggers in the background), with code added to it via an event action. The code can do whatever you want. Again, more work and, when working with custom events/triggers you can sometimes get the dreaded "mutating table" problem, but that's possible to workaround (there are several posts on that here on IFS Community).

So that would be my advice, to use custom events. I don't have any ready-made ones that "flow" (copy or move) media or document connections, so you need to figure that out yourself or have someone else do it for you.

A more long-term solution is to ask for new Object Connection Transformation rules to be developed by IFS, but that will not help you now. In case you anyway want to ask for it, use the Ideas section here on IFS Community.

Good luck!
 

/Mathias
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Thanks for the info! I figured I was running into uncharted territory when some of the LUs didn’t have MediaLibrary enabled by default in the first place. I’ll look into setting up some Custom Events.

I’ll definitely ask in the Ideas section about new connection rules as well, I think there’s benefit for the Manufacturing side to be able to have these connections.

Mathias Dahl
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Great! And one more thing: although most "flow" scenarios can be solved by using Object Connection Transformation, there are a few where the right solution is to actually copy a media or document connection to the object. That's where you don't want the connection to your object to change even if things change in the source.

/Mathias

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