Help on community article expression engine - Expression Engine FIELDVALUE on non-linked entity (xlookup / vlookup Excel)

Please see https://community.inriver.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/19807273545756-Expression-Engine-FIELDVALUE-on-non-linked-entity-xlookup-vlookup-Excel

Hi Rutger,

Currently there are no functions available to access the field values of non-linked entities in the way you describe, the expression engine is limited to accessing the values stored on linked entities. As always, feel free to post this as a feature request on our Ideas platform for our expression engine team to look into and evaluate should you wish for this functionality to be implemented. Do you have any further questions in this matter?

Kind regards

Theodor

Hi Theodor,

The issue is that if the system needs to first have a linked entity to retrieve the information, the Expression Engine will not be triggered once again.

So when the value (ItemColorCodeLookup) on Item level is filled the expression cannot retrieve colorName/colorFamilyName/colorHexCode because there is no link.

I now have setup a Link Creator (https://community.inriver.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409362779666-Extension-EntityListener-Link-Creator) to create that link, but after the link is created the Expression Engine for ItemColorCodeLookup is at that moment not triggered anymore. It will not retrieve the values into ItemColorName/ItemColorFamilyName/ItemColorHexCode, right? The Link creator is a background task that is executed asynchronously. I tested this on TEST with this entity: https://portal2-prod1a-euw.productmarketingcloud.com/app/enrich#/entity/267/details

Here I see that the ItemColorCodeLookup is correctly filled with the formula. This also triggers the creation of the link between Color and Item. But the lookup fields to the Color entity are not filled.

When I manually trigger the Expression Engine lookup for one of these fields, the formula works as expected.

If I start a Aha! idea, that will never get enough votes before we need to go live with this customer.

Please try to think with us on an approach that will work.

Met vriendelijke groet, Kind regards,

Rutger Koebrugge