SCRIBE Labs - Variable Connector Used To Control A Loop (Dynamically)

Recently, while working on a data migration task, I had a requirement to transform data stored in a string delimited by ";" and parse it to create multiple line items in the target systems.  Here is an example as a visual:

Source:
productA, productB, productC, productD...

Target:
productA
ProductB
ProductC
ProductD
...

In the target system, each product would be a line item on an opportunity.  In the source system this was all listed in a text box as a string and delimited by ";".  Also the cell where this data was in the source could be null, have one item, ten items, fifty items, etc.  So I needed a way to loop through this.

To set this up I needed to use three connectors, source, target, and Scribe Labs - Variables.  Below is an image of the section of the mapping where I achieved what I needed to happen:

1. If Product To Add - This is the null handler.  If the field where the products are listed in the source is null, then we skip adding any products in the target system.
2. Lookup uom - This is target specific related record and not important for what we are working on.
3. Upsert Counter - Here is where we declare our counter in the the Scribe Labs - Variable connector.  For this I choose NumVarible and set the name to "counter" and the val to 1.
4. Loop - Now we enter our loop.
5. Get Counter - Here we do a lookup to get the val of the counter.  Yes, we just created the counter, but remember we are in a loop and need this lookup, since we will be updating the value in the loop.
6. Lookup Product - Here is where we lookup the product in the target system.  For the lookup I am doing a like match against the product id field in the target system.  To do this I need to use the parse function in Scribe. Here is how the parse is setup: CONCATENATE("%", STRIP(PARSE(Source Field, Counter_NumVariableLookup.val, ";"),"AN")).  What we will focus on in this function is the Parse() piece.  Within the Parse we have to tell Scribe the field that we want to get the data from.  Then we tell it where specifically in that string we want to look.  Then how the string is delimited.  To make this dynamic, we are using our counter variable.  This means on first run our counter variable is set to one.  So, in a string of "ProductA;ProductB;ProductC" our parse is going to pull out "ProductA" because it is the first sub-string.  When the loop runs again, the counter will be two and "ProductB" will be returned.
7. If Product Found - This if statement is to make sure we don't create any empty line items if the product doesn't exist in the target system.
8. Create opportunityproduct - If we do find 1 product, then we create the record in the target system.
9. Increase Counter - Here is where we increase the val of the counter by 1.
10. If No More to Process - Now that we increased our counter, we need to check our string ("ProductA;ProductB;ProductC") to see if we need to run the loop again.  When you use Parse with a counter like this to get a specific sub-string.  If that we reach the end of the string, in our example that would be 4.  The Parse will return null.  So for our If statement we want to use the ISNULLOREMPTY() to check and see if we reached the end of the string.  We would setup the condition to be ISNULLOREMPTY( PARSE(Source Field, Counter_NumVariableUpsert2.val, ";") ) equals True.
11. Loop Exit - If we have reached the end of our string, then we exit our loop.

For more information check out these helpful links:

Loop

Loop Exit

Scribe Labs - Variable Connector

Parse

Concatenate

If

Strip