When setting up data integrations in Anaplan, the process or import actions are often referred to by name. However, this practice isn't robust and can cause process failures if names are changed in the model.
When setting up data integrations in Anaplan, the process or import actions are often referred to by name. However, this practice isn’t robust and can cause process failures if names are changed in the model. During development and enhancements, a model builder may choose to edit the name of a process or import to the model. This would have no impact when running the actions within Anaplan, but an unintended consequence is any API imports would also need updating to reflect the new name.
When importing data, you would typically use Code IDs as a unique identifier instead of names that could possibly change. Similarly, we want to reference the process action by the inherent Anaplan ID rather than the process name. Indeed, the ID is fixed as soon as the action is created, whereas the name can obviously change – but how do we find these IDs ?
The IDs aren’t a visible column on the actions tab for a model builder to view, but they can be found by pasting the following link into a browser and substituting (model_ID) for the id of your model, (which you can find in the URL of your browser).
- https://us1a.app.anaplan.com/2/0/models/(model_ID)/processes
- https://us1a.app.anaplan.com/2/0/models/(Model_ID/imports
Doing so lists out all of the imports or processes within the model by their name and shows their Unique ID.
Process example:
Once you have the action IDs I have found the best practice is to copy and paste them into the notes column so that they are easy to find moving forward. The IDs are consistent between Development and Production models so this only needs doing once and can be easily referenced moving forward. Finally, you can then replace the process name with the Process ID code in the API or Connect script, future-proofing it in case of future name changes.
Note: this article was originally published by Aaron for Anaplan here
