What is Superseding?

The purpose of superseding is to keep one active version of a record that has the information on it that we require, typically the most up to date version. This allows us to maintain historic versions of a record for our reference.

Superseded Records

Superseded record are referred to as historic records. By default they are not displayed in a view. To display the historic records you must tick Include History Records on the view setup. If set, superseded records will be identified by a grey background on the grid row. If not set, superseded records will be filtered out.

This can be useful when looking at the history of a record, such as a invoice or product, and seeing how it has been amended overtime.

Example

Let us consider the scenario where we have a set of product details provided each day from a supplier, Supplier Products table. Some of the details are for new products, and some are updates for existing products. We want to incorporate both types of record into our Product List table, creating entries for new products and updating existing products with the latest information.

Solution

To follow this setup you will require two tables as follows. The two table must share a common key, such as a product UID and the Supplier Products must have data:

1. Hover over the Product list. From the popup list click  Connector and connect the pipe back to the Product List.
2. In the pipe properties, set the following:
   1. Name to ss
   2. Type to Look-up
   3. Data to Read to All
   4. Click  Apply.
      This is important so the available options on your pipe get updated.
   5. Order/Index. Here we need to specify the matching criteria that will be used to see if a record is new or an update. We will set our to use the UID, so that were the UIDs from each table match this will be an update else its a new record.
      1. Click  Show or Hide Attributes
      2. Drag the UID from each table onto the Order/Index. Note if you wanted to use more elaborate matching you can add more attributes to identify a match and/or use filtering
         
   6. Click  Apply and Close.
3. Finally we need to tell our Product List table we want to use superseding.
4. Open the Product List table properties. Scroll down to Analysis Options.
5. Set Supersede Items on Pipe to ss.
6.   Click  Apply and Close.
7. Superseding is now setup.
   

Testing

1. In the Supplier Products table, add one new record and update an existing one.
2. Run Analysis on Product List.
3. Your new record set will look like this including your new record and any amendments you made to existing records.
   
4. Open the record sets and look at the previous record set.
5. We will see as we sent the same records in again, they all got superseded. We can see that all records have been replaced with our new versions. If we had only sent across the changes from step 1, we would have only superseded those records.