Copy branch not working properly?

c-f_surtevall

Hi all, 

 

I think I have encountered a quite severe bug with the Copy branch functionality. We use it to create new investments from pre-set templates. The template investment contain multiple levels and descendants. 

 

What I have noticed is that if you have items that are "outside" the normal hierarchy, i.e. do not have any parent dependency, they will be added as decendants to the newly created copy. So instead of getting the pre-set template I get a combination of the pre-sets + the standalone items that did not belong to the branch I was copying. 

 

I was in contact with the support and they said that this works as intended, but I call BS on that 🙂 

 

Has anyone else noticed this, and if you have, is there any way to get around it? Besides making sure that there are no items without parents that is. 

Thanks!

 

Br,
Carl-Fredrik

c-f_surtevall

Thanks!

 

It is very easy to replicate.

 

1. Create a blank model

2. Add 2 items to Organization

       - Item 1: Investments

       - Item 2: Templates

3. Create 2 additional lists

       - List 1: Organization L2, Numbered list format and have Organization as Parent

       - List 2: Organization L3, Numbered list format and have Organization L2 as Parent

4. Add 1 item under Templates in Organization L2

5. Add 1 item under Templates in Organization L3, should have the above item as parent

6. Publish Organization L2 to a new dashboard

7. Create a copy button using 'Copy Branch'. Copy from = Organization L2, Level to copy = All levels

8. Publish action to the newly created dashboard

9. Copy the template to 'Investments' using the action button

10. Go to Organization L3 and ad 10 items outside of the hierarchy 

11. Go back to the dashboard and copy the template again 

 

What you will see is that when you do step 10-11 you will get an additional 10 items added to your new investment, so in total 11 items. 

 

I have investigated this further and it seems that it can be solved by adding a dummy item in Organization, that you put below Templates. After doing that step the Copy branch function does not include the outside items. No idea why it solves it, but it does.

 

 

c-f_surtevall

Thanks!

 

I mean go to the list Organization L3 and add 3 items that are outside the hiearchy. Basically L3 should look like this before the second copy of the Template to Investments:

 

 

After copying it looks like this in Organization L3:

 

 

As you can see, all the 10 outside hierarchy items were added to my newly copied investment. 

 

Thank you once again!

 

c-f_surtevall

Well there are many cases where you can end up with orphans without noticing it since, as you say, they are not visible in the modules.

 

In this case the client had done a migration of a structure with a lot of items ending up as orphans. They then did a copy of a so called template and these "orphans" resulted in exactly the same amount of items being added to the copy. In this case it caused a big issue because this list is integrated to other systems and they ended up with approximatley 10 000 items under these newly created investments instead of the correct 2 which were in the template. Luckily it was discovered before the scheduled integrations. 

 

The reason why I am stressed about it is because I expect Anaplan to work as intended. Workarounds is not really my cup of tea, though that has become the common practice latley when working with Anaplan 😞