Getting the most recent data in Data Designer

Also to expand on what ​@matthew_lind mentioned earlier re: Previews. 

In Data Designer and Horizon Rules, previews are not actually representative of your desired data set. In other words, they fail the basic promise of what a preview should provide.

Each Task will pull at most something like 2K records. It seems like that random assortment of records is pulled, which means joins that should yield data may not show in the preview. This problem gets more and more exacerbated the more fetch tasks and merges you run.

I will often have to single out a single record for every task I expect to make it from top to bottom, unless I want to fully execute my rule or design to get the real results.

​@aaronhatton ​@hunterjoseph12 ​@matthew_lind is this essentially the steps we would take if we wanted to create a report from the Relationship object to show a column that has LAST TIMELINE MEETING TYPE DATE and LAST TIMELINE EMAIL DATE.  We are trying to evaluate which relationships haven’t had a meeting in “x” days or haven’t had email communication in “x” days but there is no standard “show last activity date” field to use in a report as is.

​@nburke Let me summarize this way…

If you need the date of the most recent entry, you can aggregate with a MAX of Date in the “Show Me”, and you’re virtually done. In this scenario, the needed data point IS the aggregated data point, so you don’t need that re-merge step.

If you need some other value from the most recent entry, then you need the “split and re-merge” plan. For example, if you needed to know who authored the most recent entry, the needed data point IS NOT the aggregated data point; now you need a re-merge. (Republishing ​@aaronhatton’s image or a “split and re-merge” here for clarity.)

Also, along a slightly different topic, if you need to find Companies without data (for example, there are no timeline entries), then you’re likely destined for a LEFT join, whereby you have all Companies on the left, joining to your queried data on the right. An INNER join will drop Companies without data, so use a LEFT.