Anaplan Connect (asynchronous or synchronous)

TristanS

Wanted to check if I have an Anaplan script that calls 2 Anaplan processes

Process 1 (usually runs 5 minutes)

Process 2 (usually runs 1 minute) 

 

When I run my Anaplan script

Will the Anaplan script wait for Process 1 to complete first (so wait 5 minutes) before calling Process 2? (Synchronous)

OR 

Will the Anaplan script immediately call Process 2 after successfully calling Process 1 (knowing that within Anaplan it will get queued though - Asynchronous)? 

 

 

ryan_kohn

This actually depends on how you write your script, which I'll get to in a moment.

 

Some things to note:

• The Anaplan API (which Anaplan Connect uses) supports asynchronous calls. You can kick off API calls and monitor their responses separately.
• An Anaplan model can only run one action at a time.
• The API will not stop you from sending multiple requests to a model. It will queue them up (I believe in the order they are received), and run the next one in sequence when the prior one is complete.

 

Now, back to Anaplan Connect.

 

Anaplan Connect is essentially a wrapper around the Anaplan API and bundles several API calls together to meet a need; for example, importing a file via a process is one Anaplan Connect call, but it's actually several API calls in the back end. Anaplan Connect is structured in such a way that each Anaplan Connect call will wait for a "completion" response from the API before it returns a response to the Anaplan Connect call. In this sense, I would generally consider Anaplan Connect scripts to be synchronous. Most people write the calls in sequence.

 

The reason I said it depends on your script is because you could also write a script in such a way that it kicks off separate Anaplan Connect instances that run simultaneously. However, note that if the processes are run in the same model, they will still be run in sequence.