Building Dynamic Arrays

In SBM Composer, you can build an array with a fixed number of array elements at design time. This is known as a fixed array.

However, sometimes you must determine the number of array elements at runtime (that is, when an orchestration workflow runs). For example, you want to send telephone numbers to an SMS (Short Message Service) Web service. You use a Service step in an orchestration workflow to get the telephone numbers of those users who were selected on a form.

Because you do not know the number of selected users and telephone numbers in advance, you build a dynamic array. For an orchestration workflow to dynamically add elements to an array, you use a Calculate step to target each element in the array in sequential order, beginning with 1.

This section includes use cases that illustrate ways to make Web service calls that accept a dynamically-sized list of elements. They are for demonstration purposes only, and do not represent realistic scenarios.