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Note
This How-To assumes you have already gone through the steps in Get A GE Object and are coding inside of a callback to Aptify.framework.genericEntity.getEntityObject(). It continues that example, assuming you have already defined personGE.

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Know the name of the embedded field.

Optional: if the embedded field's name is passed to you or otherwise not hard-coded, it's wise to check that the field is, indeed, an embedded one. For this you also need to have the metadata of the entity on which the field is defined.

Note
This step assumes you have already gone through the steps in Get Entity-Level Metadata and have named the entity metadata object entityMd.

Code Block

language	js
title	Check If A Field Has Link Type Embedded
linenumbers	true

if (entityMd) {
	var fieldMd = entityMd.fields.findByName(embeddedFieldName);
    if (fieldMd && fieldMd.linkType.toLowerCase() == "embedded") {
		// Now you know it's really a field with Link Type embedded. Proceed to Step 3.
    } else if (fieldMd) {
		// Field metadata exists but Link Type is wrong, throw an informative exception
    	throw "The " + embeddedFieldName 
              + " field must have a Link Type of Embedded, but it is " 
              + fieldMd.linkType + ".";
    } else {
		// No field metadata found, throw an informative exception
        throw "The " + embeddedFieldName 
              + " field could not be found on the " 
              + entityMd.name + " entity.";
    }
} else {
	// No entity metadata found, throw an informative exception
	throw "Could not find entity metadata.";
}

If the embedded object has already been loaded, you can call getEmbeddedObject() on the main GE Object, passing the field name. If it has not, you must call loadEmbeddedObject() instead. Best practice is to use this structure if you are not absolutely certain getEmbeddedObject() will work:

Code Block

language	js
title	Get the Embedded GE Object
linenumbers	true

// If using Step 2, this code would go in the branch where the check for 
// Link Type == "embedded" was successful
var addressGE = personGE.getEmbeddedObject("AddressID");
if (addressGE) {
	// The embedded object already exists, do whatever you like to it
} else {
	// The embedded object needs to be loaded, which is an asynchronous operation
    personGE.loadEmbeddedObject("AddressID", function (embeddedGE) {
		addressGE = embeddedGE;
		// The embedded object now exists, so do whatever you like to it
	});
}

Note
Note that getEmbeddedObject() is synchronous, while loadEmbeddedObject() is asynchronous.

Tip
Notice that you want to do the same thing whether or not you have to get at the embeddedGE asynchronously? This is an excellent place to encapsulate that thing in a function so you can avoid duplicating code across the synchronous and asynchronous branches.

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Old Version 5

New Version 6

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