About the Not In operator

Background

HCL® Marketing Operations objects (plans, programs and projects) are created from templates.

Templates have definitions of attributes, for example, brochure_type. Project instances created from the same template can have different values for their attributes. For example, TS001 might have Tri-fold as its brochure type, and TS002 might have Bi-fold.

In a typical HCL Marketing Operations installation, there are multiple project templates, and a particular attribute might be present in some templates and absent in others.

The behavior of the Not In operator

The operator, Not In, returns all instances of objects (for example, projects) that do not have the value of the attribute as given in the search, or if the object does not have the attribute itself. To illustrate, if you search for all Fruits that do not have black colored seeds, this search returns fruits that do not have black colored seeds AND fruits that are seedless, since seedless fruits do not have black colored seeds.

Consider the following example:

  • Template1 has a custom tab, Business, that contains the attribute BusinessUnit.
  • Template2 does not have the Business custom tab (hence it does not contain the BusinessUnit attribute).
  • Two projects are created from Template1:
    • Project1 is created with "Insurance" as the value for BusinessUnit.
    • Project2 is created with "Banking" as the value for BusinessUnit.
  • Two projects are created from Template2: Project3 and Project4.

Assume that you create a search with the following criteria:

[All Templates] -> [BusinessUnit] -> [Not In] -> [Insurance]

This search returns Project2, Project3, and Project4, since none of these projects has BusinessUnit = Insurance.