topic Re: Need help with list operation in Workato Pros Discussion Board

Need help with list operation

Bhagya_pola — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 12:54:26 GMT

Currently I am trying to map list items

Currently, when the entire list has no data, the output is generated in the following format:

{ "list": [{}, {}, {}] }

However, if the list is completely empty, I don’t want the array to appear at all in the output payload. The list field should be entirely omitted, with no empty objects or placeholders included.

Is there a workaround to conditionally exclude this field from the output when no data is present?

Re: Need help with list operation

gary1 — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:27:01 GMT

I've never found a simple solution for this problem, so I use a Ruby action with this code to recursively remove null/blank keys. Hopefully someone has a native or better way of doing this.

def deep_compact(obj) case obj when Hash obj.each_with_object({}) do |(k, v), h| cleaned = deep_compact(v) h[k] = cleaned unless cleaned.nil? || cleaned == "" end when Array obj.map { |v| deep_compact(v) }.reject { |v| v.nil? || v == "" } else obj end end

Re: Need help with list operation

Bhagya_pola — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:31:33 GMT

Thank you, @gary1
For ease of explanation, I have shown CDM here however, the actual scenario deals with SAP RFC – Send IDoc. CDM in this context refers to the SAP IDoc structure only and is used purely for representation. There is no downstream processing involved everything required must be handled entirely within the SAP step.

Re: Need help with list operation

gary1 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:36:32 GMT

I don't think you can solve this issue in the input of the SAP step. You need to pre-process the data to remove the empty objects from the array (using the Ruby I provided) and then map the output of the Ruby action into the input of SAP step.

I can't guarantee this will work for your exact situation, but it has worked for me in similar situations before.

Re: Need help with list operation

francbaviello — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 08:49:32 GMT

Hi, before populating the structure as you showed, you could add an "if" condition (new action) to check for array size > 0 and after then add a var list (new action) that populates the structure as a dynamic list.

Re: Need help with list operation

Nadella_Rajesh — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 05:03:35 GMT

Use Compact method to remove the empty arrays