Iteration and Conditional Activities in Azure Data Factory

We have discussed the For Each activity in a previous post. In today’s post, let’s have a look at other Iteration and conditional Activities in Azure Data Factory.

In the Data Factory UI, the list of Activities has been neatly classified into groups. The group of activities that we are going to discuss in this post are under Iteration and Conditionals.

We see five activities listed under Iteration and conditionals, let’s go through each of these activities briefly:

1. Filter: As the name suggests, this activity is designed to filter a list of items (array), based on some Condition.

2. For Each: This is the main activity in Data Factory that is used for creating loops (e.g. looping through files in a folder.) As mentioned before, this activity has been discussed in more detail in a previous post.

3. If Condition: Like the IF condition in SQL (or any programming language), the IF condition in Data Factory, has two activity placeholders, one for when the condition is True and the other one for False. E.g.  If condition can be used to execute two different pipelines (using Execute Pipeline activity) based on a particular condition.

4. Switch: This activity evaluates the switch expression and then executes a particular set of activities that match that condition evaluation.

5. Until: This is the Data Factory implementation of the Do-while loop. This activity keeps looping a set of activities until the condition evaluates to true.

With all the above iterations and conditional activities, Data Factory provides a good platform for designing data transformations and control flows.

These activities will be discussed in detail in future posts.