Hey Adam!
I’ve done something like this before, and I understand how the initial implementation can be kind of frustrating. What I ended up doing, to mitigate the execution of the data source microflow, was have a decision at the beginning of the data source microflow that checked if the association was already populated.
If it was, I wouldn’t call out to the REST api, otherwise I’d call out to retrieve the list of selectable values.
Hope this helps. Please let me know if you want some more help with this or if something isn’t clear.
Best of luck,
Austin
I managed to achieve this using entirely non-persistable entities. For each dropdown, I created a new many-to-many association to store the current data source for that dropdown. Then when the microflows were triggered to get the new data sources, I checked if the current data source and new data source had the exact same IDs, and if they did, I returned the current data source from the association, meaning that the value the dropdown had was no longer being wiped out.