Export to Excel/CSV Smart Service with local data

Question

Hi all, 
 It has come to my recent attention that Excel Tools has recently deprecated the Export CDT to Excel Smart Service (looking at 2.0.2), leaving us with the Appian "Export to Excel/CSV" Smart Service to export data into Excel documents. However, we are unable to format the data from our Query into a format appropriate for our end user such as displaying a user's full name instead of their username (as stored in the database). As the end user does not see the username very often in our systems, showing the username in the Excel export may result in some confusion. 
 Some theories to solve this we have considered are as follows: 
 
 Use the Excel Tools plugins - Difficult - As the most recent version of Excel Tools has deprecated the Export CDT plugin and we are in a Cloud instance, getting an older version is quite difficult as we can only install the latest version of a plugin. 
 Use the "Custom Cell Positions" and "Custom Cell Values" to emulate this functionality - Bad Practice - As the Smart Service combines the query and the export together, we can't get the totalCount or dependant data without querying the service before the export, essentially querying twice for the same data. This is a practice I wan to avoid as it causes large datasets to have even larger bottlenecks. 
 
 Are there any other potential solutions that could be used?

Aditya GIll · Answer

Hi Thomas, 
 
You can create a scheduler process to write a new table XXX_users with (userId and full name) in the database and create a new view joining main table with XXX_users using the userId column. Take the export for this view only. 
 
Thanks

Abhay Giri · Answer

Hi Thomas, 
 
In my view, you can do below steps: 
 
1) if it is possible, then update your table and add one extra column to save user's full name as well and then your excel sheet will have user full name instead of user name only. 
 
or 
 
2) create a new table and store the user's , username, full name & primary key of your first table (basically create foreign key) and whenever you insert any record in your primary table then also insert the record in second table for that particular user.While fetching the data into Excel sheet, use a view which return the data by joining both table. 
 
If it helps you please let me know. 
 
Regards 
Abhay