DS to Excel smart service

RE: DS to Excel smart service

ankitab0001 — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 13:36:25 GMT

Thanks for the clarification. I tried this myself by providing the template in the said field. The good news is that the smart service is retaining the existing contents of the template and creating the new output as well, however, it is not retaining the excel formatting.

RE: DS to Excel smart service

Mike Schmitt — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 11:56:27 GMT

[quote userid=""19507""]We can provide the excel base template in "Document to update" field[/quote]

I've tried this and it does not work how you think. The formatting in the Document to Update gets completely overwritten with unformatted information once the smart service is run. Additionally it's hard to use a base template for this use case because the file passed in will be overwritten with the new version, whereas document generation smart services that take in a base template always leave the original template file untouched and create a new output file instead.

RE: DS to Excel smart service

Raghuvaran Nagarajan — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 11:21:36 GMT

[quote userid="19507" url="~/discussions/f/general/17190/ds-to-excel-smart-service/67832"]"Document to update" field.[/quote]

This field is used to update a different sheet in a workbook already created by another smart service node. This will create a new version of the given document not a copy of the document.

RE: DS to Excel smart service

Raghuvaran Nagarajan — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 11:18:48 GMT

vetrivelk,

With the new OOTB Export DS to excel smart service you can't control the formatting of the excel workbook columns. It will be set based on the source CDT's (table/view) field type. If you are using a table entity on this smartservice, I would recommend creating a view (it can be just select * ) for the table and using a new CDT only for document generation.

Because if there is any expectation to do basic formatting on the excel content like displaying date/time in a specific format or displaying Boolean as TEXT then these formatting has to be done in the view and appian will just export it.

Thanks, Raghu

RE: DS to Excel smart service

ankitab0001 — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 04:49:36 GMT

Can you confirm if you are talking about this smart service?

We can provide the excel base template in "Document to update" field.

RE: DS to Excel smart service

Mike Schmitt — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 03:07:18 GMT

Unlike the Excel Tools smart services like CDT to Excel or SQL to Excel, the DS to Excel OOTB smart service does not allow use of an excel base template at all, which is a big missed opportunity. This means it's not possible to preformat any columns for data type or even for width, headers, filters or the like.

RE: DS to Excel smart service

ankitab0001 — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:54:57 GMT

vetrivelk

Why don't you try changing the template. Make the column of type integer. The text value from the cdt will not get affected there.