Overwriting Formatted Excel Temp While Generating Excel by Export Data from Data store entities smart service.

Unfortunately that's how the Export Excel to DSE smart service works.

To clarify on one bit: it does NOT "overwrite a template" because it does not accept a "template".  What you're doing is having it update an existing document (the closest you can get with this node), and as you've found, it completely overwrites all formatting etc.

If you need to use a base template (which is something I always require for customer-facing exports also), the best you're going to be able to get is to use the Excel Tools plug-in and use the (deprecated, but still working) "CDT to Excel" node.

hi Mike Schmitt 

This is very helpful and thanks for the same.  Is it considered 'okay' to use deprecated plugins ?  Do you know if Appian is working on fixing this perhaps ?

A lot of people still use it. I wouldn't recommend it for new applications personally. I don't think Appian is working on fixing this as it has been an issue for a long time (as you can see from Mike's link )

Personally, the current supported way is to have the user export the data in a way that they can feed their formatted template making it a 2 step process.

For a more robust way of doing this, I would look at perhaps leveraging Microsoft Graph API to do this:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/excel?view=graph-rest-1.0

rajj said:

Is it considered 'okay' to use deprecated plugins ? 

I consider it "okay" to use (at your own risk) deprecated functions where no sufficient replacement has been provided yet.  Note that the plug-in itself has NOT been deprecated, just the "export CDT" and "export SQL" to Excel smart services that used to be supported within the Excel Tools plug-in.

However between my prior comment (4 months ago) and now, I've found there's an even better, non-deprecated solution: a new plug-in called "Export JSON to Excel", which works a lot like "export CDT" (except doesn't require you to specify an actual CDT for it to work, which is an improvement), and also accepts a base template again, which they've never bothered to add back into the "export DSE to excel" OOB smart service.

Thanks Mike.  I'll try to see if our security team will approve using this Export JSON to Excel third party plugin by "Xebia" as they typically only allow Appian authored plugins in our IL5 environments.

If it helps, all cloud-approved plug-ins are vetted (down to a source code level, as far as I remember) by Appian, before being posted to the AppMarket.  Also you can download the plugin itself for intricate examination.  And of course the plugin is running on your instance, so generally speaking it would have nothing to do with the authoring company at the end of the day (at least, as long as you also believe Appian's code vetting was done correctly).

If it helps, all cloud-approved plug-ins are vetted (down to a source code level, as far as I remember) by Appian, before being posted to the AppMarket.  Also you can download the plugin itself for intricate examination.  And of course the plugin is running on your instance, so generally speaking it would have nothing to do with the authoring company at the end of the day (at least, as long as you also believe Appian's code vetting was done correctly).

Thanks Mike.

This plugin works like magic leaving even images from my original template untouched.  Thanks for sharing Mike !

Great, thanks for confirming.  Likewise, I wish I'd known about this one sooner myself.