Integration Services

How are you planning on using this process model? Is it a one time import or is your plan to expose a form that allows a user to provide an excel file that is imported? Depending on the answer to that question, you will need to design your process model differently:

• If it's a one time import, you can upload the Excel file directly into your application using the New > Document button. Then, you can browse and find that Excel file in the Import Excel File to Database.
• If you want to upload the Excel file from a form, you need to create an interface and connect it to your process. I'd suggest looking at the Process Modeling Tutorial for an example on how to connect a form to your process.

Thanks

While navigating the Appian application I came to know that you can create a process model just to import the excel file into the appian database is that right?

My intention is to bring a set of records say 50 rows of data from the excel file to the appian database and display as records in appian and view the 50 rows of data in Appian. ( the 50 rows of data is an daily excel file which we get and we want to set a automated process to pick the daily file )

Secondly  After importing the Data I want to create a couple of metrics and display in reports ( Not sure how to get going with that)

After displaying the metrics in the reports I want to trigger a process flow say for an example out of 50 records which is displayed in appian say ten of my records satisfy a condition pick all the Product category =4  say 10 records satisfy the condition and then I want to send an email to all the ten product owners  to downgrade the 'Product Category = 1'.

Import Excel to Database Under the Integration service/ excel tools

To your question: yes you can create a process to import an Excel file into the database - to be honest that's the easy part. The tricky part is figuring out what else you want the process to do, and that's why I wanted to know if you want this to be a repeatable process or a one time process.

Since it sounds like you want to be able to import this with daily files, I'd suggest creating a form where you can upload the file. When you upload the file in your form, you can then use the file uploaded as the input for the node that imports the data into Excel. Once you have this process, you can then run it whenever you want to add new data.

If you want to automate it later, you can always add that in as an additional step in the process that retrieves the new file from some location. So really to get this working I'd suggest:

1. Creating a folder structure to store your files. See the page on managing documents for more information.
2. Create a form with a file upload where you can upload the file into that folder.
3. Create a process model and associate the form you created with that process. See the process modeling tutorial I linked above for more information on how to set this up.

Thanks very much appreciate it.

I'm very much confused in terms of where to start  like

I have an excel file which I want to read first and view the same records in Appian is my first task that I would like to accomplish.

The technical online academy courses give more hands on in  building the form and entering the Data manually and not clear on how to connect to a data source like excel file or Database where you have  the data already and use that data and create some business rule and build a process model.

Thanks

I think one thing that might help clarify is that the functionality Appian has for importing from Excel is primarily focused on runtime capabilities - for example, having an end user upload an Excel file and a process automatically parses the data to insert it into a database.

However, it sounds to me like you really want to use the Excel file as a design time data source so that as the developer, you can structure your application around it. In this case there isn't a true way to say "upload this Excel file and create application objects" - that's why my suggestion was creating a runtime process to do this, and the suggestion in the other post was to just directly import the Excel file into the database.

I tend to agree with the other poster that if you truly just want to get the data into your database, your best option is probably to just upload it directly as a CSV file. Then you can create objects like a custom data type, data store, and others to be able to query the table and use the results in Appian.