Excel Tools Plug-in not supported in Portals – Alternatives

I’m working on publishing a Portal, and I’m seeing this warning:

Incompatible plug-in(s) detected. Refactor the portal object precedents to only use plug-ins compatible with portals. Using incompatible plug-ins can cause the published portal to error. Precedent(s) containing incompatible plug-in(s).

Has anyone dealt with this before?

  • What are the recommended alternatives for Excel Tools functions (like reading/writing Excel, parsing uploaded files, or exporting data) that work in Portals?

  • Are there any Appian-native approaches or other supported plug-ins I can use instead?

  • Would shifting the Excel logic into a process model (triggered from the Portal) be a valid workaround?

Any best practices or migration tips would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Hey — thanks for raising this. I ran into the same limitation.

    You can work around it by moving the excel-logic out of the portal itself. for example, have a web api or process model that handles reading/writing/parsing the excel, then the portal just talks to that service. that way the portal stays clean of incompatible plug-ins.

    If you want, I can sketch what that architecture looks like, or help you pick plug-ins or smart-services that play nicely with portals.

  • That would be great  a sketch of the architecture flow would help a lot. And yes, a shortlist of portal-safe plug-ins/smart services would be super useful too. That way I can see how the pieces fit together and know which components I can safely use without running into compatibility issues again.

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  • 0
    Certified Lead Developer
    in reply to Manikanta009
    1. I hope you didn't miss my earlier comment.  No response or feedback to it makes me wonder.
    2. As far as I'm aware, Portals currently do not allow any plug-in functions to be used (sadly this makes email validation hard, since it rules out Regex and/or the use of the People Functions rule that easily validates an email, but I was able to resort to my older OOB rule at least).  Any time plug-in funcitonality is required, as noted, one could make use of either a Web API or a Start Process handoff.