Excel Tools Plug-in not supported in Portals – Alternatives

Question

I&rsquo;m working on publishing a Portal, and I&rsquo;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.

Mike Schmitt · Answer

The appian-native approach you would need to consider is a Web API and/or a Start Process call, and in either case you would configure it such that it launches a process model, which can then utilize whatever plug-in (or other smart services) you want, then pass the result back to the Portal form.

Mike Schmitt · Answer

I hope you didn't miss my earlier comment. No response or feedback to it makes me wonder. 
 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.

Harsha Sharma · Answer

Manikanta009 said: Would shifting the Excel logic into a process model (triggered from the Portal) be a valid workaround? 
 Yes! Create a process model to handle the excel functionalities and call the process model using start process or web api from the portal!

Shubham Aware · Answer

Moving to a process model and calling it from the portal is the standard workaround for this incompatibility.