Easymorph data catalog : can you handle multiple tab excel files?

Feature requests
1

Hi team,

This is a question and eventually a feature request. Can you manage a computed dataset as catalog item generating multiple tabs in excel as output ? Which means several output tables. I don’t think so because I think that currently only one table can be exported, with a flag to determine what is the result table.

This may be a new feature although its not easy to manage as I don’t really know what you would do in this case if the user was choosing csv instead of excel.

2

Hi Romain,

I would suggest using the “Computed file” item type instead of the “Dataset” item type. The “computed file” item type should use a workflow that dynamically generates an Excel file with multiple tabs, puts it into the Public folder, and returns the relative path to the file as the 1st value in the 1st column of the result dataset.

3

Hi Dmitry,

It can not work in our case because we prevent users from downloading any file (because of security, each user has its own rows visibility). Computed dataset in this case enables us to manage download of results without having to download files. On the contrary, computed files need the privilege to download files.

By the way the logic of the relative path seems curious. I mean it seems to be the path relatively to the workspace root folder. Until there no problem. But it appears that if the user does not have the same folder path than the server, the download will fail.

Example : you store your file in Marketing\MyFile.xlsx on the server, Marketing is a folder under the root workspace folder, something very related to the server. If the user wants to download that in “Documents” and if he does not create a “Marketing” file there it will fail. That’s a bit curious to use the same path between server and client. I would expect the file is just downloaded where the user wants it to be. It seems to me as a bug that I have already raised during beta testing.

4

Hi Romain,

Yes, if downloading files is prohibited, downloading a computed file won’t work. Hmm… we might need to think about adding a way for private downloads similar to downloading computed datasets.

Possible workarounds:

  • Use a “Workflow” item to send the multi-tab spreadsheet to the user by email, or
  • Use a “Computed URL” item with a workflow that uploads the file to a personal user folder (e.g. in OneDrive or SharePoint) and then opens the URL of the folder in a browser
2 Likes
5

I understand, thanks for your help !