As the name indicates, this feature allows reading of multiple rows into AgilePoint NX process data and writing back process data into multiple rows of the selected Excel. The operations that happen on the Excel, happen on a specified table in the selected Excel.
Prior to this feature being introduced in AgilePoint NX 7.0 SU2, the existing Excel tasks, worked only at cell level i.e. at named field level but if you had to work with table of rows in excel, you had to write some kind of SOAP or REST service wrapper with logic to read such data. Now that you have OOTB activity to deal with rows in Excel, the main benefit, from designer’s perspective is that this approach simplifies the task of reading and writing data to excel tables and significantly improves the development speed. It is easier to maintain. From execution perspective, since the number of operations reduce, the task execution is much faster.
Please refer to the following short video to get familiar with how these new workflow actions work.
Please, Can you specify the structure that the Excel design template should have for “read excel table” activity? In the mapping schema there isn’t any field in excel (and I have marked the firt row’s cells with a name).
This blog post is talking about reading an excel table an not about reading individual named fields from excel. So in order to get this to work, create a table in excel by using insert table option in excel with few columns. Please make sure you include column headers in table and give the column header some meaningful names. By default it will be column 1, column 2 etc. but give them better names as shown in video (EmpName, EmpID etc.) as that is what is going to show up in schema mapper.
When I complete the steps above, I get an error that says Please create parent Schema. Thoughts?
Please disregard, I was using ‘Excel Write’ not the Write Excel Table. What would the Excel Write be used for?
Excel write is used for writing data to named fields in an excel form. It is not meant for handling multiple rows. I had a blog post on this topic as well
https://www.agilepointnxblog.com/read-data-from-excel-sheet-and-populate-on-eforms/
So if you have an excel form which uses named fields, you could use excel read/write activities but if you have to deal with table with multiple rows, use excel table workflow actions.