In today’s world of sophisticated software solutions, sometimes it’s those that are simple, yet powerful, that stand the test of time. Since its inception many years ago, Excel has emerged as one of those tools preferred by business users (whether used as intended, or not!).
From pivot tables to visualizations, Excel is used pervasively throughout an organization. With our upcoming major release, Excel now plays a pivotal role in your AgilePoint deployment. But first, a little history lesson.
As part of our Citizen Developer focus in AgilePoint NX v7.0, we introduced a native, drag-and-drop data designer called Data Entity. This meant that Citizen Developers no longer needed Database Administrator skillsets to design tables to use and store data in an application, as it could be done directly within the browser by point and click. For those less technical designers, this represented a huge productivity boost, that’s about to get a whole lot more powerful in AgilePoint NX v8.0.
So, what’s new?
In our next release, we’ve opened up the ability to automatically create tables in Data Entity via upload of an Excel file – a feature we’re calling ‘Excel Import.’ Now, rather than creating your tables manually in AgilePoint, simply create an Excel spreadsheet that lists all of the columns for your new object, fill any additional rows with data, and simply upload it to AgilePoint.
However the support for Excel is not limited to creating new entities only. Once the Data Entity is created, you could continue importing more data into these entities using the Excel Import feature.
Armed with AgilePoint NX, information stored in massive Excel files can now be neatly integrated with enterprise users and processes in minutes.
Why is this important?
Well, as we mentioned earlier in the post, the focus of our past two releases has been to make our renowned, powerful application design capabilities easier to use by non-developers, and this is the latest addition to support that vision. By automating the creation of your application data model, you’ve now opened up well-governed, end to end self-service application development. No longer do your Citizen Developers need to wait for IT to provision tables, they are now fully empowered to solve their own problems at the speed the business needs.
To know more about the Excel Import feature, please watch the following video.
Please note that at time of recording this video, this feature was in Beta and it is expected to go through few minor UI changes by the time it is generally available. Moreover this video was recorded on top of AgilePoint NX v7.0 hence the Data Entity UI would look a bit different from the new UI used in AgilePoint NX v8.0 i.e. the release in which the feature would be made available.
Hello!
This is an excellent enhancement, one that will surely be helpful. Updating mass records has been one feature greatly desired.
One quick follow up – would it be possible to export the data along with the template? makes edits and reupload?
Yes. You can export data and re-import it back. If you look at the video, I already showed how existing records will be updated and new ones would be inserted. I covered export as a template and export as a data works pretty much on similar lines.
Lets say I have an Excel sheet that is auto-generated with updated data (only data records) on a regular schedule by another system. Can I create a process activity that would follow a rule set and auto update my Data Entity with the latest data set? and not have to manually import
Though technically you could do this through a excel read activity used in a process model, it depends on how much data you are trying to process. If your excel sheet has say less than 100 rows, you can perhaps take this approach. However the thing to keep in mind is that AgilePoint is not a data migration tool and processing huge loads using process is not a good idea as you would end up blocking precious engine resources for this. A better way to do this using AgileConnector framework which can handle high volume batch jobs.