Read data from excel sheet

1

Hi Siddharth,

you can achieve this by importing the excel sheet and start sub workflows for each item list row.

Importing an excel sheet is explained here:
https://community.webcon.com/posts/post/importing-and-exporting-data-from-the-item-list/204

Multiple workflows can be started using the Start Workflows (SQL) action

If you search for this you will find a few results for example:

https://community.webcon.com/forum/thread/208?messageid=208
https://community.webcon.com/posts/post/starting-workflows-in-webcon-bps-actions/76

If you also want to store the started workflow ID in the item list row you can take a look here.
https://daniels-notes.de/posts/2021/series-expert-guide-part-7#starting-sub-workflows

Storing the workflow id will allow you to display the current step or other information in the item list and transform it into a dashboard.

Best regards,
Daniel

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your quick reply. Is it possible to automate this.
The excel file will be uploaded to any location example- HotFolder and then if it has 10 employee data rows, It should automatically initiate 10 instances of a workflow with pre-populated employee details.

Regards,
Siddharth

Hi Siddharth,

I wasn't aware of this, but there's an action to read data from an excel file
In this action you can define a reference in the excel file and the target field or item list.
An item list can be populated if you define a table in excel (format the area as a table).
See (1) in the image

The columns in the item list are populated based on the header. Similar to the import from excel action for an item list. Some recommendations:
1. Activate the "allow export" option on the item list to download a template
2. Boolean values need to be imported as 0 or 1 (2 in image)
3. If there is no header/misspelled header the column is not populated (3)
4. Verify whether you need to use . or , as a decimal separator.


If the user creating the excel file should use an easier template, you could create a second sheet on which the entered data of the user is transformed to the necessary format.

All in all you can:
- use the HotFolder to start the parent workflow
- add a timeout to move to the next step which populate the item list
- add another timeout to start the sub workflows

Of course you could do this all in one path, but I prefer to have a bit more control / error handling about such workflows.

Best regards,
Daniel