Cannot customise 'Create CSV Table'

[Anonymous]

Hi. I'm really struggling with the 'Create CSV Table' flow when importing date from a Sharepoint List.

The interface is completely unintuitive to me. When I create the CSV table with Columns set to 'Automatic' everything works fine, but it's not often that a whole list is useful as a CSV. When I change the Columns selection to 'Custom' everything falls down. I get what the UI designer is going for - placing individual column names into the expanding menu of columns, but the output doesn't work at all. Specifically, everything is on one line and many escape characters are included. Can anybody provide some documentation on exactly how to use this feature? It will be very useful to me but at the moment I can't figure it out at all.

[v-monli-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

I'm investigating on this issue and will get back once I got any update.

Regards,

Mona

[Anonymous]

Thank you - It's good to know that these boards are monitored.

Please feel free to ask me for any details relating to how I'm using the feature if it will help you to bug hunt.

[v-monli-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

Would you please share the whole configuration of this flow? Including the columns setting of the csv file?

Regards,

Mona

[Anonymous]

Sure:

I have a list of worksites. Column names are like:

Name;Latitude;Longitude;Elevation;Hazards;Last Inspected;

1 - Select flow 'Copy Shareporint List items into a CSV each week'

2 - Opt to use my SharePoint Account

3 - 'Get Items'

    3.1 Select my Sharepoint Site

    3.2 Select my List Name

4 - 'Create CSV Table'

5 - 'Get Current Time' unchanged from default option utcnow();

6 - 'Create File'

  6.1 Select a subdirector in my 'Onedrive for Business' account

7 - Select Save Flow

8 - Run Flow

  8.1 - Flow takes approximately 2 seconds to run

  8.2 - Out out is the whole list in CSV format, looks like I would expect (some information blurred in screenshot)

Now - I want to customise this to only output a few columns.... Back into 'Edit Flow'

9 - Select 'Columns' to 'Custom'

  9.1 - Use the dynamic selector to add column names to the required header columns, in this case I have selected Name, Laititude and Longitude

  My expectation is that this would result in a CSV file with:

       Headers in the columns

      The Headers called 'Name', 'Latitude', and 'Longitude'

      The date in those columns corresponding to the list columns 'Short Name', 'Latitude' and 'Longitude'

10 - Save the flow 

11 - Run the flow

  11.1 - Flow takes 40 seconds (flow using 'default' attributes took 2)

12 View CSV file:

  CSV File is all on one line. Data is not consitend (some list content is concatenated), lots of ascii control characters (\r\n)

  Basically, a mess.

 I'm happy to send the full output file to the Microsoft team for a look, but I won't paste it to a public forum.

Hope that helps.

Dan

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I was able to do this by using the "Data Operation" "Select".

First I get the list items, then I use the Select Data Operation and you can set it up to get the columns you need, and finally to create the CSV table, instead of using your current input, just use the Output from the Select Data Operation, and that`s it, you get the CSV file with only the columns you need.

Please let me know if this worked and if you were able to try this.

Regards.

[luuminhvuong93]

@Anonymous Hi there, could you please kindly share the photo of all the steps?

I have never used flow , so it is hard for me to imagine how everything works

[Anonymous]

Sure,

Well, first you get the items from SharePoint or wherever you need.

Then, you add a "Data Operations - Select" action, this gives you the ability to select only the columns you need.

Then, the output of the previous action, use it as input in a "Data Operations - Create CSV Table".

And in the end what I did was to send the CSV file as an attachment.

Does it make sense?

See the screenshots for more references.

Regards.

[Anonymous]

Hi @Anonymous , @Anonymous , @luuminhvuong93

I see that in the screen shot of the CSV file there are columns that have encrypted data like @data">.. , i got the same too and i didn't know how to fix it so it become like a normal text value

Any ideas ? solutions ?

Thank you everyone

[DudelerDad]

I can't thank you enough for showing how to email this file. I had given up and thought this was impossible.

As for the formating of some of the fields I found that using different Dynamic content such as Field 'Value' if available helps. Why all fields don't have a field value I have no idea. 

I'm still struggling with formating the Date field that I want to import. I assume I need to use Apply to each.

[Anonymous]

I find that I can modify Dynamic content dates as follows:

• formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'yyyy-MM-dd')

But I cannot click the Expressions tab containing the SharePoint list fields and use the same technique on those date fields (such as date created or date modified). Hoping someone will tell us how to do that.

Bill

[Anonymous]

Using the Select to get only the columns I needed is great! However, the SendAnEmail action failed to concatenate the ".csv" file extension onto the filename. Therefore, when receiving the email, a double-click of the attachment will not open the file in Excel as expected. And if I use "Save As" to save the attachment to desktop and then force Excel to open it, I get all CSV columns in Column A, which is unacceptable.

Now, if I add ".csv" during the "Save As" and then double-click the file, it opens perfectly in Excel. But I need to get that .csv file extension concatenated onto the filename. Perhaps you have that in the "Attachment Name" field?

Can you share the full concat() command that is in the "Attachment Name" field? Hoping that's where you add the ".csv".

Thanks,

Bill

[Anonymous]

You are right, it is in the concat function where I added the extension, so yes, it would be something like

concat('MyFile','.csv'), or you can just select any dynamic content and then adding .csv in the end manually.

Hope this helps.

Thanks.

[gamoraes]

Hi All and specialy @Anonymous 

I hope you have succeeded. Can you please close this thread by accepting a solution that was essential to your success?

For the other questions in this thread:

I came across this problem too, my solution was to use in each custom column this function, changing 'FIELDNAME' to the name of a field, and this work's

item()?['FIELDNAME']

@Anonymous, you can combine the previous function with your function, like

formatDateTime(item()?['FIELDNAME'],'dd-MM-yyyy')

@Anonymous a trick that i use is:

1. Open the expression panel
2. Type an 'a'
3. Click in DynamicField panel
4. Choose the DynamicField
5. Remove the '@' and '{}' from start and and
6. Remove the 'a' typed
7. Use funcions with this field 
8. Be happy 😄

@DudelerDad onyl lookup,option and user fields have an 'Value', other fields the value is embedded in them

@Anonymous  Thanks for the prefect sample!!!

Best Regards,

Gustavo Moraes

Community Super User
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly. And give me a kudo to make me more happy!