Question

using an excel file in the repository as a lookup source

Laserfiche Version 10

Updated June 7, 2017

asked on June 4, 2017

One of our customers attended Empower earlier this year, and they are adamantly claiming that in one of the classes the instructor said it is now possible (in 10.2) to use an Excel file in the repository as a lookup source in WF and Forms. Is that true?

I somehow strongly doubt it, but wanted to double-check.

For what it's worth, I've seen this feature in another ECM platform, so I know it's a possibility, but I also know LF generally recommends against using Excel spreadsheets as lookup sources.

The reason the customer brought this up is that, currently, they need to have a technical person go into SQL every time a change needs to be made on a database table, so they figure if it's an Excel file in the repo, any LF admin can edit it easily.

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replied on June 5, 2017

Not that I know of. Both support accessing Excel through ODBC which requires specifying a path on disk. I guess you could script exporting the file and placing it where you already defined a data source to read from.

As far as our recommendation against using Excel, that's because both Forms and Workflow are multi-threaded and Excel only allows one connection at a time. So you'd have to plan for processes suspending because they couldn't access the file.

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replied on June 7, 2017 • Show version history

The file can be on a server, but I seem to remember hearing that the document cannot be in the repository when people asked about that at Empower this year.

As Miruna said, the biggest problem would probably be threading anyway. If someone tried to run the process while a user was editing the file, it would inevitably cause an error.

However, something to consider as a sort of middle ground is that you could instead give them an Excel file they can edit, and create a Workflow that pulls that file for updating the SQL database.

OR, if you wanted to get really fancy you could try creating a Laserfiche Form that pulls the current table, allows users to edit the values, then kicks off a workflow to update the database.

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using an excel file in the repository as a lookup source

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