Define Excel column's sequence in Integrity Excel Integration add-in.

[gajananhole]

Hi.

As per our users requirement, we have to define the column sequence in predefined order. I came to know from PTC Support  "Integrity doesn’t function to control the fields order in mapping file. The order will always be random as it’s using a HashMap (unordered data structure) to store them."

I would like to ask PTC to have this feature to order the column order.

Also, please help me if there is alternative way to achieve this.

[chirag_kpit]

Hi Gajanan,

Yes, you can manually create the sequence of columns.

For this you need to enable the developer options in excel and use import mapper and using this mapper you can drag and drop the fields to the desired column.

Regards,

Chirag Agarwal 

[LLawton]

I think there is a misunderstanding: yes, you can drag and drop as you wish when you create your spreadsheet manually after importing the map.

But if you create your spreadsheet with a direct import (Get Items), then as explained above, the order of fields is random.

As an example, I have a mapping for an Issue type that defines "ID, Project, Title, Severity, Comments" as the mapped fields in that order because that's what I want to see in any new spreadsheet where I perform a Get Items command.

But the results could be "Comments, Severity, Project, ID, Title". Obviously this makes no sense.

We could predefine empty spreadsheets, or any other kind of workarounds, but that's not user-friendly.

So it would be nice to be able to control the default order of mapped columns. I don't know if Microsoft allows that, but it's worth investigating.

[gajananhole]

You are right LLawton, XLM columns are stored as HashMap  that's why columns order is not guaranteed and always be random. For columns pre-defined order, PTC has to change the implementation. As an alternative, I have created template with required column order (as Chirag has mentioned) and asked users to use the template.

Thanks for your comments.