Currently if we export small reports from dashboards an excel file is downloaded. But if you export larger reports you are sent a csv file in an email. This introduces a number of issues:
- We have TONS of instances where the email is never received (We have many open tickets on this)
- There are file size issues when emailing csvs
- If you’re exporting timeline entries, the csv format gets messed up if there are special characters in the timeline entry, whereas the entries are exported fine in excel format.
My request is that instead of emailing csv files, you tar the excel file (similar to how you do that for bionic rule job results) and download that immediately.
In addition - having to wait for an emailed export is a productivity disruption. You have to stop what you were doing while you’re waiting for the file to arrive (if it does) then pick it back up once you have the file. Emailing large files is not a robust solution.
+1. I have also had the experience recently where the amount of data is so large that it only sends about half in the CSV, and the rest has to be retrieved from two separate links. Definitely has been confusing for my leaders.
It is quite problematic to have an export process that produces a different format depending on the size of the data - that simply does not make sense and makes it difficult to implement external processes that use exported data. Having the actual data incorrectly manipulated based on the exported format also needs to be resolved. This has made doing external reporting using exported data more difficult.