CSV stands for "comma-separated values" and is a seasoned, proven, stable and cross-platform file format for exchanging data records of identical or similar structure. Most advanced, industry-strength software systems can read in and import CSV data files easily, including Microsoft Office Excel (for spread sheets) and Outlook (for contacts). Utilizing the sophisticated, customizable CSV data export solution provided by ExportZen can make your highly custom data transformation or migration processes and tasks so much easier and faster to accomplish.
In SharePoint 2007 (WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) ExportZen integrates one or more Export actions into the Actions menu of SharePoint List Views:
In SharePoint 2010 (Foundation and Server) ExportZen integrates one or more Export commands into its own Export to CSV menu inside the Connect & Export section of the List ribbon tab:
Clicking the menu item will let users download the SharePoint List data as a CSV file:
In addition to making CSV exports available interactively to end users as illustrated above, you can also utilize the same ExportZen capabilities for scheduled automation of server-side, unsupervised, background List data exports.
To make the above work, you need to tell ExportZen just a few preferences, by specifying for a given export use case (which can then be re-invoked time and again) some so-called Export Action Definition Settings, such as:
To do so, you just need to create at least one rule on the Export Actions page available via Site Settings / ExportZen Studio / Export Actions:
On the Export Actions page, simply create and save a new rule item to finally define your CSV Export action:
That's it! This CSV Export action you just defined is now available in the Actions menu of the specified Lists, and clicking it will download a CSV data file with only those columns you specified, fully reflecting all of your export action definition settings.
Your Export action may not show up in the Actions menu of SharePoint 2007 Document Libraries and other SharePoint 2007 Libraries, and in addition may not show up in List Actions menus of heavily customized SharePoint 2007 environments. (Such incidents have so far not yet been observed under SharePoint 2010 however.) To direct users to a CSV export of a given List, simply give them a link to http://your/web/site/url/_layouts/roxority_ExportZen/expo.aspx?exportlist=list_guid&rule=youraction — replacing, of course, the your/web/site/url part with your SharePoint Web Site URL, the list_guid URL parameter value with the GUID of the List to be exported and the youraction URL parameter value with the name of your export action.
The ExportZen setup package (the roxority_ExportZen.zip file) is a zipped archive containing:
Run Deploy.exe (under user account credentials added to the Farm Administrators group in Central Administration, on the "primary" SharePoint farm or web front-end server — in a multi-server farm environment, that is the server hosting Central Administration) and when the Welcome screen is displayed, click Next to start a series of system checks. To proceed with the installation, all system checks need to succeed:
Click Next and on the following screen, select the Web Applications to deploy ExportZen to. You can also de-select those Site Collections you do not want the setup wizard, upon successful deployment, to activate the ExportZen List Integration feature immediately for you on.
Click Next to start the installation and wait for the deployment jobs and Feature activation to complete. This process can take up to a few minutes.
After deployment and Feature activation have completed, review the installation log:
Once you have successfully completed the setup wizard, you can start defining Export Actions (via Site Settings / ExportZen Studio) immediately, as described in the Using the ExportZen CSV Data Export Feature for SharePoint Lists introductory topic.
The ExportZen List Integration feature is a SharePoint Site Collection-scoped Feature, which needs to be 'activated' on each Site Collection it is to be used in.
This feature needs to be activated if your Export Actions (defined under Site Settings / ExportZen Studio) should be offered to end users (via the "Actions" List toolbar menu and the "Connect and Export" ribbon group) to facilitate interactive invokation of your Export Actions.
The LegacyMigration.exe tool is needed if you intend to upgrade ExportZen from a previously or currently installed version lower than 1.6, to 1.6 or higher. Deploy.exe will detect whether the tool needs to be run in your environment, and inform you accordingly.
If this upgrade scenario applies to you and you haven't uninstalled ExportZen yet, good — don't do so until you have completed this tool successfully.
Prior to 1.6, ExportZen used its own List definition and custom field types so that ExportZen action definitions could be set up by admins and power users. Starting in 1.6, this overhead is no longer necessary, but keeping Lists and their Columns based on these legacy types in your content database WOULD compromise your SharePoint environment after upgrading to 1.6 because the underlying List definitions and Column types are no longer there.
It is therefore crucial to not just recycle but fully delete these legacy Lists. The LegacyMigration.exe tool first scans your entire SharePoint server farm for these legacy Lists when you click the scan button on the left. This first step is definitely completely harmless.
After the scan completes, all legacy Lists found are shown in the view on the left. Click the Backup/Export button on the right to first save all your export action definitions from your earlier installation to a file that you will be able to fully import (via Site Settings / ExportZen Studio / Transfer Wizard) into ExportZen 1.6 or higher later after the upgrade has been performed. This button will then attempt to delete all legacy Lists found, and will notify you about its success. All these legacy Lists will need to be deleted or the ExportZen deployment wizard (Deploy.exe) will simply refuse to perform the upgrade to 1.6 or higher.
The following settings can be customized for each Export Action by administrative users on the Export Actions page in your ExportZen Studio, accessible via Site Settings / ExportZen Studio / Export Actions:
(Text box)
This name will not be shown anywhere outside this page, but helps you stay organized.
(Descriptor for a set of SharePoint Web Sites)
Optionally select in which web sites this Export Action will be available. By default, it will be available in all web sites and this usually does not need to be changed during your first explorations within this software. Only perform changes if you are familiar with the terminology presented in the above property editor. Should your changes not result in the expected outcome, you can always easily set this back to "all web sites, no exceptions" and then resume experimenting incrementally with your exceptions.
To define the set of Web Sites, first select either Available in all Web Sites or Available in no Web Sites, then click the except... link to describe which web sites to exclude from that selection. You can exclude:
(Descriptor for a set of SharePoint Lists and Views)
Select in which Lists this export action will be offered as a menu item to end users (in the SharePoint 2007 "Actions" toolbar menu and in the SharePoint 2010 "Connect and Export" ribbon group (both only if the "ExportZen List Integration" Site Collection feature is activated too and for List Views, only with their Toolbar Type property set to Full or Show, not Summary or None).
To define the set of Lists, first select either Show in all Lists or Show in no Lists, then click the except... link to describe which Lists to exclude from that selection. You can exclude:
To define the set of Views, first select either Show in all Views or Show in no Views, then click the except... link to describe which Views to exclude from that selection. You can exclude:
(Text box)
Specify the caption for this CSV export action to be shown in the export menu item for the Lists specified above. (If you do not specify a caption, the above name for this export action will be used, or if blank, its internal ID.)
Default value for new Export Actions:
$Resources:Tool_ExportActions_DefTitle
(Text box)
Specify the description for this CSV export action to be shown in the export menu item for the Lists specified above.
(Text box)
Specify the List Columns (one per line) to include in that order in output CSV data files generated by this export action. (To rename a Column in the exported CSV, enter the List Column name, followed by a colon (:) and the CSV column name.) Be sure those Columns will be available in the exported List, otherwise the CSV column will remain empty.
Default value for new Export Actions:
Title
(Text box)
Optional: if you'd like ExportZen to append an additional column recording all version history per item (only for the Columns specified above, in a simple plain-text format), specify your preferred name for this CSV column here. Leave blank to not append a version history column.
Not applicable to User Profile exports via PeopleZen.
(Check box option)
Instead of keeping all version history in a single column, you can export each version in the history to its own row. These versions will appear underneath the data item row, in descending sort order, and in this case you'll need a separate CSV column to denote the version number of each history record. You need to enter this CSV column name (for example 'Version') above this check-box option if ticked.
Not applicable to User Profile exports via PeopleZen.
(Check box option)
If ticked, this export action only ever exports items included in the currently displayed List View, applying the View-defined default sort orders and filters (but not currently user-applied live sort order, filters or paging); otherwise, all List items are exported, unfiltered and in their original sort order.
Not applicable to User Profile exports via PeopleZen.
(Check box option)
If ticked, this export action only ever exports items included in the filtering currently applied to the applicable List View (only supports filters supplied by a currently connected FilterZen Filter Web Part).
(Check box option)
Not recommended unless you and your users intend to only ever open these CSV exports in Microsoft Office Excel AND Excel displays all comma-separated column values in a single cell (some internationalized Excel versions do that, some don't).
(Check box option)
If un-ticked, ExportZen generates CSV data files using escaping patterns (for critical characters such as commas, line-breaks and quotes) that software written for Windows or Office is more likely to read flawlessly. Tick this check box to generate CSV data files using UNIX-style escaping patterns instead (only recommended if you get errors while feeding your exported CSV data files to other, non-Office software).
(Culture picker)
This setting controls how numbers and dates are represented in this export. For example, dates may be stored in an US format (due to your SharePoint installation) but your export consumers may use a different-locale version of Excel (such as for example German), which would then mis-read and mis-represent factually-correct, but US-formatted date values. Keep the default choice to start with and experiment as needed if results do not meet expectations.
The drop-down menu provides all standard-defined regions. You can also choose from the following "dynamic" cultures:
The default choice is: Server-side 'current' locale.
(Encoding picker)
Only if your exports contain international characters that don't look as expected in external software importing this export should you start experimenting with different export encodings. The Unicode / UTF encodings are the recommended choices to test before trying other encodings. Keep this set to Default UNLESS your exported contents are not decoded correctly by external software that needs to consume this export in production.
The drop-down menu provides all standard-defined text encodings. The default choice is: Server-side default encoding, meaning the default encoding defined for the Windows and/or ASP.NET installation on the server.
(Check box option)
ONLY tick this option if you selected the UTF-8 encoding above AND your exported contents are not decoded correctly by the external software that needs to consume this export in production. Recommended for opening UTF-8 exports in Excel.
In a future release, ExportZen will offer a full-fledged SharePoint Timer Job integrated into Central Administration for scheduling automated CSV List data exports. Even in the current release however, the software provides a fully workable way for you to start automating and scheduling exports immediately. This involves only a few setup steps outlined in this topic.
When you successfully deployed ExportZen to your SharePoint environment, an executable file ExportZen.exe also got deployed to the file systems of your farm servers. The setup wizard (more specifically, the ExportZen WSP solution package) placed this executable in your "14 hive" (or your "12 hive" on SharePoint 2007), ie. the full executable path is most likely C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\roxority_ExportZen\ExportZen.exe (or a localized equivalent path).
Once you have defined a CSV export action, this action can also be invoked by the above command-line program. It takes three arguments:
Of course, you'll need to run ExportZen.exe at all times:
However, other than that you may invoke the tool in any way you wish, and do with its output file as you please.
Once you have experimentally and interactively tested that your export also works with the ExportZen.exe command-line utility too, you can schedule your exports using just the Task Scheduler that's part of Windows Server. (Naturally, the Task Scheduler service needs to auto-run for this.)
Apart from setting the path and arguments to ExportZen.exe as described in the above paragraph, you should make sure the task:
The following configuration settings are available to administrative users on the Configuration page in your ExportZen Studio, which you can access via Site Settings / ExportZen Studio / Configuration Settings.
Each setting has a global value scoped to the SharePoint server farm, and this value can optionally be overridden on the Site Collection level. The following settings are available:
ExportZen has been localized for multiple languages. Changing this setting affects all ExportZen user interfaces except captions and descriptions of Features, List Templates, Column Types, Content Types or Web Part Templates (those are always loaded directly by SharePoint based on the current Web Site locale).
You can pick one of the following options on the Configuration page in the ExportZen Studio:
By default, your ExportZen action commands co-exist together with the built-in, out-of-box 'Export to Excel' command. If you intend to fully replace that functionality with ExportZen, you can set whether and when to show (2007) / enable (2010) the built-in, out-of-box 'Export to Excel' command (affects both both the SharePoint 2007 List Actions tool-bar menu item and the ribbon button in the SharePoint 2010 'Connect and Export' section of the List Tools ribbon tab).
You can pick one of the following options on the Configuration page in the ExportZen Studio:
This specifies the text used to combine the export value representations of List Columns containing multiple values, such as multi-Choice and multi-Lookup Columns.
After you have customized this setting, you can click the Reset to Default Value link on the Configuration page in the ExportZen Studio to restore the following default value:
,
Some ExportZen end user-facing artifacts require (and load into the respective host pages) the jQuery library, version 1.4.4. Embedding jQuery more than once in a single page can cause JavaScript warnings in Internet Explorer with some few jQuery plugins (and only if any are used in your farm at all). On the Configuration page in the ExportZen Studio, tick this check box only if your master pages, web pages or third-party extensions also already include jQuery globally (not just on some individual pages) and independently of ExportZen to prevent ExportZen from loading jQuery too. If you do so, you need to make sure jQuery 1.4.4 or higher is loaded on each page hosting also hosting ExportZen user interface artifacts, or ExportZen will appear broken. This is a global default setting that can be optionally overridden locally where applicable.
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