There are no native actions to either filter a data table or to create an HTML table in PAD (which you need to pass a
table to the body of an email). You can do both, but need some processing to do it.
When it comes to filtering a table of data that you get from Excel, there are a few options:
1. You could read all the data, then create a new table, loop through the data and add the relevant rows to your new table. This is the easiest way to do it, but requires the most actions.
2. You could run a SQL query to the Excel file and add the filters as a WHERE clause in the SQL query. This requires certain drivers to be installed on your machine to support SQL queries to Excel. It is not as straightforward, but is more efficient and requires less actions.
Your flow is doable, but there is no native way to filter data tables in PAD currently. So, you will either need to read all of the data from your Excel sheet and then loop through the resulting data table while getting the rows that are relevant to you and adding them to a new table, or use a SQL connection to the Excel file to extract only the relevant rows right away.
However, since you need to convert your table to an HTML table, meaning you would anyhow need to loop through each row to add the relevant HTML tags, I suggest extracting all the data from Excel and then having a filter condition in the part of the flow that creates your HTML table.
To do that, you first need to extract the data from Excel. This is quite simple:
This will result in your data in a variable called %ExcelData% like this:
Here's a snippet for the code to read the file (you can paste this directly into the PAD designer and the actions will be automatically created for you):
Excel.LaunchExcel.LaunchAndOpenUnderExistingProcess Path: $'''{directory}\\Test 0629.xlsx''' Visible: True ReadOnly: False Instance=> ExcelInstance
Excel.GetFirstFreeColumnRow Instance: ExcelInstance FirstFreeColumn=> FirstFreeColumn FirstFreeRow=> FirstFreeRow
Excel.ReadFromExcel.ReadCells Instance: ExcelInstance StartColumn: $'''A''' StartRow: 1 EndColumn: FirstFreeColumn - 1 EndRow: FirstFreeRow - 1 ReadAsText: False FirstLineIsHeader: True RangeValue=> ExcelData
Excel.CloseExcel.Close Instance: ExcelInstance
The next step is creating the HTML table. A HTML table is usually set as follows:
<table>
<tr>
<th>header1</th>
<th>header2</th>
...
</tr>
<tr>
<td>value1</td>
<td>value2</td>
...
</tr>
...
</table>
As mentioned, there is no native way to convert a table in PAD into an HTML table. So, you need to loop through your table and create the appropriate variables.
Step one is setting up the headers of your table. They should each be encapsulated in <th> </th> tags that are also within a row that is as a whole encapsulated in <tr> </tr> tags.
The following steps would create a variable that stores your headers:
What it does is it loops through the column headers of your table. They are accessible via either %ExcelData.Columns% (results in a list variable) or %ExcelData.ColumnHeadersRow% (results in a data row variable), adds them to a separate list with the appropriate tags and then joins it to a single string.
Here's the code snippet for this part:
Variables.CreateNewList List=> TableHeaders
LOOP FOREACH CurrentColumnName IN ExcelData.Columns
Variables.AddItemToList Item: $''' <th>%CurrentColumnName%</th>''' List: TableHeaders
END
Text.JoinText.JoinWithDelimiter List: TableHeaders StandardDelimiter: Text.StandardDelimiter.NewLine DelimiterTimes: 1 Result=> TableHeaders
SET TableHeaders TO $''' <tr>
%TableHeaders%
</tr>'''
At the end of it all, you will end up with headers that look like this:
When you're done with that, you need to apply a similar approach to your rows. You can loop through the entire data table getting each row. However, since you need every cell to be added as a column value, you will in fact need two nested loops - one for the rows and then for each value within the row. So, the following set of actions will handle the entire table body dynamically, regardless of how many columns and rows you have:
And here's the snippet:
Variables.CreateNewList List=> TableBody
LOOP FOREACH CurrentRow IN ExcelData
Variables.CreateNewList List=> TableRow
LOOP FOREACH CurrentItem IN CurrentRow
Variables.AddItemToList Item: $''' <td>%CurrentItem%</td>''' List: TableRow
END
Text.JoinText.JoinWithDelimiter List: TableRow StandardDelimiter: Text.StandardDelimiter.NewLine DelimiterTimes: 1 Result=> TableRow
SET TableRow TO $''' <tr>
%TableRow%
</tr>'''
Variables.AddItemToList Item: TableRow List: TableBody
END
Text.JoinText.JoinWithDelimiter List: TableBody StandardDelimiter: Text.StandardDelimiter.NewLine DelimiterTimes: 1 Result=> TableBody
The body will then look like this:
Finally, at the very end, you need to concatenate the headers and the body, and encapsulate them in the <table> </table> tags like so:
I added the border=1 there to add a table border, but you can use all sorts of other HTML styling there, too.
This will result in a table that looks like this:
<table border = 1>
<tr>
<th>type</th>
<th>Customer name</th>
<th>date</th>
<th>curr.</th>
<th>amt.</th>
<th>others</th>
<th>Contract NO.</th>
<th>Category</th>
<th>Reiceiver list</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>194301</td>
<td>China telecom Sichuan</td>
<td>20230628</td>
<td>CNY</td>
<td>341461,89</td>
<td>227693</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td>{sanitized}</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>194301</td>
<td>China telecom Yunnan</td>
<td>20230627</td>
<td>CNY</td>
<td>323343,39</td>
<td>10TX2500228631</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td>{sanitized}</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>194301</td>
<td>China telecom Guangdong</td>
<td>20230628</td>
<td>CNY</td>
<td>24781,24</td>
<td>00110TX2500276281</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td>{sanitized}</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>194301</td>
<td>China telecom Sichuan</td>
<td>20230629</td>
<td>CNY</td>
<td>504562,55</td>
<td>2022</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td>{sanitized}</td>
</tr>
</table>
If you put that into an HTML editor, you'll see the output is like this:
Now, to add that to an email message, all you need to do is put the %Table% variable into the body, next to some text depending to your needs. And you need to enable the Body is HTML setting in the Send email action:
This will get you the desired table in the email body.
Also, for the filtering part, you could actually do a filter while adding rows to your HTML table. So, if you want to only include rows that have a specific email address, you could do a condition in the row loop like so:
This will skip all the actions for the specific row if the email address is not what you check for in the condition. I would suggest storing the email in a variable, but for the sake of simplicity, I hardcoded it here (and then removed the actual value to get through the spam filters for this forum).
You can apply the same conditions for other columns, too.
(Note that I included the typo in "Reiceiver list" on purpose as it's also there in your Excel sheet).
Here's a full snippet of the entire flow for you to copy and paste to your designer (including the row filter condition):
Excel.LaunchExcel.LaunchAndOpenUnderExistingProcess Path: $'''{directory}\\Test 0629.xlsx''' Visible: True ReadOnly: False Instance=> ExcelInstance
Excel.GetFirstFreeColumnRow Instance: ExcelInstance FirstFreeColumn=> FirstFreeColumn FirstFreeRow=> FirstFreeRow
Excel.ReadFromExcel.ReadCells Instance: ExcelInstance StartColumn: $'''A''' StartRow: 1 EndColumn: FirstFreeColumn - 1 EndRow: FirstFreeRow - 1 ReadAsText: False FirstLineIsHeader: True RangeValue=> ExcelData
Excel.CloseExcel.Close Instance: ExcelInstance
Variables.CreateNewList List=> TableHeaders
LOOP FOREACH CurrentColumnName IN ExcelData.Columns
Variables.AddItemToList Item: $''' <th>%CurrentColumnName%</th>''' List: TableHeaders
END
Text.JoinText.JoinWithDelimiter List: TableHeaders StandardDelimiter: Text.StandardDelimiter.NewLine DelimiterTimes: 1 Result=> TableHeaders
SET TableHeaders TO $''' <tr>
%TableHeaders%
</tr>'''
Variables.CreateNewList List=> TableBody
LOOP FOREACH CurrentRow IN ExcelData
IF CurrentRow['Receiver list'] <> $'''{SomeEmail}''' THEN
NEXT LOOP
END
Variables.CreateNewList List=> TableRow
LOOP FOREACH CurrentItem IN CurrentRow
Variables.AddItemToList Item: $''' <td>%CurrentItem%</td>''' List: TableRow
END
Text.JoinText.JoinWithDelimiter List: TableRow StandardDelimiter: Text.StandardDelimiter.NewLine DelimiterTimes: 1 Result=> TableRow
SET TableRow TO $''' <tr>
%TableRow%
</tr>'''
Variables.AddItemToList Item: TableRow List: TableBody
END
Text.JoinText.JoinWithDelimiter List: TableBody StandardDelimiter: Text.StandardDelimiter.NewLine DelimiterTimes: 1 Result=> TableBody
SET Table TO $'''<table border = 1>
%TableHeaders%
%TableBody%
</table>'''
Note that you will need to replace {directory} in the Launch Excel action with the actual folder path to where your file is located. You will also need to replace {SomeEmail} in the condition to actually filter for the applicable email address.
If I solved your question, please mark my answer as the solution.
Thank you.
