Insert Text Column to allow blanks

Feature Requests
1
  1. What is your feature/integration request? Currently the insert text column feature errors out if you leave the value of the data as blank. It would be helpful to insert a column without values. Make that an option.
  2. What problem would this feature/integration solve?
    In my case I need to add items to an order and each item must have an order id that is auto assigned by the service provider. This means I have to add the orderid to each line item that will be added to the order using the API export. I also need to add an date that the item was ordered.
  3. How do you solve/workaround this problem today? A flow branch first refreshes the session variable using an api enhance, a current date and time string is returned and used as the order name, an order is created using an API export, I then refresh the session again to create a delay before requesting the order ID using api enhance, then I have to create columns in the main data that match the columns from the create order branch, then stack tables, then search and remove the fake values added in the create column step, then sort, then fill down.

There should be an easier way to append date from a single line dataset to a multi line dataset.

2

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for the feature request! Happy to share a workaround to generate an empty text column.

You can first use the "Insert Text Column" step to insert a column where all row values contain a single space (" "). Next, you can use the "Find and Replace" step find all instances of " " in the previously inserted column, and replace the value with a blank. This should generate a totally blank column.

Does this seem like it would be a suitable workaround for your use case? Let me know!

3

That’s essentially what I’ve done as a work around.