Exporting To Excel Without Export To Excel Privilege

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Posted on by viperdudeuk

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I know the title looks like an oxymoron but let me explain.

The requirement is to have a button on the Account entity that allows a user to export to Excel/CSV data from a select entity and it's child entity. However the ability to OOB Export to Excel needs to be disabled for data security reasons.

What is the best approach for this? I have considered a 3rd party site that connects to the web service and dynamically constructs the data and presents as a file download. Is there another way here that doesn't need a 3rd party site?

Any advice appreaciated

Jon

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Hi viperdudeuk ,

you have 3 possibilities:

1) Full excel format > Plugin + OpenXml (or external component) + ILMerge: create a plugin which build a full xml file by OpenXml library, create an annotation record with xlsx extension and attach it to your entity, then merge openxml dll to your plugin and register it

2) Fake excel format > Plugin: create a plugin which build a html string, create an annotation record with xls extension, and attach it to your entity, then merge openxml dll to your plugin and register it

3) CSV format > Plugin: create a plugin which build a csv string, create an annotation record with csv extension, and attach it to your entity, then merge openxml dll to your plugin and register it

Hope it helps.

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ashlega 34,477 on at

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One other option:

Customize "export to excel" button using Ribbon Workbench - probably use a "Custom rule" to hide that button for the entities where you don't want to show it (I think you'll find it in the application ribbons), so it will be somewhat similar to this:

www.itaintboring.com/.../application-ribbon-in-dynamics-or-how-can-we-add-a-button-to-all-entity-forms

Technically, it won't be relying on the security model.. but, since there will be no button on those entities where the users should not be able to export, it might be good enough

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viperdudeuk 142 on at

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Thank you for the responses.

In the end I created a button in Ribbon Workbench and then called a bit of Javascript that calls a URL on another server. I then used Python to create the CSV and send it back with the required HTTP headers to download it on to the users machine.

After discussion the client preferred this to having the file annotated to the entity record.

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