Automatically creating new columns when import data from API

Chris Chen

When using API to fetch data from other platforms and import into SmartSheet, how to automatically create new columns, if there are more columns in the data than the target sheet on SmartSheet (right now, importing data from API to SmartSheet need to specify column ID, but when we have a dataset with many columns, this become a problem if we hardcode every column ID) ? Thank you!

marc4

I'm assuming that you are matching columns from the source and data by column headings/names?

You need to first read the target sheet and build a table of column names to IDs. Then read the source sheet and if there are any column headings/names not already in the sheet you need to create them and add them to the table.

Then you can load the data from the source sheet.

/marc

Chris Chen

Hi, thanks for your reply. Yes I am trying to match by column heading/names. I tried to use your approach of mapping the columns based on IDs and it works. The following picture shows how I did this. Thanks!

Meanwhile, I am also trying to know if there are "more automated" approach, for instance, without having to specifying column ID matching between the target and source sheet through hard coding like this. Many thanks!