Data Shuttle - How To

Susan Morash

I am new to Data Shuttle and am looking for some guidance. Here's what I'd like to do:

1) Extract a subset of activities from my Project Plan - I've created an Offload Data Shuttle to do this. However, I am manually adding fields to this file that are not in the source file but need to be populated in the target Smartsheet.

2) Read the Offload csv file and ADD these records to another Smartsheet. The target Smartsheet should create a new Action ID as each record is created. I created an Upload Data Shuttle and ran it once but if I try to run it again to "ADD" more records it wants a unique key. The Action-ID doesn't get created until the record is created. So with each run I want to append to the target Smartsheet new records.

How do I ADD records without having a unique ID?

How do I populate columns into the receiving Smartsheet that are not in the source Smartsheet. For example: Issue Type will always be value "Project", Status will always be value "In Progress", etc. Currently I am manually adding these columns to my csv file.

Any help would be much appreciated or if you know of a training course or video that will show this scenario.

Mike TV

@Susan Morash

I'm guessing you have both an Offload Data workflow type and an Upload Data workflow type of Data Shuttle workflows. For the Upload Data type which adds to a new sheet, you can add data that doesn't exist on the source sheet within the Expressions section. Unique Name would be the column name and Value would be what you want to end up in that row of that column. So one unique name would be Issue Type with a value of Project. Your target sheet will need to already have these columns in it I believe for you to do that. It may be able to auto-create them on the first import but I haven't really used Expressions before so I'm not sure.

For the unique ID issue, can you just have the source sheet creating Action IDs there so that each row always has a unique column to use as the Unique Identifier Column? This could be hidden on the source sheet if it would cause confusion with it being displayed. The Action ID column would just be a auto-number type column such as:

Susan Morash

Thanks for the response @Mike TV

Here's my biggest challenge, which is likely due to my lack of Data Shuttle knowledge:

I want to Add records every time I run the Upload Shuttle but this is not working. With the Workflow Action I've selected it seems that it wants to "Match" to an Action-ID already existing in the file and update, so no updates are occurring.