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Report multi-select values comma separated in a single row in exported CSV from Explore

Answered


Posted May 23, 2023

The current behavior when exporting a CSV from Explore creates a new row for a ticket for each value in a multi select field. Our reporting requirements for our client requires this data to be displayed as a single row for each ticket with all data values included (comma separated) in the cell associated with the multi-select field.

This creates a lot of extra work because I have to manually consolidate the duplicate ticket rows and copy the values from each one into the common cell, then delete the duplicated tickets.

Here is an example of the current behavior:

Here is an example of the preferred output which currently requires a lot of manual work to achieve:


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5 comments

This becomes even worse if you're reporting on multiple multi-select fields, because the duplication compounds. Like, every option of field 2 will be listed next to each option of field 1, like:

Ticket ID, Liked Foods, Liked Drinks
1,Pizza,Water
1,Pizza,Tea
1,Sushi,Water
1,Sushi,Tea

It increases multiplicatively, where the number of rows = # of selections for field 1 * selections for field 2 and so on. I have a report where there are 3 multiselect fields and just 2 selections in each field means 8 rows for one ticket, and for many tickets it's more like 16 rows.

I'm trying to see if there's a way to accomplish this with custom attributes, but no luck so far.

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Hey Collin and Marcus, thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback. This has been logged for our PM team to review. For others who may be interested in this feature request, please add you support by upvoting this post and/or adding your use case to the the comments below. Thank you again!

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Do we know if this could be solved using Calculated Attributes? Is there a way to concatenate the strings from the multiselect field?

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Eugene Orman

Zendesk Product Manager

Thank you for sharing your feedback. Placing all values of one multi-select field into an array makes sense. It is something we considering for the Dataset Exporter. However, there are no plans to change the current behaviour for the Report and Dashboard exports. 

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We had a simple field where we collected several values. To report on this, I had to create custom calculated metrics with 0/1 for each option had been selected or not. Then redo the calculation if we add more options. 

 

I'd like if multiselect fields could either get a string-joined variant by default (that is just a texta attribute), or that we get an function in explore to do the join, with some delimiter of our choice. 

 

Accordnig to a Zendesk ticket today I got response from an Zendesk on, it's not possible to join or report using built in functions. I didn't find any way myself either. 

 

One alternate solution that might be of use - depending on your use case - might be to create a calculated metric for each multiselect value of choice using an expression like IF ([YourAttribute] = “Label”) THEN 1 ELSE 0 ENDIF, and then include each such metric in the report. Since its a metric, it won't create additional rows. 

 

Then you'd need to do some lookups and string concatenation in Excel or other ways to try to produce a new column with the concatenated 1-values.

 

Solution is cumbersome to create as you might need to create many calculated metrics, it needs to be maintained if you add more values, and then you'd need to implement the solution to join it, once exported.

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