Bringing in Confiforms data from REST to Excel
Asked by Jason Walsh:

Good evening and forgive me in advance and I'm relatively new to REST API calls.

I'm managing a massive form (300+ fields) and obviously, when one needs to extract all that data it takes a very long time from the administrative cog wheel located on the Confluence page hosting the form fields.

Now I have had some success using Dynamic filters in Table Views with a filter set on the default table to effectively set the returned records to blank.

I'm curious if the solution to my problem is to attempt to manipulate the filter control or is there a way to get started extracting this using the REST API and how would I get about coding that? Again, very new to REST API. Let me know!


Answers:
author: Alex Medved _ConfiForms_
body: Hi

Check this page <https://wiki.vertuna.com/display/CONFIFORMS/Data+Export+tricks+and+hints>

It explains how the exports can be "tuned" and it also shows that you can craft a link that will export the data from the form for you. (without a need to go through the form's admin UI (cogwheel "stuff"))

And it doe snot have to be REST API (JSON), but you can export it into CSV/Excel directly

Alex

comments: author: Jason Walsh
body: The link works well but it doesn't solve for the rendering speed. At time it can take 5 minutes to build the CSV.

The problem is that business wants a dump of all the fields and records. Again, this form has over 300 fields so it naturally takes a ling time to render. That kind of why I was asking about a REST API call that could suffice it. Thoughts?


author: Alex Medved _ConfiForms_
body: Well, 5 minutes is a lot! Does your form has fields that use data from external systems? Like Jira fields, or database/web-service backed fields?

How many rows in the form and what is the size of the form (administrative UI (button with a cogwheel) reports this)


author: Jason Walsh
body: Hey Alex,

Nothing being pulled from external sources, database or webservice and 1 field populating the corresponding JIRA Key for the created record.

The form table has roughly 300ish fields with many confiforms rules in place for several of those fields. Total records is 305 and the size is 1.9MB

There some rather large text fields as well and I've always suspected that they might be the root cause to the speed at which the "View Edit Stored Data" option for the form table to load.

Any idea what could be causing the lag?


author: Alex Medved _ConfiForms_
body: Rules are not important when we talk about export, but the types of fields are.

So, your form depends on Jira and it's performance. Size of the form is rather small (only 2 MBs, as well as the number of records)

I suggest to check the ConfiForms version to see if you are on latest and do the following 2 checks:

* Look at the data and see if you have any "errors" shown for ANY of the Jira fields. For example, the field still references a Jira issue which was removed from Jira or has "erroneous" Jira key specified
* Consider optimizing the fields you load with your Jira field by going to ConfiForms Field Definition macro for this field and specifying only necessary Jira fields to load

![Screenshot 2020-10-15 at 08.50.33.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/114383i00FE647E597924B5/image-dimensions/489x311?v=v2 "Screenshot 2020-10-15 at 08.50.33.png")


Tags: confiforms

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