Edit Data source values on Excel data source?

[mrt]

Hey folks,

until now I was using CSV files as data sources, which were fast and I was able to edit the data source values directly from inside Ranorex Studio.

Because the amount of CSV files did become quite overwhelming I decided to switch to Excel data source to lessen the amount of files by using sheets and make use of the better editing possibilities outside Ranorex.

Now I noticed that data source handling inside Ranorex did become quite slow, I could live with that,
but it is very unhandy that I cannot edit the data source vales directly from inside Ranorex anymore.

Is this not implemented or do I miss some configuration or prerequisite?
I already checked the Ranorex documentation but couldn't find any details on this topic.

thank you, BR mrt

[odklizec]

Hi,

Excel editing is unfortunately not implemented in Ranorex data connector editor and yes, working with too many excel data connectors is quite slow. Both issues were a reason why I switched from excel to csv

[mrt]

Haha, alright, thank you.
Not what I wanted to hear, but somehow what I expected.
It was quite some work to move all CSVs to Excel, let's see if I could get around with that, otherwise i will have to switch back to CSV probably.

The main reason why I decided to replace CSV by Excel was, that is is really cumbersome to find a correct value for a certain column, because in CSV there are no aligned columns.
So if I want to quickly change the value for Attribute 35, I can't either use Strg+F nor any layout to get there.
And when attributes from 25 to 45 contain only (very similar) numbers, it can be quite challenging to find the correct value in a simple text editor.

I need a "built-in" way for editing, because also other colleagues on different computers check out the Ranorex solution and modify certain values - this has to work quickly and reliably.

How do you edit your CSVs?

Just opening them in Excel is too error-prone because Excel automatically changes comma-values to dates and they get saved as that.
Import/export in Excel is too time consuming.
Also notepad++ with plugins for aligning CSV values did not do the trick.

Any hint?

thank you!
BR DAniel

[odklizec]

Hi,

Well, most of my 'complicated' csv files are autogenerated via code, but most of them are only 3 columns wide So I usually don't have a problem finding things. Any manual changes I eventually do are done inside Ranorex data connector UI or with Notepad++ search&replace. So I'm afraid, I don't have any magic solution for csv files with too many columns. If I were in your shoes, I would probably investigate an option to disable auto conversions in Excel? As far as I remember, opening CSV file via Import wizard should help with this? But yes, it means even more steps and consumed time

[mrt]

Hi,

yes, search and replace in Notepad++ would work if the to-be-found value occurs only once.
This is the case for some, but not for all.

Disabling the auto-conversions of Excel would work on my machine, but if someone else clones the repo, they just double click the CSV and because it opens in Excel, they think everything is ok and edit some values.
But they usually don't realize, that when they edit values in columns 5 and 10, that a value e.g. in column 45 is converted to a date, so they save it and the test-data is broken.

So for safety reason I will stick with xlsx for now, maybe I give xlsb a try and see if it speeds things up a bit.

Some other question:
Is it possible to define data sources only ONCE for a certain project and re-use them in all solutions in there?

Creating Excel data sources can be really time consuming because of the loading times...

[odklizec]

Some other question:
Is it possible to define data sources only ONCE for a certain project and re-use them in all solutions in there?

Creating Excel data sources can be really time consuming because of the loading times...

To be honest, I've never tried that, but I really doubt about this? As far as I know, the data connectors are test suite-based and are stored directly in rxtst file. So I don't see a way how to use "general data connector" in multiple solutions with different test suites?

[mrt]

alright, thanks for clarifying.