Cannot export server object custom section or fields

kseraphine

I have a number of server objects with custom sections and fields added. If I try to export these to CSV, none of this information is included, even if I select all columns.

Is this expected?

I can provide a screenshot of the server object along with the exported csv if this would be helpful.

Version 5.1 (510027) Mac App Store

Thank you

littlebobbytables

Hi @kseraphine,

No screenshot required. I can replicate your findings not just with Server items but over all the categories I tested. Both the comma delimited text and tab delimited text formats don't export the custom fields where the .1pif does.

I can certainly place a bug report but that won't help you for right now. Now the .1pif is an unencrypted format using the JSON specification (so readable in say TextWrangler for example) but it might be you really needed CSV. It depends on what you were trying to achieve. Can we help?

littlebobbytables

Just to expand on what I wrote before @kseraphine.

I've been looking into our feature requests/bug reports and through that came across this thread, Feature request: allow export of all records, not just Logins [Use 1PIF export, which is JSON-based]. Depending on the reason you were asking it may be relevant to you. The issue seems to be the explosion in columns if we export all custom fields. Our .1pif format which I mentioned before seems to be what we're focussing on due to the limitations of the comma and tab delimited formats.

Let us know what you think.

MrC

I've toyed with the idea of adding a 1PIF reader to the convert_to_1p4 utility, and provide a CSV exporter. This would be useful for folks such as the original poster here, and for folks who want to print out their records (to PDF, or whatever), etc.

However, for exactly the reason suggested by @littlebobbytables, I've have not moved forward on this. The issue is not only the varying column numbers across categories (which I can handle by using category-specific sections, or other techniques), but also there is the problem of custom fields (and deleted stock fields), and how to label these columns with a consistent header row for the category.

I could certainly provide labels for fields in the output, even per-record, but then this breaks the validity and expectations of a CSV file, becoming just a free-form text file. And this free-formness creates problems where one value in a cell ends and another value in the next cells begins (what is the separator, if the format is not CSV?). At some point, the text file becomes too difficult for a user to unambiguously interpret, and there is no way for software to reliably interpret that data (that's the problem with eWallet's export - its mostly a free form, meaningless, ambiguous textual data export).

So, the best answer to the original question really does depend on what you ultimately want to do with that exported data.

kseraphine

For my purposes, printing to PDF is sufficient. I was just surprised by the results I got with the csv export but I see why it is problematic now thanks to these explanations. I hadn't looked at the 1PIF export previously but, if I ever need to do something more fancy with the data, this would work nicely.

thanks for the quick responses.

AGAlumB

@kseraphine: On behalf of MrC and lbt, you are most welcome!

I do apologize for the confusion though. Thanks for bringing this up. 1PIF is pretty handy, but we will see if we can improve CSV export in the future as well. I'm glad you were at least able to get the data you needed. Cheers! :)