Open Excel workbook from URL

excel
http
#1

Hi folks :slight_smile:

I have a workflow that needs to retrieve data from a number of excel files, all stored in a Sharepoint site.

In my little test workflows, and when the .xlsx files are stored on my local computer (“c:\yadayada”), everything works fine, but when I try to open an Excel application scope with a URL instead (https:\sharepoint\yadayada\myFile.xlsx"), I get an exception: "The given path’s format is not supported”.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jeppe

#2

I too require to work with Excel on Sharepoint and faced with the same problem as you do. “The given path’s format is not supported”.

For now, i’m thinking with using basic click activity to get sharepoint auto launch excel then attached the Excel scope to it. I will try it out tomorrow and update your thread if I find any solution.

Would appreciate if anyone have ideas to open Excel in Sharepoint in a more efficient manner. Also to share that downloading the excel document to local drive and uploading back to sharepoint is not an option for me.

#3

HI jjes,

My idea to workaround fail, and after googgling around, there is any feature that UiPath is able to support excel URL. Guess i’m forced to download a local copy, make the changes and upload it back to sharepoint :frowning:

Perhaps, UiPath could look into supporting URL in the Application Excel Scope.

#4

I found it to be a security issue in our network. If I connected to a document in the “outside world”, still from our network, it would still fail. I then tried to access the “outside world” file from a different, non-corporate network, and it worked out fine.

I found that documents - even those on our corporate network - would open just fine in a webbrowser, and I thought of something I did years ago in another solution: pretending to be a browser.

Using a network traffic sniffing tool, Fiddler, I found out exactly how a http-request from a browser looked, especially the values in the http headers. I copied the values from the http header, and in UIPath I added those values to the Headers property in the HTTPRequest activity in UIPath.

With a little bit of work, the request sent by the HTTPRequest activity in UIPath looked enough like a webbrowser request, that our secutity policy let the traffic through, and I could retrieve the .xlsx with no problems.

I have since explained to our security team what I am trying to do, and they have since agreed to loosen the security for this specific type of traffic, of course still limited by IP address etc.

Hope it makes sense, otherwise ask :slight_smile: