I have a string type DB column data that starts with a number or the minus sign(-). For instance, values can be something like '78;34;-45' or '-34;45;79'. When I present this column with DB Query and Retool Table, it is displayed well without any issues.
But when I try to download the Table data with a 'utils.exportData()' Eventhandler or the small download button within Action UI of Table element, Retool add apostrophe(') to each value that starts with the minus(-) sign. Such nuisance is not happening with strings start with numbers but only when the first character is the minus sign.
FYI, I am on the Retool On-premise version 2.80.19
Hey there I tested this on my end and in older stable versions and haven't been able to recreate it. Would you mind sharing a screenshot of your table?
Just to loop back after taking a look at this in another thread, the apostrophe ' being added via the exportData utility method is doing some intentional sanitizing.
However, you can use Papa Parse and the more general downloadFile method
It would be very helpful to be able to turn off this "intentional sanitizing" for downloads at the table level - we use our database (and therefore our Retool tables) as a source of truth and want to minimize any postprocessing necessary after downloading a CSV from Retool. We turn any kind of autoformatting off when importing this CSV to Google Sheets, so we don't need any additional Retool sanitation.
The specific issue we have right now is that any phone number in the international format (e.g. +12345678900) will display correctly in the Retool table when we tell the table that it's a text column, but whenever the table is downloaded, the phone number will have an apostrophe in front of it in the exported CSV (e.g. '+12345678900).
The workaround doesn't seem to be scalable since as have dozens of tables across different Retool apps. We don't want to have to process the CSV after downloading it from Retool, and we can't enable autoformatting in Google Sheets since it messes up our data (for example, one customer used some dates in the year 0001 for testing, which Google Sheets autoformats to 2001).
I tested this on my end and in older stable versions and haven't been able to recreate it. Would you mind sharing a screenshot of your table?
