How to Render a Table with Multiple Lines in a Cell

[Zephyrus]

Hi community - 

I am trying to render a table to PDF with multiple lines of text within one cell as shown in Exhibit A below. However, after several attempts and fixes, Alteryx still renders as shown in Exhibit B. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

Exhibit A - Desired Outcome

Exhibit B - What Alteryx Renders

[DawnDuong]

hi @Zephyrus 

Firstly,  add a Summarize Tool (Group by: Movies Series, Concatenate: List of movies - with newline (\n) as separator.  This should get you the desired outcome. 

Secondly, pass the output from the Summarize tool to the Table tool.

Dawn.

[Zephyrus]

That’s exactly what I did in the workflow attached in the original post. But it didn’t work as intended. 

[Qiu · Accepted solution]

@Zephyrus 
Credits go to @patrick_digan  and dont ask me how does it work 😁
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Working-with-wanted-line-breaks-and-th...

[patrick_digan]

@Zephyrus In @Qiu 's workflow, he's replaced the newline character (\n) with a line break (<br />). The table tool uses html, and html doesn't display/repsect \n; instead, you need to use a <br />. For what it's worth, here's the table tool's html when you just use a newline character:

[Qiu]

@patrick_digan 

THank you for the details

[Zephyrus]

@patrick_digan and @Qiu 

I saw this "Table (Bad Field Type)" error while replicating @Qiu's workflow. See Exhibit C. 

When I opened @Qiu's workflow, the Render tool gave the same error. See Exhibit D.

I understand that the workflow could run regardless and the final render appears just the same as desired output, but am wondering what is causing this error to show? Is it some HTML-related parsing malfuntion associated with the Render tool?  

Exhibit C

Exhibit D

[patrick_digan · Accepted solution]

@Zephyrus Great question! Alteryx knows we're changing the html behind the scenes, and so the render tool throw errors (even though you see that it still works). You can "trick" alteryx with the attached macro that I created for this particular use case right before the render tool. It uses a report text tool to fool alteryx into thinking that your html is coming from a reporting tool. 

[Qiu]

@Zephyrus 
Do you have any feedback?

If you find the solution from my and @Zephyrus are useful, kindly mark it as accept so it would be helpful for other users having the same issue. 😁

[thulasir]

Very helpful i was struck with last step. It like magic it worked!

Thank you