Summarize Tool, Email Tool, "This Cell Has Truncated Characters"

[kkahle]

Hi,

I have a column of email addresses. I'm attempting to use the Summarize Tool to concatenate the values (email addresses) into a single cell.  The new cell with all of the email addresses will be used as the " To: " value in the Email Tool.

After I concatenate the email addresses there is a message on the new cell that reads "This Cell Has Truncated Characters". I can use an output tool after the Summarize Tool and all of the email addresses are present (not truncated) in the output file but when I try to use the new cell as the " To:" value with the Email Tool I receive an error that reads "Record#1: Failure when receiving data from the peer".

The workflow runs without any errors if I'm only using 2 or 3 email addresses but I'm trying to send the output to 100 or more email addresses.

I think the error is being caused by the truncated email addresses. The Email Tool can't send a message to half an email address. 

I've tried changing the data type to all the different types of string data.

Has anyone found a solution for this issue?

Please let me know if there's any other info that would be helpful.

Thanks!

[mceleavey]

Hi @kkahle ,

This is probably due to the limitations of the length of characters allowed in the "To" field.

The way around this would be to wrap the email tool in a batch macro, use the summarise tool to simply group by the email address, and use this field as the batch. That would then loop through and send an email per email address.

Let me know if you need me to build that for you.

M.

[AdamR_AYX]

Hi @kkahle 

Do you need to send it to all 100+ email addresses as a single email? If not then I think the email tool will send an email per row of data it receives, so you could do this without the summarise?

[danilang]

Hi @kkahle 

Just to be clear here.  The data is not actually truncated. It's only the display of the data in the results window that is truncated.  Alteryx does this to limit the amount of memory used for display purposes.  This display limitation exists in all tool except for the Browse tool.  If you connect a browse tool to the output of the Summarize tool, you see that them message changes to "This cell has >256 characters"

If you double click on the cell, the value opens in the cell viewer where you can see the entire string.  In the image above, I've scrolled all the way to the right so that you can see that the last email address is complete.  

As the other posters have commented, it's probably the length of this string that the email server is complaining about.

Dan

[kkahle]

Hi @AdamR_AYX and thank you for the reply,

I do need the output sent on a single email.  The output of my workflow is sent to employees who's name show up on a daily report and that employee's supervisor. The supervisors could have multiple employee's under them on the daily report and some employees could be multiple instances on the report for the same employee. I'd rather not send everyone more than one email if it can be avoided. 

[pedrodrfaria]

@kkahle I think the solution would be to create an iterative macro to group by the supervisor and employee and send an email to them.

So the macro would read both columns and apply the email logic to all the instances that "Bob" shows up, and then do that again for whenever "Josh" shows up. It is a tricky logic, but based on your needs, seems like a possible solution.

[kkahle]

Hi @danilang 

If you copy the results from the display window (after the summarize tool) it has the email addresses cut off. 

"johndoe@acme.com,johndoe@acme.com,johndoe@acme.com,johndoe@acme.com,johndoe@acme.com,johndoe@acme.co...

You can copy the full results from the display window on the Browse tool but I don't think you can connect the Email tool to the Browse tool. The Email tool would have to be connected to the Summarize tool that doesn't seem to be transferring the full results. 

I've been sending this report manually to all of the email addresses. I also regularly send messages to more individual recipients than this output would be going to so I don't believe the issue is with the email server. 

[pedrodrfaria]

@kkahle 

What shows up in the results window after the summarize is NOT the whole data. It is a simplified version of the data due to memory capabilities. The data IS there, you can use the browse to actually see it wholly, but it is there, even though you cannot see it all without the browse.

[danilang]

Hi @kkahle 

To show the results in the results window, a copy of the data is made and that is what is displayed.  It's the copy that is truncated and it's this truncated copy that you copy and paste.  The actual data isn't truncated.   To see this add a formula tool after your Summarize tool with the following formula 

length([Concat_Email])

 to give you 

Another way to show that the actual data is complete is to use a Text To Columns tool to split Concat_email to rows.  When you do this you'll get same number of rows as your input, 32 email addresses.  if the actual data was truncated, you'd end up with fewer rows after the ToC tool.

Dan