Exporting to CSV and Multi-Value Fields

This morning I picked up a support query from a customer who was confused by the behaviour of an export. My customer was exporting a view to a csv file for import into a third-party application. Although I’ve written agents to import to and from text files with a specified delimiter, this was just using the normal Notes Client export functionality from File – Export. However, the output from the view in question was rather strange. One column showed a multi-value field, but with no specified separator, so the view column was:

Value1,Value2,Value3

But only the first two values were being pushed out to the csv file. There was nothing unusual with the view except that the column was not wide enough to show all the entries, and I could only see part of the second value. Instinctively I expanded the column before exporting, so I could check what values I should be seeing. When I exported, I got all three values, not just the two the customer was getting. My customer was on an 8.5 client, so I tried that instead of the usual 7.0.2 client, but I still got the same output.

However, when I then put the column back to its normal width, so I could only see two entries, like this:

Value1,Val

I only got two values in the csv export – “Value1,Value2”. Strange behaviour, but I guess it’s to do with the front-end export and overflows, that it is just exporting any visible or partly visible values. But it’s worth being aware of if users will be exporting a view to csv.