Native support for CSV Exports - Not Screen/Template based

Currently in Mendix, if you want to create a CSV/Excel export that has different data or formatting than what is in the corresponding datagrid2 you have to either:

• Create a second dategrid2 with the desired data and formatting
• Intall and setup the overly complicated and lackluster UI Excel Exporter marketplace module

Neither of these are ideal, esepcially if you are just looking for a basic export and not needing to do all the complex things that the Excel Exporter offers. My suggestion is to re-use the built in UI screens used in Studio pro for Odata or Message Definitions to allow easier creation of excel export templates. Just like when you go to expose an entity in the OData screen, you would instead be creating an excel template selecting the entity with optional datasource like database/microflow. You can then select which atttributes you want, the order of them, column headers per attribute and other basic export configurations. This would be accompanied by a new microflow action that takes a list of the selected entity. Very easy and straightfoward, only taking a few minutes to configure compared to the 30+ minutes it takes to configure an export with the Excel Exporter, which losely follows these steps:

• Install the Excel Exporter module and dependencies
• Configure and run Mx Model Reflection
• Configure navigation to allow access to the screens (which are horribly designed and look like they were slopily thrown together in a rush)
• Setup additional domain model etities to support the module
• Configure the template during runtime of the app, which if you are locally testing with a built in database you will need to recreate this every time you deploy to a new environment, or build out a migration service
• Go back to studio pro and build logic to get the special entity to pass to the action to export

There is also a CSV module, but it also has too many dependencies and steps. I should not have to be prefixing my entity attributes numerically in order to get the correct ordering in the CSV.

I like to compare a lot of features in Mendix to OutSystems because frankly, OutSystems is just objectively more polished and easier to develop with. If I want to export data in OutSystems, its already natively supported and takes less than a minute to do so. I pass the list of objects I want exported to an action, then select which fields I want inlcuded and it automatically takes the label for those attributes for the headers, if headers are selected. Then, if I want a more customized export I can create a structure to use and use their built in mapping action to easily map between the two objects. The difference in platforms for such a basic feature is INSANE.