Excel Writer

[kevinnay]

Any idea why drag and drop from KNIME.com into KNIME is returning an unknown url error?

[marvin.kickuth]

Hi @kevinnay,

This error usually comes up when your network environment can’t get an IP to access hub.knime.com. This is likely due to corporate network restrictions.

You may need to configure a Proxy in the preferences, or may need to instruct KNIME to accept SSL certificates (needed for https connections) that may be pre-installed on your local machine by your IT.

To do the latter, append two entries to your knime.ini as seen here:

Help with the Extensions

Hello future reader I’d like to add one more option to the ones above when facing “PKIX path building failed” issues. Again, these issues are often caused by a company proxy intercepting SSL certificates in order to monitor encrypted traffic. Possibly, the proxy’s certificate has already been preconfigured in Windows by your IT. In that case you can simply instruct KNIME to use the Windows trust store. To do so, add these two lines at the end of the knime.ini file which is locat…

If needed, you can configure a proxy (details would be provided by your IT team) under Preferences > General > Network Connections. Here is an example:

Kind regards
Marvin

[kevinnay]

Thanks, the proxy is already configured as direct, but it appears that I need to select manual in order for it to work at the office. As soon as I switched the active provider it seems to have woken up. Whether I can install excel writer however is another matter.

From home I don’t have the same issue and I’ve updated the software numerous times. Since the time the MS nodes stopped working it seems like KNIME has released more conflict resolution features, but I’m not even seeing the nodes (e.g. Excel Reader, Excel Writer).

Under installed software it seems to suggest there is excel support, but there no nodes that appear in the Node Repository with the word Excel in them.

Below also illustrates what software sites I have configured. The whole things a big mystery at this point.

[kevinnay]

Here’s another head-scratcher. Despite Knime indicating that excel support is installed, as shown in the previous screen shots, it returns the following when I attempt to drag and drop them from nodepit. It then prompts to install and after clicking next, does nothing. Is this a bug because it offers no further explanation of what is (not) happening? Then it suggests a newer version is installed, but again those nodes cannot be found, so it’s unclear what the “new” node is since Excel doesn’t show up by name in the Node Repository.

Also, nothing is written to the error log so the detail shown is the only information to troubleshoot with. It seems odd that a newer version of Knime Excel Support wouldn’t be backwards compatible with the only known MS Excel nodes, but that may be the issue suggesting I have to uninstall that before those nodes will work.

[kevinnay]

I guess this is resolved. I uninstalled the latest flavor of KNIME Excel Support because there were no new nodes and it isn’t backwards compatible with earlier Excel nodes. I went to Apache POI - the Java API for Microsoft Documents, which it points to for reference, but I see nothing related to KNIME.

I uninstalled KES 4.7 and reinstalled 4.5. It’s concerning that updates can have consequential dependencies, but I never saw any mention of it when I was receiving updates. They just disappeared one day and my initial attempts to find a logical explanation were less fruitful than today apparently. I’m just hoping I don’t use some node in a development project and then suddenly find it gone, which is pretty much what happened here. If there’s a best practice to avoid that kind of issue I’m all ears.

Thanks for the input.

[wkhan]

Hi Kevin,

In general the networking is a bit out KNIME’s control. It makes sense to me that you have to switch the proxy as the application doesn’t have context to where you are working from.

Nodepit is a 3rd party site to KNIME so it may have a different exception/URL links and we couldn’t really control that.

Out of curiosity, are you trying to install and use the nodes from a future version of KNIME into a previous version? It looks like you were trying to use v4.7 nodes in v4.5. If so this is what is probably cause a lot of the issues.

KNIME is backwards compatible and if you upgrade the Analytics Platform to 4.7, not only an underlying node, everything you’ve previously built should continue to work.

[kevinnay]

I’m using Knime 4.7.7, but Excel Support 4.5 is what supports the Excel nodes I lost, so I had to uninstall Excel Support 4.7 because it’s not backwards compatible and that solved the problem.

What was unfortunate is that I had been using them in a workflow and then one morning I opened it up and they no longer worked. So what appears to have happened is the software had updated and didn’t indicate any compatibility problems. When I went back to open the workflow the conflict prevented the nodes from loading. It wasn’t until today that I realized that I might be dealing with something that isn’t backwards compatible.

Might be something to look into, but for now my issue appears to be resolved. All the Excel Nodes reappeared and are operational again.