Anaplan: Read Export

Description

Runs a pre-existing Anaplan export action over your Anaplan connection and lands the file it produces as a table. The export action must already exist in the model — the API can’t create one — and this step can’t narrow what it emits: whatever the action is configured to export in Anaplan is exactly what lands.

This step appears in the step menu under Anaplan.

The step reaches Anaplan cloud-direct over its Bulk API — there is no on-premises agent path.

Tip

This connector is read-only, and authenticates with Basic (username and password) or CA certificate credentials — see Authentication. Anaplan’s request budget is shared tenant-wide, so stagger this step’s schedule against your other Anaplan workflows — see Schedule Considerations.

Configuration

Source and Target

Field	Required	Notes
Anaplan Connection	Yes	The Anaplan connection to read through.
Environment	Yes	The connection’s environment.
Workspace	No	Overrides the workspace ID saved on the connection. Discovered live from the connection, or typed by hand.
Model	No	Overrides the model ID saved on the connection. Discovered live once a workspace is chosen, or typed by hand.
Export	Yes	The Anaplan export action to run. Discovered live once workspace and model are chosen, or typed by hand. Its selection isn’t overridable from here — it runs exactly as configured in Anaplan.
Poll Attempts	Yes	Default 120. How many times to poll the export task for completion before the step refuses, naming the task ID. It never silently resubmits — Anaplan doesn’t document how to tell two files produced by the same export action apart, so a resubmit risks binding the wrong file to this run.
Poll Interval (seconds)	Yes	Default 5. Seconds to wait between polls.
Target Table	Yes	The table the export lands in. Every column lands as text.

What This Step Cannot Represent

Limitation	What it means
Requires a pre-existing export action	The API can’t create an export action, and the request this step sends carries no point-of-view, member selection, or slice parameter of any kind — what the action is configured to emit in Anaplan is exactly what lands. Build or edit the export action in Anaplan to change what it produces.
Every column lands as text	The field Anaplan publishes to declare an export’s column types is internally inconsistent in Anaplan’s own published documentation, so it can’t be trusted to type a column correctly — no column is typed from it, deliberately and permanently. Cast the columns you need in a downstream step.
Numbers requested in US format; a still-grouped column is flagged, not fixed	The export task is submitted requesting US number formatting. A column that still comes back with thousands separators means the export isn’t rendering under that format — the step lands the value unchanged, as text, and warns, naming the column and an example value, rather than guessing at which character is the decimal point. Check such a column before casting it downstream: a European-style 1.234.567 read as 1.234 is a thousand times too small.
Refuses rather than land an unreliable extract	The step lands nothing, rather than a table that looks complete and isn’t, when: the export task fails or reports no success in Anaplan; the task is cancelled; the task is still running once the step’s poll budget runs out; the produced file has no data at all; the produced file can’t be tied back to the export that made it; or the number of rows read disagrees with the row count Anaplan itself reports for the export.
Read-only	Nothing is ever written back to Anaplan.

Related

• Connect to Anaplan (guide) — create the connection.
• Anaplan: Read View — read a saved view exactly as saved.
• Anaplan: Read List — read lists into a PlaidCloud dimension.
• Anaplan Steps