File Name Pattern in Data Extract Activity

Question

In the Data Extract activity, we can use the File Name Pattern to define the exported file name, but we can only use the following personalization strings in the filename: %%Year%% %%Month%% %%Day%% %%Hour%%. for example: FileNmae_%%Year%%%%Month%%%%Day%%.csv

I have a business senario: I want to generate a file containing the data of the month before last month, for example: today is July 22nd, 2022, I want to generated the file of May, the file name should be FileNmae_202205.csv, but it looks like the file name pattern is not able to do like that.

Is there any other way to achive that?

Answer 1

I believe those file naming attributes are not retroactive unfortunately. Which doesn’t make what you’re trying to achieve possible through Automation Studio.

Why not solution the DE extract differently by adding a field to the DE that indicates the year and month of the export cohort via sql? If file naming of the export is essential for the business logic, then write a bash script to get the first row of non-header extract data of the solution above, then rename that file accordingly.

Or manually create a filtered DE for that date range and then export the csv. Depending on how often this data needs to be pulled, I would go with the this solution if it’s not daily or weekly.