Crew Macro updates, or alternatives for Server

Question

Hi everyone!

I've been using Alteryx for just over a decade now, and our organisation has been using Crew macros on a Scheduler license for a handful of years.  We upgraded to a Server license last November, and most of our migration has gone pretty smoothly, but we have a use case that I'm trying to work out the best way to handle.

We have some wrapper workflows set up that test for certain conditions, and if true, we run the main workflow in question using a Conditional Runner Crew Macro.  We also use Log Parser to write results of the main workflow to a network folder so we can inspect it if there are any issues, whether the WF is successful or not.

Before I realised that Crew Macros aren't supported on Server, I built one of our wrapper workflows to run one of our main processes, and the wrapper also updates a SQL table before and after the main WF has run so we can monitor the time it takes to run etc.  Although this wrapper worked for a test case, it errored when I included the main WF despite the fact that this main WF runs fine when it is scheduled on Server on its own.  A secondary problem is, although the Conditional Runner and the Log Parser generates most of the log entries to our logfile, about half a dozen lines are missing including any details of what is causing the main WF to error.

So I have 3 questions :

1. are there likely to be any updates to Crew Macros that will enable them to run reliably on Server?

2. are there any fixes to Crew Macros to help determine what the error is causing the main WF to fail when scheduled to run on Server via the wrapper?

3. what other options have I got to replicate the functionality that we make use of with the Crew Macros?

I have read this article, amongst others :
Chaining Workflows Together (alteryx.com)

Several of the options I have checked out aren't supported on Server, or scheduled workflows, or involve causing the WF to error when conditions aren't met (thereby making our "Workflow Results" list appear to show such workflows as having 'errored' despite being a controlled exit).

I still have some ideas where I can possibly emulate a workaround causing the main WF to output nothing when our chosen conditions aren't met, but so far, I haven't come up with a way that would avoid the time delay having to read our inputs of the main workflow only to output nothing when our conditions aren't met.

The Crew Macros enable super elegant solutions where you can quickly check conditions, then exit or run depending on the results of the conditions, without a major revamp of a working workflow in order to mimic the benefits of Crew Macros.

Many thanks in advance.

Dazzerman · Answer

Hi Verakso,

I agree that you can get them to work, and I did so up to a point also by installing them on the Server, but my comment about the support was based on a quote from the Article that I linked to in my post :

"Runner Macros are not supported on Alteryx Server"

No doubt some of the Crew macros can be used with confidence on Server, but clearly there are several issues that motivated the 'instability' caution in the article.

As is often the case, there are usually several ways to achieve what you want with Alteryx, and for now I have a reasonable workaround in place.  But I am interested to learn if/when versions of the Conditional Runner and other tools get upgraded so they can work more robustly on Server.

Thanks for your comment!

Verakso · Answer

Hi,

I am just curious to your statement "Crew Macros aren't supported on Server,"
Because here we actually is running a bunch of CReW macros in workflows running on the server.
There is many CReW macros, so I can't speak for them all, but i seems more to me, that the CReW macros isn't properly installed on the server side.
As mention, here we run almost all of our scheduled workflows using Listrunner and we parse the logs and save it back to a database for monitoring and reporting.

/Thomas

Dazzerman · Answer

UPDATE :

I have decided to go with converting my SQL inputs to Dynamic Inputs, where I have a "1 = 999" in the Where clause that I amend the 999 to '1' when my condition is met, and set to '0' otherwise.  Though, there is expected to be no rows supplied to the Dynamic Input when my condition isn't met, which then means no records get returned anyway.

While this method works, and the workflow only takes 9 seconds to run with the 15 Inputs amended accordingly, I will still be interested to know if a more elegant solution via Crew Macros or otherwise becomes available.