Here is my team's current workflow:
* We only have Designer Desktop (one license per member of the team), not Server.
* We collaborate by storing the yxmd files in shared OneDrive folders.
* We pull data from a variety of sources (SAP tables, Excel files, yxdb files, etc).
* We usually write out data to Excel files which are then pulled in by Power BI reports.
* When making a change to a workflow, we usually have the output nodes in a container which we can switch off while changing things.
* We use the browse tool to manually check if our changes have done what we want or broken anything.
* When we think it's fine, we switch the output node back on and run it again. Sometimes at this stage we check the Power BI report and can see something is wrong.
This is the simplest version of what I would like to be able to do:
* Flip a switch to change between "live" and "developing" in the workflow. When it's "live", all is as normal. When it's "developing", the outputs (and possibly inputs) are all changed to different files, so we can run it through without changes being reflected in the "live" Power BI report. Maybe we will set up a "test" report tht points to the outputs from the "developing" version. Ideally we can click one thing to go between live and developing which will automatically change potentially several outputs between the two.
My best idea for this so far is to have two directories, one for live outputs and one for "dev" ouputs. Then have a field somewhere to specify the output directory, and have the files output using that field.
* Bonus: it would be amazing if we could flip a switch to change the inputs to some defined dummy data, and automatically test that the outputs are what we expect them to be.
I'm not sure how to make this work. The above idea of using different directories would work for something simple like reading one Excel file, but it wouldn't work the same way with reading a SAP table. Also, the directory thing wouldn't include checking the outputs are correct. Also, it seems that this could be set up for at most one input/output combination, not for a range of different test cases.
Any advice on best practices for the above would be much appreciated.
We currently do not have access to Alteryx Server, so solutions that work in Desktop would be much appreciated. We are trying to get the company to get us a license for Server but don't know if/when that will happen.
