Alteryx 11 Gallery Search Special Characters

Question

I am observing a strange behavior on our company's Gallery.

Steps to Replicate:

1. Create a workflow and save it to the Gallery with the name "spa_something" (to your private studio)

2. Login to Gallery using same credentials (or credentials with access to the private studio)

3. Using the Search toolbar, search for "spa". The workflow appears in the search result.

4. Using the Search toolbar, search for "spa_". No results are returned.

5. Using the Search toolbar, search for spa_something. No results are returned.

I know that in Oracle, the underscore in a LIKE query represents a whildcard (single character). I'm not sure what the behavior is in Alteryx, but would like to understand this and perhaps know what escape character I could use so that I could search workflows appropriately in Gallery.

dokmanc · Answer

Fast forward 5 years and I see the desktop client has the same issue.

smille17 · Answer

PeterS - appreciate your response, however, special characters, e.g. underscores (and hyphens, as well as &'s), are a way of life for us. Can you explain what the behavior is when an underscore is included in search terms? It seems that when an underscore is passed to the search engine, it returns 0 results. Can you confirm? If so, I'll submit an idea to have this changed :) .

I disagree with the fact that search needs a term longer than three characters - I have been able to successfully search for workflows using a 3 character search. I understand that this is a tip but I'm not clear on the character limitation.

I appreciate your help in helping me make sense of the Gallery search engine!

Thanks,

Seanna

PeterS · Answer

A couple tips for searching in your Alteryx Gallery. The search engine used for the Gallery:

* Needs a search term longer than 3 characters
* Will ignore words like: is, the, a, and...
* Will only search from the beginning of a word or words separated by a white space, it won't find sub strings

* If a workflow is called 'spa something' it would search both 'spa' and 'something'. Searching 'some' should return a workflow with 'something' as long as it is preceded by a white space.
* If 'methi' is searched no results will be returned as it is in the middle of the word 'something'.

For searching purposes it would be advised to not use underscores or other special characters in the workflow names.