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How to cancel portion of a workflow if conditions are met

bsharbo

Hello everyone. I am very new to AlterYX (am doing a trial of it trying to see if it can be useful at my company over some other tools) and I am struggling to see how the tool can handel canceling of specific runs. Related to this problem I have two distinct questions.

For example: We have a very basic ETL tool that reads in 3 seperate files. If any of the files has a formatting problem (Aka a text in a field that should be a date, etc..) then we want that entire file to not process, and an email to go out to specific users that would show the exact field location of the format error.

Question #1:
If someone gave us a csv file with 5 fields and 10,000 rows, and field #3 had a format error in row 9,203 Is there a way to capture this information specifically?

Question #2: If we can capture this inforamtion, if there a way to then kill the next steps in the workflow related to this file, but allow the other steps (for the other two files) to continue?

Thanks and let me know if I need to clarify my question any further!

Developer Tools

Accepted answers

Ned

Typically you would use the Test tool or the Message tool to have a error, but it sounds like you don't actually want an error. It sounds like you want to ignore those records silently and keep processing.

It would be fairly straightforward to use a filter tool. You will need to join the record count on to the data stream to filter on it - I used an append fields tool. On the false side I would add a Message tool to issue a warning to the output log that an input was skipped.

I put together a quick demo of what I mean in case its not clear. It was be easy to convert this to a macro if that's an operation you would commonly use.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xg7dsts9s8sdgxf/SkipBasedOnTotal.yxmd?dl=1
rtaImage (3).png

All comments

Ned

PuffinPanic

I've used control containers to control outputs to provide something similar to what you're looking to do. The control container means that if there are no errors, there's no error file output. I have also put a report output in another control container and have prevented that from outputting if any errors exist so you only get either an error or a report output (but that's not what you're looking for).

In your case, if an error was identified, I'd add it to an errors file. If errors exist then the error output container runs and the error report is produced. If there are no errors, then there's no error report. As you say you're new to Alteryx I've included an image showing the basic idea below. I'm not sure if you're merging the data from your inputs, but something similar could be set up if you're not.

Control container error output.png

You might need to add a dummy file path after the unique (eg filepath = "none") to ensure that the join doesn't fail because there's no input from the L input anchor - I forgot to put this in the image. I've used a similar set up to count errors from multiple error/exception tests throughout a workflow and provided a summary of the count of errors found at different points in a workflow as well as outputting the data for each error found.

I hope this helps.

Nicola

Qiu

Conditional Container is good! 😁

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