Alteryx Connect - Reporting Global Changes (CHANGE LOG)

[DavidM]

Hi everyone,

I am being asked quite frequently by the Connect customers how they can report changes in their Connect installation.

The typical use-cases that I hear:

• Once we finish running a loader (say a SQL Database), we want to see all changes to the database structures
• We want to see what users are doing in Connect - i.e. changing and creating entries, to track the activity
• We would like to see all newly created objects so that we can make sure they are properly cataloged and certified
• We need to make sure that running the loaders did not break any content in the catalog

Even though Connect provides a detailed versioning feature for all the content you load in, there is currently no global view of these changes.

The versioning is accessible in the more menu (ellipsis) on every asset page in Connect. But you get to see only the history/ versions of that currently viewed asset.

Thus, I have created a very simple app in the Designer, which connects to the Connect DB and reports on the changes in your entries/ assets. See it attached.

What it does:

• connects to Alteryx Connect database using ODBC (Postgres driver)
• reports on all created/ changed/ inactivated (deleted) entries
• reports on details of changed entries at the key/value (attributes) level
• let you decide what date range you are interested in seeing changes for
• output the data to files (ideally YXDB as they can get quite large)

Note that you need to have the ODBC driver for Connect set up. How to do that is described in the workflow itself in the Interface screen.     

I think it should be relatively easy to adjust this to anyone's needs - drop in some filters or whatever you feel like doing :-)

[戴卫]

This is really very useful.   Is there a way to get hold of the user name not just the xid?

Thanks

[DavidM]

The report on the output actually contains all the details of assets, incl. names, their version etc.

[bconard1]

Excited to use it... I'm running into an error related to the sql connection... I had ports opened and got error related to sql trying to connect:

[2.635]conn=000002233C01DBA0, query='SET DateStyle = 'ISO';SET extra_float_digits = 2;show transaction_isolation'
[2.689]CONN ERROR: func=PGAPI_DriverConnect, desc='Error from CC_Connect', errnum=110, errmsg='ERROR: Syntax error in SQL statement "SET EXTRA_FLOAT_DIGITS[*] = 2 "; expected "@, AUTOCOMMIT, MVCC, EXCLUSIVE, IGNORECASE, PASSWORD, SALT, MODE, COMPRESS_LOB, DATABASE, COLLATION, BINARY_COLLATION, CLUSTER, DATABASE_EVENT_LISTENER, ALLOW_LITERALS, DEFAULT_TABLE_TYPE, CREATE, HSQLDB.DEFAULT_TABLE_TYPE, PAGE_STORE, CACHE_TYPE, FILE_LOCK, DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT, AUTO_SERVER, AUTO_SERVER_PORT, AUTO_RECONNECT, ASSERT, ACCESS_MODE_DATA, OPEN_NEW, JMX, PAGE_SIZE, RECOVER, NAMES, SCOPE_GENERATED_KEYS, SCHEMA, DATESTYLE, SEARCH_PATH, SCHEMA_SEARCH_PATH, JAVA_OBJECT_SERIALIZER, LOGSIZE, FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS"; SQL statement:
SET extra_float_digits = 2 [42001-197]'

[DavidM]

Hey @bconard1,

Can you please confirm you are using the very exact version of the ODBC Postgres drives as noted in

https://help.alteryx.com/connect/current/Administration/UsageStats.htm?tocpath=Administer%7C_____10

I am quite positive that the H2 connection does not work unless you do.

Also, a good thing to do is to follow the same manual viz above and try to access the DB management console.

This is a good idea to validate whether its DB, or ODBC.

d

[VojtechT]

Hi @bconard1 ,

unfortunately the last Postgres ODBC driver compatible with H2 is 09.03.04. Any newer version will lead to the error you've received. 

There has been some modifications in later drivers which H2 is not able to communicate with. 

[bconard1]

Thanks,
Yes, the version I have installed is 9.06.02.00 a later version... thanks...
I believe we are keeping that up to a later version for our Tableau environment to take advantage of any benefits and compatibilities.

Any suggestions on managing different versions? I'm thinking I'll keep that version on the alteryx gallery server and use the change_log from designer on the server exclusively.





Bart Conard
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[bconard1]

Thanks,

Yes, the version I have installed is 9.06.02.00 a later version… thanks…