Alteryx Connect Ideas

Hi Alteryx,

Currently, there is no way users get notified that more metadata/reports have been loaded in Connect. Would it be possible to enable notifications for these newly loaded assets? The idea would be that if e.g. somebody is an owner of a project (or any folder), he/she would be notified when a new dashboard (or any other object) within that project/folder is loaded.

Thank you.

Jan

Hi,

Would it be possible to implement an option to enable a banner with custom notification for users? This would be meant to inform users about scheduled maintenance windows, that they can experience slow performance (e.g. during metadata loading) or to inform them about any important information. 

Thanks

Michal

Change localization from the system level to the user level. This allows select interface language individually for each user. 

Some of our potential customers - multi-cultural companies would like to have this flexibility.

Each workflow state has a very useful option: «Persistent» flag.

I understand how it works, but I would like to setup the system somehow to allow users to see public state by default.

My approach is simple. A lot of users visit Alteryx Connect for searching and reading. And I want to show them ‘public’ (official, approved) state of objects by default, not draft versions.

If the user would like to edit an asset, he/she can exit from public mode explicitly.

When adding a link to another Alteryx object ("Link to page") or a custom field with a picker, only 7 results are returned and there is no way to get beyond this. For example, if the thing I want to link to doesn't have a unique enough name, or there are multiple items with a similar name, then I cannot "choose" the correct item to link to and I am stuck.

Via the normal Search you can go to Advanced Search to find the item you are linking to, but there is no further option for custom field picker or Link to page....

The only hack workaround I have found is to temporarily rename the item I want to link to to something unique that won't be found elsewhere in Alteryx, and then rename it back after creating the link. Not something I want to recommend to our end users of Connect! This seems to be a big limitation.

Big organizations have strong security policies and one of our potential customers would like to distinguish superadmin actions (login, change the config, change permissions) from other action. For example, they ask to change logging level (from INFO to WARN) when superadmin is logging in.

In the Alteryx Gallery we have the ability to place workflows in Districts or Collections. This structure should be maintained in Connect. Similar to how Data sources are managed, instead of Data Source Servers, you have an area to select and filter by the various collections and districts in which workflows are contained.

Hi,

In standard Alteryx Gallery loader (to Connect), would it be possible to implement an option of selecting the public workflows only and ignoring the ones stored in users' private studios?

Thanks

Michal

Hi Alteryx,

From 2019.2 version of Alteryx Connect, there is a new functionality of adding custom fields. However, right now, it is only possible to add plain text (text type) in there. 

Would it be possible to add there also URLs (hyperlinks)? We want to add new custom fields with hyperlinks pointing to other Connect pages.

Thank you

Michal

Establish lineage/relationship between SAP HANA and Tableau (reports)

Issue

By default in Connect, we are unable to see data lineage between SAP HANA and Tableau. The standard Alteryx loaders (i.e. Tableau & SAP HANA) in version 2019.2 are unable to detect the HANA object link due to a misaligned naming convention (“::” vs “/”). This specifically occurs when Tableau dashboards are pointed to HANA synonyms (“::”) as opposed to the views (“/”).  

Background

In SAP Hana, there are two types of objects – views (which are present in relevant schemas, e.g. “_SYS_BIC”) and synonyms. The synonyms are created for each view by default and always appear to be in the schema “PUBLIC”, however, this is not actually an explicit schema. According to SAP, public synonyms are the official access interface for the system views.

When loading the objects from SAP HANA, the object names contain the package name as well as the object name (view etc.). These two are differentiated with a “/” when loaded from the “_SYS_BIC” schema (e.g. “GSTP_VALIDATION/CA_01_C_PDA_GRA_001”), however synonyms from the “PUBLIC” schema are loaded with a differentiator of “::” (e.g. “GSTP_VALIDATION::CA_01_C_PDA_GRA_001”). An example below, where first row is the view and the second row provides the related synonym:

Thus, the lineage is not established when the SAP HANA objects from schemas are loaded (containing the “/”, and at the same time, the Tableau dashboards linked to the synonyms (“::”). This is because the object names are quite clearly different, and the loader doesn’t currently resolve the synonym to view translation (as per standard SAP HANA SQL parsing behaviour).

Loading problem analysis (using standard Alteryx loaders)

On SAP HANA side, when running the loader, user can (optionally) define schema name(s) they wish to load, however:

1. When schema is set as “_SYS_BIC”, the loader only loads the views from this particular schema, with no synonyms.
2. When schema is left as blank (i.e. no value entered), the loader loads everything, however in the “_SYS_BIC” schema, only synonyms are loaded and not the views.
3. When schema is set as “PUBLIC”, the loader does not return anything - fails as there is no corresponding schema in SAP HANA (it is only virtual space, not an explicit schema)

The SAP HANA instance in question is very, very large and due to volume limitations, as well as the potential risk of performance degradation, it is not feasible to load everything.

When we’ve examined the H2 staging tables, we find that Connect has loaded (therefore is technically aware of) the synonyms from the “PUBLIC” schema but they are not ever loaded beyond the staging tables. This is obviously required if we wish to represent these relationships within Connect.

Idea/Fix:

• SAP HANA loader – it seems there is a problem of loading synonyms from the “PUBLIC” schema and the loader should be adjusted in order to allow this.
• Tableau loader – needs to be able to refer to synonyms defined in a SAP HANA data source, meaning whenever there is a “::” in object name and the schema name is blank (i.e. empty string representing the “PUBLIC” schema), then it should be defaulted to “PUBLIC”. This logic would ensure that a schema name is always present, even in cases where the schema name is retrieved as blank (which then would become “PUBLIC”).
• In case the schema name is left blank for any reason, it should be populated as “PUBLIC”.
• @DanH suggested to customize the Tableau loader as a temporary fix to replace the “::” with “/”, which is certainly possible but comes with a risk of incompatibility with future releases. Also the customers strong preference is to deliver a solution which only utilises standard loaders.

Hi,

Are you considering building a standard SAP BW loader for Alteryx Connect. I am concious there are some custom solutions available on the market (like DVW loader), but that is not standard and does not allow data lineage with other systems?

Thank you

Michal

Hi Alteryx,

Would it be possible to implement a toggle for switching between business and technical names of metadata objects? We have both business people as well as technical IT people using Connect. While technical people are interested to see the original names of tables, views, schemas etc. from the sources, the business would like to see some names they can more relate too. 

We are using the alternate names, which works well, however we are missing a toggle, in which each user can define what he wants to see.

Thank you

Michal

Our customers would like to see propagated data lineage. For example, if some columns in different tables are linked together, obviously, tables have dependencies as well. So it is a good option to have the possibility to view child objects' relationships. It allows analysing impact and data lineage between objects deeper. 

Manage permissions based on entry type. E.g. I set up some folders structure and I’d like to allow to users only create glossary terms, not new folders. So if I set up CREATECHILD permissions, it allows to create subfolders as well. 

Can't really tell if you've clicked the Like button already...

Seems like it goes from a dark grey to a light black. 

And the tooltip always shows "Like"

Please change the Liked object to blue; like when you hover over it. 

And also update the tooltip for Liked objects to say "Unlike".

We are implementing 19.2 of Connect after trialling 19.1. Our users are missing seeing the Search option and when I look back at the old version it seems much more obvious than from the 19.2 version. It would be good to have the search much more obvious from a UI perspective.

Hi, 

I understand it is possible to integrate the users from active directory into Connect but there is no functionality to import actual user groups. Is that something that can be added to the roadmap?

Thanks

Michal

Alteryx notifies thumbs up but does not notify the owner of a thumbs down.... We think this makes sense to have as consistent so that the owner can follow up on issues with the asset, and/or have it removed.