We’ve been working hard to follow up on our customers’ feedback and make a bunch of enhancements to Connect. Here’s an overview of the changes in 2019.2.
New UI
We’ve made changes to the UI design in 2019.2. Now the design of all our products is aligned. We know some of our customers might prefer the old design though. For these users, we’ve made switching back easy.
Admin Menu > Connect Configuration > Instance Settings. Scroll down to “Appearance Theme”. Choose “legacy”.
Asset Configuration Menu
The Asset Configuration Menu is a completely new menu in your Admin Menu. It allows you to configure your assets in a couple of ways:
Search boosting weights Search boosting weight was one of the best enhancements in 2019.1. With 2019.2, we’ve moved the location for configuring weights to the right side of the Asset Configuration Menu.
Switching the order of alternative and entry names The default setting for asset names sets the alternative name before any entry name. While this is fine for technical names (e.g. tables), it can be problematic for assets which have a distinctive name (e.g. glossaries). In 2019.2, we’re allowing the user to switch the order of the names via the Asset Configuration Menu. A user can now set an asset’s primary name to be the asset name, making it easier to search for.
Please note, primary name usage is part of the search index. In order to change the name order, you’ll have to perform a full re-index of the system. Follow the “full-reindexing” link at the bottom of the menu and click “reindex”. Please note, this can take a long time if you already have a lot of content in Connect.
Custom fields By default, there’s a limited number of attributes that an asset can possess when it’s put into the system.
If there’s any other value you want to add to the asset type, you need to use a “description”. Unfortunately, descriptions can only be searched with a full-text search. To give our users more flexibility and make things easier for them, we’ve added a custom fields feature to the Asset Configuration Menu. You can now define a new custom field and assign it to an asset type. There are three types of fields: Text, Dropdown, and Picker.
For more info see: How To: Use Custom Fields in Connect.
Notification emails
This is a small enhancement we’ve put into 2019.2 to allow asset owners more control over email notifications. Currently, email notification is (by default) switched off for changes caused by a loader. With 2019.2 a user can now switch this notification feature “on” in their Profile menu.
Profile page > Edit. At the bottom of the “Description” box, toggle “Notify on changes by loaders”.
Support of Dynamic Names
Alteryx workflows can have very complicated lineages. Workflows save their outputs to specific file locations. However, for some outputs, the file name is defined by the data and not pre-defined. For example, it might contain the date of creation” e.g. “report_YY_MM_DD.xls”.
In these cases, outputs’ filenames aren’t hardcoded into the workflow and thus aren’t possible to parse out. When you collect the outputs, you will get a number of files but have no way to find out where they came from.
In 2019.2 we’ve included support for these cases. Now we not only parse the workflow itself but the job output as well, meaning we can find out what file has actually been produced. Please note, this is specifically for the most recent run of a given workflow.
There’s no change needed from the user; the lineage should automatically pop up.
Changes to Loaders
We’ve made a number of enhancements to our Loaders with 2019.2. As mentioned above, we’ve added lineage support for in-db connection parsing from .indbc files and for stored procedures.
We’ve added support for SAP HANA SSO in the Use Button.
We’ve added support for Hive on Azure HDInsight. And finally, support has been added to the Snowflake loader to allow the fetching of metadata from USAGE VIEWS.
Fixed issues
In addition to all of these new features, some of the known issues have been resolved! Please, see the Release notes for the complete list of them.
Resolved: The Advanced search page takes a long time to load.
In some cases, the load of the Advanced search page took too long due to a heavy load of unnecessary data. This has been handled and the page loads in an appropriate amount of time.
Resolved: Load of DB objects containing an apostrophe.
The loaded script has been modified to correctly load database objects containing an apostrophe.
Known issues
Tableau Loader failing SSL validation
Tableau Loader is failing SSL validation in the following case: the SSL is used for the connection between the client (Browser, Alteryx Designer, Loader, etc.) and the load balancer. At the same time, the standard HTTP connection is used between the load balancer and the Tableau server. This causes the SSL is terminated. The workaround will be provided soon.
