Browse to folder; Store as variable for re-use?

Question

I have about five minutes of experience with Alteryx Designer, so please excuse my ignorance.

Each week, source data is stored in various sub-folders beneath a folder that is named according to the date. I cannot change where the data is stored.

Example:

2020.07.10

EEData

EEFilename1.xlsx

PayrollData

PRFilename1.xlsx

AffiliateData

AFFilename1.xlsx

2020.07.17

EEData

EEFilename1.xlsx

PayrollData

PRFilename1.xlsx

AffiliateData

AFFilename1.xlsx

I would like the user to be able to browse once for the folder <Path>/2020.07.17, and then I would like to be able to use that selection in multiple InputData objects.

In other tools, I would allow the user to select the path once, and then I would store their selection as a variable that I would use in my pathnames for the individual files as needed.

Does Alteryx have this concept of storing variables and using them in file/paths connections? If not, what would the best approach be to accomplish this?

echuong1 · Accepted Answer

There are workflow constants that you can set - open the workflow configuration by clicking anywhere in the white space, then go under Workflow. You can add constants to be referenced in the workflow later on here. With this method to dynamically bring in files like this, you'd need to use the Dynamic input tool instead of the standard input tool.

If the goal is so the user doesn't have to reconfigure every tool each time they want to run the analysis, you can turn your workflow into an analytic app. You'd use the folder browse tool with action tools connected to the input tools to update the folder path portion of each input tool.

It will look something like this:

See this post for an example:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer/Using-input-data-with-folder-browse/td-p/333710

Hope this helps!