Classroom data with events and available classrooms with dummy data

Question

We have a live data monitor that we use Alteryx to update. The monitor shows our 25 classrooms and what is going on in each of those individual classrooms on a certain day. We are currently sending the display monitor multiple days so we have the option to scroll and see the future as well. The issue is that there are 25 classrooms either being used or not being used on each individual day so we have to send 5 or more days worth of data for each of the classrooms. The events that occur on each of those respective days in each of the classrooms vary. We could potentially have something in classroom 12 today and nothing in it tomorrow. We have to send a value regardless for it to display. I found an ugly solution that works but I know there has to be another way and if we wanted to send it more than 5 days it would be even uglier.

We basically have data coming in from our database with information on all of the classroom events for the day and that populates the data for classrooms in use. The issue is the classrooms we don't have data for. We still want them to display even if they are empty and just show nothing on the Agenda. I have this working but in a rather ridiculous manner. We want a way for this to work for any range of dates provided. We can take the minimum and maximum date range of the data provided and have this create dummy classroom events for each available classroom between those dates. After attending the 2018 Inspire conference, we believe an iterative macro might be our best bet but we are having trouble figuring out where to begin.

Note: Please keep in mind that we are still using the 10.6 version of Alteryx and are limited to it's constraints.

See attached.

Thank you,

Tyler

Sample Workflow.yxmd

danrh · Accepted Answer

You should be able to avoid an iterative macro by using the Generate Rows tool:

The top Text Input is your original data you provided, the bottom Text Input has the date you want to begin from and the number of days forward from that date you want to send --- note that if you'd rather put in an end date, this is also very doable.  Append puts these two fields on every record.  The Generate Rows then takes every record and creates additional records until the condition is met --- in this case, until we've gone forward more than the specified number of days from the start date.

Take a look and reach out with questions.  You should be able to get this going without an iterative macro and without duplicating out Formula tools for every day.