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Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Find answers, ask questions, and share expertise about Alteryx Designer Desktop and Intelligence Suite.
fireworks

Download Tool giving website code

MudgilNiket
6 - Meteoroid
‎05-29-2025 05:21 AM

Hi Alteryx Community,


This is my first time using this tool.

 

I'm having trouble with the Download Tool. After successfully adding a URL, the data appears be in an HTML format making it impossible to process.

 

I've checked the URL and output settings, and I've tried different character encodings in the Input Data Tool, but the issue persists.

Has anyone faced similar issues? Any tips on handling Unicode data in Alteryx would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

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abacon
12 - Quasar
‎05-29-2025 06:01 AM

@MudgilNiket 404 errors means it can't find the website provided, which could be from a few different things. What are you trying to download? It might be in the wrong format, you might be missing some parameters, or many other things.

 

Are you able to provide some context, documentation, and/or screenshots as to what you are trying to do?

 

Bacon

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MudgilNiket
6 - Meteoroid
‎05-29-2025 06:51 AM

Hi Bacon,

 

The issue is I am not getting the 404 error
What I am getting is an HTML code instead of the XLS file for which I have added the link in the Text Input Tool.

This is what I am getting in the downloadData column :-

<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en-US"><head><title>Just a moment...</title><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge"><meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"><meta name="vie...

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abacon
12 - Quasar
‎05-29-2025 06:52 AM

Your download headers column is saying 404, that is why you are getting the HTML of the website. What is the query you are using and the parameters? Good testing is use Postman to create the query and get it working first then put into Alteryx.

 

Bacon

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davidskaife
14 - Magnetar
‎05-29-2025 06:55 AM

@MudgilNiket 

 

Screenshot of your screenshots....

Screenshot 2025-05-29 113254.png

 

You need to provide more detail on what you're trying to extract, where from, your tool configuration, any documentation etc

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apathetichell
20 - Arcturus
‎05-29-2025 07:20 AM

hypothesis --- the download tool is best suited for APIs --- you are trying to using for webscraping. The page you are trying to scrape will not allow direct requests. If you throw the same URL in Postman and hit run - you'll get the same redirect/Not Found content.

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apathetichell
20 - Arcturus
‎05-29-2025 07:21 AM

To be clear --- your response is ALWAYS going to be in html, xml, json or raw/encoded bytes --- and hopefully you mean an xlsx file --- not an xls file.

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