How to cancel portion of a workflow if conditions are met

[bsharbo]

Hello everyone. I am very new to AlterYX (am doing a trial of it trying to see if it can be useful at my company over some other tools) and I am struggling to see how the tool can handel canceling of specific runs.  Related to this problem I have two distinct questions.

For example: We have a very basic ETL tool that reads in 3 seperate files.  If any of the files has a formatting problem (Aka a text in a field that should be a date, etc..)  then we want that entire file to not process, and an email to go out to specific users that would show the exact field location of the format error.

Question #1:
If someone gave us a csv file with 5 fields and 10,000 rows, and field #3 had a format error in row 9,203  Is there a way to capture this information specifically?

Question #2:  If we can capture this inforamtion, if there a way to then kill the next steps in the workflow related to this file, but allow the other steps (for the other two files) to continue? 

Thanks and let me know if I need to clarify my question any further!

[Ned · Accepted solution]

Typically you would use the Test tool or the Message tool to have a error, but it sounds like you don't actually want an error.  It sounds like you want to ignore those records silently and keep processing.

It would be fairly straightforward to use a filter tool.  You will need to join the record count on to the data stream to filter on it - I used an append fields tool.  On the false side I would add a Message tool to issue a warning to the output log that an input was skipped.

I put together a quick demo of what I mean in case its not clear.  It was be easy to convert this to a macro if that's an operation you would commonly use.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xg7dsts9s8sdgxf/SkipBasedOnTotal.yxmd?dl=1