Is it possible to get a diagram/list of all tools and their configuration from a workflow?

[Alayna]

Hi Alteryx,

I have a couple workflows that have been handed off to me and I'm in the process of building process maps to understand the data inputs, processing, and outputs for each. This is so I and any future Alteryx designers on my team can have a better understanding of what some of our legacy workflows are doing. I was wondering if it is possible to somehow get a list of all the tools in a workflow along with what they're doing?

For example, I have a workflow with 13 input tools (6 are SQL statements), 6 output tools, and several joins and formulas in between. Can I somehow extract this information from Alteryx and have those tool names outputted into a list and/or diagram?

If I remember correctly, there's a setting to see the XML view of an entire workflow... could I use the xml parse to achieve what I want?

[DataNath]

Hey @Alayna, there’s an auto documentation tool which sounds like what you’re after, if not very similar:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Engine-Works/Auto-Documentation/ba-p/545827

[acarter881]

Hello, @Alayna. You can see the XML for a workflow by (for example) right clicking on the yxmd and selecting Edit in Notepad++. I would use the Python tool and this API to parse the XML into a structured format.

XML of a yxmd

Spoiler

[Alayna]

Hi @DataNath thank you for the reply! This looks amazing and I will take a look at it later, but it seems like I may need admin permissions to use this? I see a section where I'll need to edit a file in my Alteryx folder and I don't have permission to do that on my machine.

[Alayna]

Hi @acarter881 Thanks for the reply! I'm not too familiar with the python tool in Alteryx but I've coded before. I'm reading in the XML as a text input with no delimiter, then using cross tab to get it all back into one row. Then after reading, looks like I needed to convert a data frame to bytes before using the module. Do you have any ideas on the error?

[DataNath]

Ah yes, looks that way for disabling the python timeout @Alayna - any way your admin can do this?

[acarter881]

Hey, @Alayna. I'm impressed with that transformation of data, but I find it more difficult to use that in Python versus importing the XML file itself.

Please see the spoiler. I'd save that text file as an XML file and import it directly into the Python tool. The Python tool does not require an input data stream.

Spoiler