Loops in Alteryx are among the most frustrating experiences ever devised. If there is anything that will cause me to move away from this tool, it's the fact that such a simple concept is so difficult to implement. This seems to me one of the most common use cases for an ETL tool. The answer to this (so I'm told) is a batch macro, which is another difficult concept to implement.
Here's my situation - I have a set of files. They all have fun variations on their names based on how Windows auto-names downloaded files (i.e. file.xlsx, file (1).xlsx, file (2).xlsx, etc). I need to grab all these files. For each file, there is a column in the dataset which contains dates. I need to find the max value in that column and append it to the data associated with that file. This suggests a for loop as follows:
get list of all files matching criteria (ie, load file*.xlsx) into temp table
for each file in list
read date column to get max
append max(date) to file's dataset
repeat until all files processed
How do I do this? Thanks in advance for the help.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention - there can be zero user interaction required during the execution of this workflow, aside from perhaps updating the file path to the location of the downloaded files.
