Parsing Alteryx Challenges

[mpennington]

I know there are many resources on the community for parsing challenges. I've obviously been working through many of late, trying to hone my skills. One of the things that I had done early on, was to try and scrape my challenges in an effective way. I felt, at the time, that many of the solutions I had seen were too complicated for my skill set, so I wanted to build something simpler and I wanted to learn more about parsing web pages in the process. With that, I thought I would post my solution, in case it helps anyone who is working through challenges.  I know it would probably be easier to do this in other ways, but I am very particular about how I wanted to see my results. Also parsing for all users is resource intensive, so limiting to one user keeps this workflow speedy. Unless you have hundreds of pages of comments, this works well--at least in my experience.  If you want to use for yourself, simply change the ID in the first input. I wanted to keep this simple where it could be modified without difficulty. Basically, I use my community ID and I scrape my posts for challenges that I have commented on. I know there are ways to do so with attachments, but I felt that would over complicate my solution.  In the first part, I am scraping my challenges from the messages I have posted. Then I limit to the unique posts per Challenge, so I don't double count.  Then I post a couple of final browse outputs, with the final table for all challenges, whether completed or not, including a link to my solution (my first comment on a challenge), if one exists:

Next is the output I use the most, the Next to Complete, where I filter for challenges that I do not have a reply posted, as I have done several challenges twice, perhaps due to a lack of mental accuity or blunt force trauma.  Regardless, I try to copy the links from here before I begin a new challenge: 

I try to always comment my workflows, so it will be easier for others to use, but I don't guaranty that my ramblings make sense to all.  Here is the workflow in totality:

I highlighted where to find the User ID# on community for reference. At any rate, hope this is helpful.  Happy to answer any questions, if it is useful.

Best Regards,

-Michael Pennington

[Qiu]

@mpennington 
Thank you so much for the details.
Good material for me to learn.

[mpennington]

@Qiu Glad you find it helpful!