Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas
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When building out Alteryx workflows there may be a need to read in different ranges within the same Excel spreadsheet. For example bringing in a table from Sheet1, but also isolating a table name in a particular cell (in my example cell C8).
When turning this into an analytic app, with a file browse is to add an action tool with the default value of "Update Input Data Tool".
However when specifying this option within the analytic app interface, you are only allowed to chose one option of the following:
i) Select a sheet
ii) Select a sheet and specify a range
iii) a named range or
iv) a list of sheet names.
The problem is in the example above I need a sheet and a range, but I want to avoid adding two file browse interface tools as it shouldn't be needed. If the user selects (i) then it loses the reference to cell C8, but I would imagine a lot of users as they get started with apps don't realise this is what will happen.
There is however a way to solve this currently and it requires overwriting the default behaviour and configuring the second action tool (the one that updates the file for C8), to update value with a formula, where you assume the user would select sheet name and then use this formula:
replace([#1],"$`","$C8:C8`")
However I would argue that this has a lot of technical debt, plus if the user needs to modify where the header is, for example to D8 they need to change the input file and the action tool so it works as a workflow and an analytic app.
Solution
Like how the configuration options for the input file, such as which row to input data from or whether first row contains data is maintained, modify the behaviour of the default option in the action tool to maintain references to ranges.
