Natural Language descriptions of a workflow

[paul_houghton]

While I was trying to integrate Alteryx workflows into modern data catalogues got me thinking about the transformation lineage. To integrate the transformations into those applications, an understanding of what transformations are happening and in what order is needed. Why not take this one step further for documentation use?

So my suggestion is:

Create a natural language description of the transformations and sequencing of a workflow. This could be used as the default descriptions and exported as a readme file for reviewing (e.g. during workflow handover activities), adding workflows to version control or project plans. 

[gautiergodard]

Hi @paul_houghton 

Thank you for sharing this one, I agree this would be a fantastic way to eliminate or reduce all of the time that is currently spent on documentation!

Id submitted a posted a while back suggesting something similar using the XML of a workflow and you’ll see some of the responses containing existing solutions:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/XML-to-Procedure-Document/idi-p/1011755

Regardless of how we get there, an enhanced or automated documentation feature would be awesome. 

[cgoodman3]

This would be cool, as I often describe an Alteryx workflow as WYSIWYG. So it would be great if this would be reversed engineered to give a summary description such as “This workflow takes order data from SAP and summarises sales by region per month”.