Version Control for Alteryx Designer

[jordancarson18]

Currently if one wants to compare different alteryx files or different versions of the same file - one needs to compare the XML files. If you are not very familiar with navigating XML, this poses a risk as one may not be able to identify all changes.

It would be a great addition to Alteryx to integrate Alteryx with Git, Subversion, CVS, Mercurial, and GitHub as this tool is becoming the go-to tool for data processing for data analysts and even programmers.

This additional functionality to compare previous versions (diff) and also to merge alteryx workflows if two people are working on the same workflow, and also to easily see what changes have been committed/ made by other developers and when would make Alteryx a much more powerful tool and would open doors to other types of users, as essentially you can run anything through Alteryx.

[chrisha]

As a first step, a Git-integration in Designer - maybe something similarly basic as what RStudio offers (https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200532077-Version-Control-with-Git-and-SVN). Might not be useful for everyone, but as soon as you collaborate with others, it can be a life-saver.

[seven]

It seems like there are already fantastic tools for version control, issue tracking, kanban, etc. I prefer GitLab. I've used git or svn for every Alteryx project I've ever been on with no issues. What am I missing?

[SeanAdams]

Hey @seven 

the area that a few people are looking for, is for Alteryx and Alteryx Server to integrate to integrate to version control systems like Git / SVN.

You can definately store your Alteryx canvas in GIT if you want, as a single person team that works OK - once you scale this up to an enterprise of several thousand users, you start to have challenges keeping your GIT versioning, and the versioning on Alteryx Server in-sync.

So the core of the request is to allow teams to integrate to GIT / SVN / other team source repositories from within Alteryx Designer directly (so that you can share a canvas with your co-workers with check-in/check-out like you do with source code directly from Designer) and also to use this same versioning on the server env - with Diff and audit of changes.