How To: Create a Template Workflow That Opens Each Time You Open Designer

[TheOC]

A couple of Important notes before we get started:

• This functionality may require Administrator access on the machine to be able to add files to that folder.
• it's important to know that this isn't part of Alteryx Designer User Settings probably for a reason - and your Alteryx Designer stability is at your own risk by changing files within these folders. I haven't experienced any problems with changing the Start Here file or adding additional files, however, I am not responsible for any trouble caused by doing so.
• This functionality is tested on the current version of Alteryx. New versions could stop this from working - so bare that in mind when upgrading.

If you've used Alteryx Designer, you will be familiar with this workflow:

This workflow is great because it opens each and every time we open Alteryx Designer, and it's a great launch pad for development and learning. I was interested in having a dig around, and see if I can get other workflows to open when I first open Alteryx Designer. The easiest example for this, is a workflow template with company branding, style guides, and annotation descriptions. From a development perspective, it would be useful for a template workflow to open each time I open Designer.

I will be using this workflow for a demonstration, which I would like to use as my template for future development:

The next steps are really quite simple - we just need to find where the Start_here.yxdb file is located. To do this, you can either hover over the file name:

Or we can right click ➡ Open Containing Folder:

Here we can see the Start Here workflow:

Each and any workflow within this folder will be opened when a new instance of  Alteryx Designer is created. If we add our workflow to this folder, and then open Alteryx Designer, we will now see two workflows when opening Designer:

I can, of course, delete the Start Here file too if required, and add additional workflows that may be useful to me or my organisation.

Also, it feels weird creating a how to post without a gif - so let me thank you, fellow nerd, for reading my post!

Let me know below how you use this functionality too! I am curious to see what other use can be gained from setting default workflows!

[JagdeeshN · Accepted solution]

@TheOC !

Thanks for putting this together. Really useful when encouraging consistent documentation across workflows in an organization.

I have used a similar approach to force email notifications(logs) across all workflows. Either through a macro or the events.

[MitchN]

I used this method in the past to create my own version of the StartHere page that contains links to other Alteryx workflows. The most recent version of Alteryx that has the StartHere page pop up as a separate window is not allowing me to click on the blue "Open workflow" buttons to open the workflows that I have linked to them. Is there a fix for this?