Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Find answers, ask questions, and share expertise about Alteryx Designer Desktop and Intelligence Suite.
SOLVED

Populate Text Box Tool default value with existing workflow value

Sbinkley
7 - Meteor

Hi - I need to display the entire free text contents of a field on the Interface Designer window.  Currently, the ideal tool for this would be a Text Box Tool, except that there is no input connector for me to populate the default value of the tool.  

 

I know Alteryx is not a data input tool, and I probably have to hack this solution. I'm open to ideas. 

 

I don't have an option to edit the xml for the Text Box Tool (but I do for other tools) so that option appears to be out.  

 

Can I use a macro as an interface tool such that I can make it show up on the Interface Designer window with its default populated with my field value?  

 

Any ideas welcome!

3 REPLIES 3
afv2688
16 - Nebula
16 - Nebula

Not like I tried, but just throwing an idea here.... what if you concatenate two apps, in the first one you create an output file which you want to be read by the second one?

 

Then you maybe can use there the text input tool.... as I said, just having thought about it for a sec. :)

danilang
19 - Altair
19 - Altair

Hi @Sbinkley 

 

Like you said, Alteryx is not a Data Input tool.  Your best, safest, most reliable approach option is to have the correct text before running the workflow, by having the user submit a text file with the proper text, that you then parse in your workflow. 

 

Having said that, I can think of a way that would work in Alteryx Designer, but probably not on a server, because of security restrictions.  This extreme hack would be to have 2 chained apps.  The first would read your default text from a file and edit the raw XML of the second app. 

 

 

 

Obviously this won't work on encrypted apps and is fraught with all kinds of issues.  For example, what if the input text contains the line "X >= Y" which would be perfectly valid text, but would completely break the the second app because of the embedded ">"

 

Dan

Sbinkley
7 - Meteor

We are in fact hoping to deploy on server so thanks for the heads up that this will not be a solution for this project.  That being said, I will keep this in my back pocket for going forward.  

Labels