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Text File Input to an App Interface

dwmautone
5 - Atom

Hi. I am building an app where I want to have the user input a text file, but the issue is it's not delimited, and there are no natural delimiters in the data. Previously I had been manually selecting the file in the input tool and setting the column breaks by hand. Is there a way to have this ability when making the workflow into an app? I am using the file browse tool but it doesn't give any options, it just brings in the un-delimited file which then doesn't work with the rest of the flow. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks!

5 REPLIES 5
CharlieS
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

@dwmautone wrote:

Previously I had been manually selecting the file in the input tool and setting the column breaks by hand.


Is there any programmatic way this could be done? If so, the user could input the complete path of the text file into a Text Box that updates the path in the Input tool. The tools downstream in the workflow could then execute any necessary parsing. 

dwmautone
5 - Atom

Thanks for the suggestion! I am now having the file input as CSV and having tools downstream do the necessary parsing.

adrilarotta
8 - Asteroid

Hi @CharlieS , I am having kind of the same issue, I have a workflow which takes 75 to 100 txt files with no delimiters, I have exported the file to tell Alteryx where to parse the data, but how can I do that in an application? I also have the problem of uploading the 75 text files, some help would be very much appreciate.

 

Thanks

CharlieS
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

@adrilarotta 

 

I guess I'm not clear on how the data is formatted if "there are no delimiters". Even a space can be considered a delimiter. Now, if you don't know what the character is ahead of time, it may be possible to use an automated process to determine, then apply a delimited and import a file, but this would require several complicated macros and a bit of time to test and build.

 

I hope this makes sense, I'm happy to answer questions here, or you might be better off starting a new topic with some examples to bring this to the attention of a wider audience. 

aghani006
7 - Meteor

You can use folder browse tool (interface) to tell Alteryx where the files are and use chained App to run the workflow

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