Alteryx Designer Ideas
Share your Designer product ideas - we're listening!
@AdamR did a talk this year at Inspire EU about testing Alteryx Canvasses - and it seems that there is a lot we can do here to improve the product:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eN7_XQByPQ&t=1706s
One of the biggest and most impactful changes would be support for detailed unit testing for a canvas - this could work much like it does in Visual Studio:
Proposal:
In order to fully test a workflow - you need 3 things:
- Ability to replace the inputs with test data
- Ability to inspect any exceptions or errors thrown by the canvas
- Ability to compare the results to expectation
To do this:
- Create a second tab behind a canvas which is a Testing view of the canvas which allows you to define tests. Each test contains values for one or more of the inputs; expected exceptions / errors; and expected outputs
- Alteryx then needs to run each of these tests one by 1 - and for each test:
- Replace the data inputs with the defined test input.
- Check for, and trap errors generated by Alteryx
- Compare the output
- Generate a test score (pass or fail against each test case)
This would allow:
- Each workflow / canvas to carry its own test cases
- Automated regression testing overnight for every tool and canvas
Example:
For this canvas - there are 2 inputs; and one output.
Each test case would define:
- Test rows to push into input 1
- Test rows to push into input 2
- any errors we're expecting
- The expected output of the browse tool
This would make Alteryx SUPER robust and allow people to really test every canvas in an incredibly tight way!
You've built your Alteryx workflow to process your data, but are you certain it works how you intended it to? Can you be certain it will work months from now when the data format changes? In this session, we'll look at different automated ways to test your workflow, starting with features built ...
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