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!
The Product Idea boards have gotten an update to better integrate them within our Product team's idea cycle! However this update does have a few unique behaviors, if you have any questions about them check out our FAQ.

Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Share your Designer Desktop product ideas - we're listening!
Submitting an Idea?

Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!

Submission Guidelines

Use Environment variables in directory & input tools (for paths)

Environment variables act as a shortcut so that different computers can be configured in different ways, but a particular path will still point to the right place.

 

For example if you open up explorer and go to %TEMP%\  - you will open up whichever folder is set up as Temp on this machine.    This is super useful so that you can use a particular logical folder without knowing the actual placement on every machine (for example the Windows Directory)

 

envVariables.png

 

 

This works partially in the Directory / input - when you put in the environment variable, it is able to search possible subdirectories (screenshot 1) but it does not work once you run the workflow (screenshot 2).

It seems as if the designer hits the Windows API directly, but it does not work within the engine.

 

Please could you alter the engine to be able to make full use of the environment variables on the machine in question in the directory path or input tool path?

 

Screenshot 1 - works in designerScreenshot 1 - works in designer

 

Doesnt work in Engine.png

2 Comments
patrick_digan
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

I would love to have those environment variables available in the Input Directory and output tools

AlteryxCommunityTeam
Alteryx Community Team
Alteryx Community Team
Status changed to: Accepting Votes