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Alteryx Designer Desktop Knowledge Base

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CS Macro Dev: Analytical App Debug Workflow

MattD
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
Created

This article is part of the CS Macro Development Series. The goal of this series is to communicate tips, tricks, and the thought process that goes into developing good, dynamic macros.


If you’ve ever built an analytical app and used the Interface Designer (View >> Interface Designer), you’ve probably spent some time in the Test View:


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This menu provides a great runtime view of the interface as you’re adding and configuring tools and also allows you to interact with them, much like you would when selecting “Run As An Analytical App” in your Designer. You can clear (Reset), save (Save – as an .yxwv analytical app value file), reopen (Open – search for your .yxwv files) and investigate the xml capture of your test values (View – these will initialize to your specified defaults) in here, but the real value is in using the “Open Debug” button to open your app debug workflow:


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This will create a new module with the workflow that would result from executing all the actions of your interface tools (individual values, tools, even xml, can be updated). You can also see these values, along with an actions log, in a comment box preceding the tools themselves. The workflow will even show you errors if your interface tools created any after updates! This comes in handy as you’re updating detours, opening/closing tool containers, and performing complex updates to your workflows via interface tools because it gives you a snapshot into what, exactly, is happening with each set of Test View values and, in effect, at runtime.


For example, in the screen capture of the Test View above, we have the default app (attached as v10.5 App Debugger.yxwz) values. When opening the debug workflow (attached as v10.5 Debug Workflow Default Values.yxmd), we can see the result of them in that our row value is still “Test” and our detour defaults to the right:


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However, if you update the values in the Test View and reopen the debug workflow with the values below:


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You’ll see in the new workflow (attached as v10.5 Debug Workflow New Values.yxmd), that our row value is now updated to “DebugTest” and our detour no longer goes to the right:

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The above is a simple example of the power of the tool, but using it more often in your troubleshooting will help pinpoint where your errors or conflicts are arising, freeing more time for you to build out more apps!

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