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Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

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SOLVED

Block until done

roadhouse
7 - Meteor

How is this possible? Shouldn't the second macro be BLOCKed (0%) UNTIL the first macro (79%) is DONE? How can the second macro be 28% finished while the first is still running?

 

I've validated my data and the flow did run in sequence but I'm curious about what displays on my screen when the job runs.

 

pasted_image_at_2017_03_15_02_56_pm.jpg

11 REPLIES 11
GarthM
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

i must've misspoke but I should be forgiven 'cuz, at this point, my knowledge -more truthfully, my guesses- are riding the edge of a lightning bolt with how i'm describing things. 

 

anyway...

 

it's my understanding that upstream tools, and by extension their output anchors, care A LOT about downstream processes of the tool(s) they're passing data to. naively speaking, in order for Alteryx to finalize an "output connection process" on a given data stream, downstream tools must communicate to their upstream tool counterparts something along the lines of: "everything is ok. feel free to close out and head home." given that the 'Wait A Minute' macro must exit itself before output #2 "opens the gate" has me believe that a string of cascading dependencies exists amongst the downstream sequence of tools connected to the BUD output #1. another one of my shallow understandings is that the Output tool requires a complete profile of the data flowing into it before the engine will initialize the incoming connection to it. if what i know is accurate, and my suspicions about the dependency cascade is also true, then the BUD can't ask the engine to initialize the Output tool that writes to out3.csv until output #2 is fully aware of the size and structure of the data it will be passing down to it.

 

i hope this makes sense.

mcarrico
9 - Comet

Thanks everyone for weighing in.  We ended up getting this resolved and just wanted to post our findings.  So as I mentioned, our macro that is not finishing before the BUD proceeds ends with a nested Batch Macro used to execute another process.  Ideally, the workflow would pause and wait for the process initiated by that Run Command to finish, but that was not the case.  The solution was to introduce an Output tool that outputs a dummy CSV to conclude the macro.  This output does not contain any data and is not used for anything, but by adding it, the BUD seems to respect the order of operations and waits for the command to finish before moving onto the next gate.  

 

 BUD_Resolution.PNG

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