Share connections from Designer

[SeanAdams]

In alterxy BI teams, we often need to hit the same data-store - however if shared connections are not adopted in the server environment, there's currently no easy way to share the connections among the team (none that I know of)

Would be great if there were a "share" button on the data connections tab in the designer, so that we could share connections with a team, or export known good connections to a file that can be kept under config-management / version control.

Thank you

Sean

[MattB]

Hi Sean,

Thanks for submitting the idea! What types of connections are you hoping to share? Are you using Alteryx Server? In case you are not familiar with our Data Connection Manager feature in v11.0, please check out the following posts.

New in Alteryx Analytics 11.0 – Wrangling Connections with the New Data Connection Manager

Manage Data Connections

Please continue to post ideas as these help us refine our roadmap. We appreciate it!

[SeanAdams]

Hey @MattB,

While we do use the server, sharing connections via the server requires us to work with the server admin team to share these (apologies if I've misunderstood this) which creates a bottleneck because our server admin team are so busy.

The desire is to be able to share these bilaterally without having to go via the server or the server admin team.

Specifically the two types of connection we'd like to share, so that we can all connect using the same ID and alias, are database connections (connections via OLEDB do not require sharing because they are fully self-descriptive in the connection string, but native SQL server connections only share the alias name in the workflow) and InDB connections.    The reason for wanting to do this is that we have a team of folk who need to provide holiday cover to each other - and if everyone is using a slightly different name for a DB connection, then we cannot run each other's flows.

As noted above, this is not an issue for OleDB connections which are fully self descriptive, but other connection types which rely on the local alias have to be manually created on every machine in the team in exactly the same way in order for the flow to work.    This would be easier if we can just share the details of the connection alias to everyone (from designer to designer) and then we'd be done in 5 mins and 100% accurate.

Thank you for coming back on this and asking for more info Matt

Sean

[MattB]

Thanks @SeanAdams . I appreciate the info and this helps validate some of our thoughts. These features are part of a larger initiative in our roadmap. I may reach out to you later when we have a Beta or to talk in more detail about the initiative.  Please keep the ideas and feedback coming!

[patrick_mcauliffe]

@MattB

I wish I had more stars to give this idea.  @SeanAdams is absolutely right - requiring the Admin to setup connections for sharing on the Gallery creates a bottleneck.

It was a little disappointing to finally try out this feature today only to find that I couldn't add connections from Designer.  Especially confusing since the options give the illusion that it's possible.

[MattB]

@SeanAdams and @patrick_mcauliffe, I completely agree. The ability to share connections from Designer was part of the original spec for our feature in v11.0. We will not be able to pick this back up until early 2018. We are also looking at adding even more value to the Data Connection Manager in addition to sharing Designer connections. At the moment, we are fully consumed working on a ton of great products and features that we are excited to get out in upcoming releases.

[Atabarezz]

still looking forward to it...

[MattB]

Hi @Atabarezz,

We are excited to work on delivering the feature too :). During the Inspire in London, we talked a bit more about our Next-Gen platform. As part of that, we have an incredible list of exciting features coming in 2018 and 2019. The data connection management space is part of the plan.

[CliveM]

Matt, 

I'd be interested in knowing more about this as soon as information become available. I work with a large amount of data sources and having to go through the Server Admin is an enormous pain point.

One step towards this would be not having Alteryx rely on DSN's. How Tableau/Tableau Server manages connections is the gold standard in my opinion.

Thanks,

Clive Munz

[wlhale]

Put me down for another site that would love to have the ability to share connections. Our situation goes like this.

1. Purchased Alteryx designer with scheduling to allow us the ability to build workflows and schedule them

2. Step #1 went very well to the point that within a year we decided to purchase additional designer installs. We cannot afford Server at this time or any time in the near future. 

3. We purchased 2 additional designer installs to go along with our original install. The additional designers do not have scheduler. 

4. After some training this quickly turned into a mess with connections as users were creating their own connection alias's and when trying to deploy them on the install with scheduler errors occurred due to missing alias.

So are there plans to allow something like "export connection - import connection"? Maybe even a save connection to a shared location that all designers can get to?

[scottr1]

Is there an update on when this will be implemented? I am about to move to a new laptop and migrating numerous workflows that I will need to make sure to include connections.