Alteryx Gallery Search Engine Needs Attention

[ccagle]

Wanted to grab some attention here regarding the Alteryx gallery search engine (which also bleeds over into searching for schedules and jobs when troubleshooting). 

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm pasting two pictures (one attachment) of searching our gallery for the word "Contour" and the word "Signal". Both of these words are in the title of a single workflow - when I search for the word "Contour", the workflow pops up. When I use the first word in the workflow, which is "Signal", it doesn't pop up. 

I appreciate all that Alteryx does, but I wouldn't think this should be a difficult issue to fix, and I would imagine there are other frustrations with the functionality here. 

[ccagle]

I have a workflow I just pulled off the gallery (manually) that has the word "Search" in it. The search engine didn't recognize the workflow when using the word "Search" 😞

[TanyaS]

There are a number of behaviors in the Server search that prompt comment. We're currently investigating best course of action for addressing some of them while maintaining or improving on current capabilities. Feel free to add comments regarding edge cases or oddities we should be aware of while we look into this!

-Tanya

[ccagle]

Thanks Tanya. One of the main issues is that when you search for one of the words in a multi-word workflow, there are many instances when the search returns nothing. Also, even some workflows won't return when you search for the exact name of the workflow. This is also consistent when searching in the scheduler on designer, or doing a search in designer to open a workflow in the gallery (probably obvious there since it is likely all the same search engine but just pointing this out). 

[wildflower]

@ccagle Did you get with Support to take a look at your gallery server? This sounds to me like your indexes are broken -- queued items may no longer be updating. Were you also encountering issues with replacing workflows (since that also queries MongoDB). Deleting workflows will also have issues.

• In the gallery logs, this line indicates indexer is active (it doesn't sleep very long): INFO,22,QueueWorker,Hibernate,,,,<your_server_name>,,,,,,Queue worker sleeping for 1 seconds.
• Logs found in <drive where server is installed>\ProgramData\Alteryx\Gallery\Logs

We had the same issue and Support was able to resolve the indexing issue for us. They also found a much larger issue due to a previously failed migration when looking at our user-managed MongoDB.

All gallery searches now return results and we're able to replace workflows seamlessly. We have a handful of workflows with the word "Search" in its name (e.g. "Search by Address") and they all show up in the list, searching a portion of the name (e.g. "whole" in "wholesale") also returns results.

[ronvv]

We are also having issues with the GallerySearch...even after working with Support to re-index MongoDB.

The search engine appears very inconsistent and unpredictable

eg:

• We have 17 workflows where the filename contains the word “Compass”

  Only 14 are returned when searching for “Compass”

  The 3 missing:

  • 021CompassStaff_lan_stg
  • 022_Compass_Parents_lan_stg (yet Faces_Compass_MedicalStaging is returned)
  • 02Compass_lan_stg

  There are 12 workflows containing “_lan_”

  Only 10 are returned when searching for “lan”

  The 2 missing are:

  • 021CompassStaff_lan_stg (yet 022_Compass_Parents_lan_stg is returned
  • 02Compass_lan_stg

Support has been unable to assist this far, and are unable to provide the rules or patterns we should be using

This significantly impact on our teams use of Gallery

[j_acon]

Alteryx  can we improve the search function in the gallery? Substring search and support of any characters in the workflow name. Is so easily done within alteryx, yet the gallery can't do it. It just fustrates the users.

[KylieF]

I wanted to give an update on this idea as its been a bit over a year since this was placed into Under Review. Unfortunately, this idea fell through the cracks and we were unable to start our research process on what it would take to update the search. However, has been brought back to our product team's attention, who are currently researching how we would best be able to update the Server search engine.

Thank you for your patience while we look into this enhancement!

[dajones]

Have there been any updates on this?  It's pretty frustrating when you can't substring search, exact search, or any search (for that matter) a workflow title in the gallery.  I've tried exact names and partial names and it seems to return a result less than 20% of the time.

[bhawkes03]

@KylieF, I want to echo what @dajones asked. This is a frustration that me and my team deal with every day. It is ridiculous that this is even an issue. It seems silly to keep adding new features if the existing ones don't work properly. Is it too much to ask for this fix be prioritized?

[mlange]

For the last 4 years, Alteryx Designer has been a joy for me to work with, but the server product leaves a lot to be desired from a user experience perspective.  We've found technical work-arounds to several items that we wish server did better, but there really is no good work around to this search engine problem.   If I were to pick a single item that is most frustrating, and casts Alteryx in the worst light, it is the server search engine.  I have yet to come across an engine in the last 10 years that has been worse for finding what I want.

We have several hundred production workflows in our gallery now, and we use the meta info tab quite extensively for documentation and maintenance purposes.  I think the fact that the engine seems to search the meta info is the biggest problem.  Unless my workflow happens to have an unusual word in the name, anything I type (especially using the full exact workflow name) brings up dozens of results, with the workflow I'm looking for often at the bottom of the list. 

It's great that the engine looks at meta info, but it needs to prioritize matches against the workflow name, or that "feature" makes the engine feel unusable.  Our situation has gotten bad enough that I'd way rather just have an alphabetized list of several hundred workflows to scroll through every time and no access to a search engine than be forced to use the existing engine.  I agree with the other problems mentioned on the forum, but this issue is the real kicker if you utilize meta info like our organization does.