Workflow chaining based on alteryx workflows available in gallery

[vijayalt]

Submitting this idea based on the Case #00361430.
 

We are trying to do alteryx workflow chaining based on workflows available in alteryx gallery, but this option is not currently available in alteryx right now and we are raising this idea to enable this feature in upcoming release or existing version patches.

Currently couple of methods available; saving the workflow in network share drive and chain the alteryx workflow based on events or run another analytical app on success.

The disadvantage of these methods are,

1. We cannot have version history maintained for the workflows in network share drive.

2. We cannot able to run a specific workflow in chaining as the workflows are packaged together.

[KylieF]

Thank you for your idea! We appreciate the time our users take to provide us feedback and help us improve our product. Be sure to check out our other product boards and user ideas as well as our updated Submission Guidelines.

 

[rob_cottrell]

Agreed! 

If you want the Server to be seen as enterprise-ready, this functionality needs to exist out-of-the-box.  It shouldn't be hard for an experienced developer to write a macro (using the Gallery API) to make this happen.

[patrick_digan]

This would be a great improvement

[SeanAdams]

Agree that this would be a useful capability - the other way that I've seen people doing this is by calling the gallery API to manually invoke the next worfklow in series - or using the Crew Runner from @MarqueeCrew 

[MarqueeCrew]

@SeanAdams 

Or setup a script or workflow that takes advantage of:

https://help.alteryx.com/current/designer/run-workflows-command-line 

cheers,

 mark

[Dynamomo]

Chaining workflows to run one after another on the Server has been a request that has gone back years.  This is basically why the CREW conditional and list runner macros were created (but are only supported on designer).  I've been working with Alteryx server since its first version and I've seen this requested by countless clients but if it isn't a Product Idea that gets a ton of votes on it, it isn't acted upon.  There are so many product ideas and challenges to searching them, lots of product ideas are sadly just buried.  I've had to help so many Alteryx developers build this functionality using the Alteryx API but it really is far above the average user's ability and I think it's really too much to ask when they just want to run Workflow 1, then 2 then 3.  

Also, my understanding is that by using the command line or even an Event will trigger the Alteryx engine to run, but could potentially conflict with workflows that are currently running or are in the queue to run then create a conflict of resources.  Functionality should be built in the scheduler (or elsewhere) to select workflows to kick off after other workflows.

[JohnPelletier]

Hi folks, we love the idea of workflow chaining and are we intend to do it as soon as we can get through some higher priorities. No promises on when but it's definitely on our radar. Thanks for the feedback!

[CristonS]

We are researching, and will update when our product team knows more.

[vijayalt]

Thanks Criston, looking forward for that... Thanks

[JohnPelletier]

Hey folks, with regard to workflow chaining, some of our customers are using third party orchestrators/automation tools such as Maestro or ActiveBatch. What are your thoughts on these solutions? How can we make it easier to do automation using third party tools? If you're not using one, why not? Is it because it requires scripting/automation that's not available or easy for citizen data scientists and business analysts?  Is there another challenge?