Alteryx Server Ideas

Improve Gallery scheduling to allow the end user to specify company denoted Holidays when scheduling a workflow. If the workflow is scheduled on a Holiday the schedule would not run. This should be configurable per workflow schedule. Example: A daily report Monday through Friday would be able to skip Holidays based off a Holiday exclusion list. 

When adding jobs to the queue via API call, you currently cannot specify the name of the job.

Running the job directly from gallery allows this as in the picture below, but there is no setting to do so in the API.

When a workflow is used in many different situations, being able to specify a name for the individual run will make tracking and troubleshooting easier.

Hi all,

Having all the schedules/results centralized in the same place would be neat!

Option 1: Have all on the same page and have an additional column to describe the shared source.

Option 2: Have a separation between my own schedules and the ones shared with me.

Best,

Fernando Vizcaino

In the Alteryx Gallery Collections the Workflow Upload Date doesn't sort properly. Instead of sorting chronologically (ex: Jan first Dec last) it sorts by number (Dec goes before April because Dec starts with a 1 while April starts with a 4), see attached for an example. 

 it flips back and forth between 2022 and 2021

In the example November and December are first because the month starts with a 1. Then April follows because it starts with a 4.  Then it starts to get messy because it does this:

• 12/16/2021
• 4/04/2022
• 4/26/2021
• 5/02/2021

That 2022 is in the middle purely because 4 < 5, that's not right.

I tried exploring the settings to see if I could change this but I didn't find an option to do so.

Two potential solutions:

• Change the format of the date to YYYYMMDD, then if it sorts numerically it will still work
• Don't sort numerically and instead sort chronologically, ex: April goes before December

As collections get big sorting for the most recent workflow becomes a nightmare with the current improper sorting mechanism.

If I'm mistaken and this option already exists please let me know.

Thanks!

Chris

It should be possible to schedule chained apps. Particularly useful when the first workflow in a chain runs a check and if the check returns true then the next workflows run and if the check returns false then the next workflow should not run. 

Possibly related to:
Schedule Configured Analytic Apps - Alteryx Community

Hello,

We recently upgraded our on-prem instance of Alteryx Server/Gallery to version: -

• Client: 2020.1.0
• Server: 2021.3.3.63061
• Server Binaries: 2021.3.3.63061
• Service Layer
• Master: 2021.3.3.63061

We have noticed that the search functionality in various areas (top and right-side) no longer return results using a "contains" but rather it is doing an "exact" or "starts with" keyword search. This is very frustrating to many users as we can't easily find our workflows quickly compared to previous versions.

Please improve search functionality.

We have situations where some workflows that are scheduled end up having intermittent connection issues to other databases that result in the workflow running to timeout. The timeout settings are set in the server, but it would be nice if you could set an override value for a lesser timeout in the runtime settings for individual workflows and basically use the server setting as a not to exceed value. We have a multi-node environment with multiple worker nodes and about 250 artisans. We have some regularly scheduled workflows taking the full amount of time in the timeout setting and obviously if a couple of normally quick running workflows ran to timeout that causes issues with the queue.

Hello Alteryx team, 

I would like to propose idea that was mentioned on the community but there is no solution either.

It was mentioned at https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Data-Cleansing-tool-suddenly-stopped-w...

The issue is related to Qlik Analytics Samples and error that it is causing with wrong path error for default macros like eg.CountRecords.

Commas save lives! With large numbers, it's difficult to see what number was actually entered without commas present, and the wrong number can easily be entered as a result:

Is this number

• 100,000
• 1,000,000
• 10,000,000

It's hard to say without taking a really close look!

Hello all,

Right now, we can choose either MongoDb or Microsoft SQL Server as a backend. I would suggest to add Postgresql. Why ?

-it's open-source
-it's reliable
-it's free
-it works well on many environments
-it's popular
-it's already used as backend for Tableau or Qlik and many others
-it respects SQL norm and doesn't have a lot of specificity

Best regards,

Simon

After a job is run on Alteryx Server, Gallery lists Job Results with a Status column containing with one of 2 values:

• Error (represented by a red exclamation point icon); and
• Success (represented by a green checkmark icon).
  See attached screenshot for illustration.

If any WARNING messages are generated by the workflow, the operator/user is unaware unless they take the time to expand the message log details, then scroll through the long list of messages that typically appear in the log.

Because the Success Icon appears whether there are Warnings or not, the user must dutifully spend extra time scrolling through the list looking for Warnings even if there are none to be found.

My Idea: provide additional information under the Status column in one or more of these ways:

1. add a 3rd status option with a yellow/orange icon that indicates if/when 1 or more warnings are present
   • This should be a quick/easy enhancement that would provide immediate value
     
     
2. append one or more numbers after the Icon to indicate counts (see mock-up example)
   • There seems to be ample space for this type of info
   • This could be done at a later date as a subsequent enhancement

I think that the user would benefit from a filter where they could focus on errors, warnings, or other types of messages in the same spirit as the Designer interface, but I recognize that would be a lot of work and I am not asking for that now.

Alteryx DCM has been an incredibly useful addition that supports key security concerns from companies. Currently, only three external key vaults are supported:

• Hashicorp Vault (KV secrets engine) - supported for Designer 22.3 and later.

• CyberArk Conjur - supported for Designer 22.3 and later.

• AWS Secrets Manager

https://help.alteryx.com/current/en/designer/tools/dcm---designer/dcm-external-vaults.html## 

I propose that we also include Delinea Secret Server.

Thank you and hopefully we can start to add more to make this feature widely useable and support security compliance.

Hi all,

I would like to suggest the idea to make the ability to add a graphic to an Interface on the server as well. 

Currently, the function only seems to work on Desktop, but having it work on the Gallery as well would be very nice.

Especially if we could have the image be horizontally oriented as well as vertically, depending on our other interface tools. 

Would love to hear any other related comments or ideas!

Alteryx Server does not presently support any file encryption systems. Many people need to encrypt there Fileshare as a secure measurement and use safeguard lan encrypted. Please provide a solution so workers are able to read and write encrypted files through safeguard lan encrypted.

Currently Alteryx has a timeout setting at a worker level which applies to all of the workflows/schedules that run on that node. 

It'd be great and very useful is that setting is made available at a granular level like at the Collection/User Group or workflow level. 

I've been told by Alteryx support that this is not a feature that is currently available. Hence proposing an Idea on the community requesting for such an ability!

Hello,
One of the frustrations we have faced in using Alteryx Gallery is the question "How do we set up many users with their respective collections easily?".

If we take for an example, the scenario where a company has 300 potential users of the gallery, who are all going to login and generate a report based on their department.
In order for them not to be able to generate the reports on other departments, the report generation workflows are put into collections. The current solution to this (atleast on SAML Authentication), is for a user to sign up, and then a Curator to assign them to their given collection. This is fine for small scale solutions, but the purpose of server is allowing for large scale deployment and automation of tasks, and this is far from ideal for a larger company.

If the server is setup on Windows Authentication, the users are able to be categorised within the Windows Active Directory, and then these groups (which may pre-exist) are able to be added to the gallery straight from the AD (see here), however this is not a feature within SAML Authentication.

From my knowledge, SAML Authentication should easily allow for this functionality, and it works very similar to Windows Active Directory. I mentioned this on a call with a Customer Support Engineer, and he explained that this wasn't part of his known roadmap for the Alteryx Gallery. 

I do believe this to be an extension of a current post on the Alteryx forum, however, this details opening the API to allow for this on an API level, however I would also suggest for this to be integrated within Alteryx Gallery, as not all users are experienced with using, or building tools around, the API.
 
Cheers,
TheOC

I am in the process of migrating apps from the old gallery to the new. I have screen captures of the results from the same app in both. In the older gallery version, if there is only a single file type available, it defaults to that file type and you click the icon for the type. In the new gallery version, you must select a file type before you can download the file, even if there is only a single type available. The dropdown makes sense for one that you have multiple types (like pcxml), but it makes no sense to require the user to go through an extra step to select a type before downloading when that's the only type they can download. Please see all the screen captures. The blue-ish background is from the new gallery.

The V3 jobs API endpoint woefully lacks any usefulness. The current endpoint only has a get jobs/{jobid} method that is not useful because a database admin must query the database to get a list of all job IDs. To add insult to injury, this method is only limited to the user whose job is running or queued.

These are new features that I am proposing

1. GET jobs/list—This method must be callable by all users. Parameters such as none (default—full list), running, or queued will display jobs with the appropriate status. The job ID of the running or queued job and the worker it is running on must be included in the resultset.

2. GET jobs/{ownerid} — This method must be callable by all users. Like the GET jobs/list above, the resultset must include the job ID of the running or queued job and the worker it is running on.

3. DELETE jobs/{jobid} — This method must be callable by the person who scheduled the job, the owner of the workflow, or the curator. This method is the equivalent of cancelling a job on the Server Admin page - #!/admin/jobs by a curator. All three mentioned people have a vested interest in the running or queued jobs on the server and must be able to cancel those jobs.

4. POST jobs/reassign/{jobid}/{new_job_tag} — This method is restricted to the curator and applies to any job in a queued state. It allows a curator to reassign a job to another job tag or the first available worker for reasons determined by the curator.

This is an enhancement that I am proposing
1. GET jobs/{jobid} — This method must be callable by all users. This will allow any user to get the details of any running or queued job.

Logging requirements

All DELETE or POST methods must be logged and purged based on the Persistence Option > Delete queue and results after (days).

Previously, Alteryx Gallery had a progress bar when the job is running. However, it has been removed in the newer version and the screen only appear blank when the job is running. This could lead to confusion in users as they might be wondering what is happening when the screen goes blank when it actually is running the job. Users might also attempt to click the run button repeatedly due to this.

Hence, I hope Alteryx could bring back the old UI that showed progress bar or anything similar when the job is running so users will aware of what is happening.