Alteryx Server Ideas

Hello Alteryx Team,

I've developed a workflow and successfully uploaded it to our Alteryx Gallery. This workflow requires an Excel file as input, which the user should select interactively via a File Browse Tool.

To achieve this, I've used the following configuration:

• An Input Data Tool is connected to a sample Excel file and reads a specific sheet (e.g., "Sheet1" or "Data").
• A File Browse Tool allows the user to select the Excel input file.
• An Action Tool connects the File Browse Tool to the Input Data Tool to dynamically update the Excel file path

Every time a user runs the workflow in the Gallery and selects an Excel file, a pop-up window appears, prompting the user to select the Excel sheet.

I do not want to have the option of selecting "<List of Sheet Names>". I only want to be able to select the Sheet itself.

I would suggest to add an option that allows the creator of the App to deselect the field "<List of Sheet Names>", so that the User on the Server can not see and select this field.

Thank you in advance for your help!

Best regards, Felix

Idea: Option to receive an email notification when a schedule gets disabled (could be added in the user settings, see attached picture)

Business Impact: The implementation of this idea would reduce delays that might even have a financial impact because

not receiving any notifications when a schedule was disabled could lead to

• important processes not being executed and users realizing that only at a later point in time (>> potential financial impact and stress)
• the user not being able deliver a report in time (>> potential financial impact)
• huge effort to manually track the workflow results on the server (or email notifications after a successfull run) to avoid the above two bullet points (>> financial impact due to waste of time)

I would be glad if you could implement this idea because I think it would be useful for a lot of people!

Hello all,

According to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook

"A webhook in web development is a method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page or web application with custom callbacks. These callbacks may be maintained, modified, and managed by third-party users and developers who may not necessarily be affiliated with the originating website or application. "

An example : whoever publishes an asset, I receive a notification on Teams and when a scheduling task fails, it creates automatically an analysis task on Trello.

Seems cool, huh?

Guys at Tableau have implemented it (https://help.tableau.com/current/developer/webhooks/en-us/ ) and so do the guys for Qlik Cloud.

Best regards,

Simon

Today, when you share a workflow with someone else through the collection, you cannot see the manual run that the person will do, neither the person will see yours. 

This is really annoying as this is not helping collaboration between colleagues. 

Since we use an external scheduler and the server api, only the job owner will see the job execution results within the gallery.

Idea here would be to let the sharing of job execution result as an option in the collection.

I would like the ability to "favorite" Public flows that are on the server and then have a separate "Favorites" section.  As the volume of Public flows on the server increases, It would allow for users to be able to navigate to frequently used flows much faster.

When scheduling workflows in the gallery that are recurring, it would be beneficial to have  start and end times also. For example, when setting the frequency to hourly, if there is an option to run between 9 AM and 5 PM that would be great. This would prevent us to schedule workflows for all 24 hours and take up systemic resources when other important workflows could run instead

Hello all,

Nowadays, chatting, commenting, having a discussion on assets that are published on a server is a very common feature, and a useful one !

Here an example on Tableau :

Collaboration is not a luxury item !

Best regards,

Simon

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).

Current State:

Currently, all workflows and applications are in list-form within "My Workspace" (formerly Private Studio) and Collections.  In My Workspace, I might have workflows and applications that support a broad range of domain spaces and audiences.  As the developer (or Artisan), they're all in My Workspace, but shown as an exhaustive list with no categorization unless I name them to represent not only the function of the workflow/application but also the domain. 

Once those same workflows/applications are moved to collections, there can exist confusion over whether the workflow/application is intended for a schedule, manual run, or application.  Separating by naming convention gets messy and degrades clarity for non-developer roles.

Proposed Solution:

I would like to see folders, only one or two levels deep, be added to My Workspace and to Collections.  This proposed solution would not alter permissions, as those would be common for the parent collection and any assigned roles would function the same for that entire collection.  The solution is simply adding organization to enhance the user experience.

For example:  I might have a Collection that is intended for my Finance team....

Finance_Collection / Scheduled_ETL_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / Scheduled_Analytic_Workflows / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Applications_for_AccountingDepartment_ReceivablesTeam / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Applications_for_AccountingDepartment_PayablesTeam / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Manual_ETL_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / Manual_Analytic_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / etc...

All persons who have been assigned the role connected to the "Finance Collection" will still see everything in all of the folders but would have a better sense of what "workflows/applications" are intended for their use according to the folders the workflows/applications are organized into.

Value Added (Why This Matters):

• Enhanced user experience (easier to find the correct workflows
• The volume of roles and collections can be reduced, thus reducing Admin strain
• The solution does not impact roles and permissions
• Overall management of workflows and applications is enhanced for the Artisans

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I welcome input and feedback from the community and would appreciate your support if you find this suggestion useful for your Alteryx experience!

Given the security requirements of our company collections need to be created centrally, which is fine for sub-organizations that only require one collection. However, the large sub-orgs require more than 1 collection, ideally we would create the top-level collection and give the sub-org the access to create their own sub-collection within that collection, but not the ability to create collections at the top-level.

Hello,

We would like to have the option to configure the timeout of the manual running jobs, as already exists for the schedule jobs.

Regards

When you add a workflow you have to add its schedule to share the results in collection menber's.
A workflow can be in several collections and therefore different users can schedule it. (why not)
This results in multiple schedules for the same workflow. There is no reason why a workflow cannot have multiple schedules.(mandatory in some cases)

Automatically adding schedules to the collection would allow users to see that there is already a schedule on the workflows in question and not to recreate one!

it should also be possible to create a schedule from the collection.

When scheduling an analytical app on Gallery, there is no UI for submitting app values. This significantly limits the value of scheduling workflows and using analytical apps. With this feature, it would allow our users to have more flexible scheduling while also simply maintaining one workflow. Because this feature doesn't exist, we have had to build workarounds by either creating multiple workflows or utilizing APIs. 

Since this feature is already available for manual runs and APIS (shown below), it shouldn't be a reach to also have this feature when scheduling a run.

Manual Method:

API Method: GET /workflows/{appId}/questions

Scheduling Method (no app questions): 

We want to share direct links to analytics apps with our users.  However this does not work with our current SAML login.   This the use case.  

1. User clicks on direct link URL for the app  

2. User  is required to click log-in button

3. After login user is taking to the gallery home page not to the app

The end effect is that we cannot share links to apps with our casual users, instead we have to instruct them to go to the gallery log in and then search all public workflows for the specific app they are looking for.   Not a great user experience, especially because we did not have this issue before single sign on support. 

personally I think this is bug more than a feature request, but was asked to create it as a request by support 

I just underwent an exercise of recovering my controller in the event of a catastrophic failure. One of the steps is to recover the DCME keys (DCM Encryption keys) - which is documented here: https://help.alteryx.com/20221/en/server/install/server-host-recovery-guide/dcme-keys-to-backup.html...

This DCME recovery needs to be revisited. This document assumes that the previous controller is running. In a disaster recovery situation, this is not possible. What, if any, can be done to recover the DCME keys if the host has is completely irrecoverable?

For context, having an irrecoverable host has happened. Complete hard drive failure (showing my age), nuked virtual machine and its backups (no one paid attention to the notices that the data center was shutting down), and fire.

Hello all,


Alteryx Designer Cloud is quite young, somehow incomplete, not compatible with Alteryx Desktop etc... but I'm very optimistic than in a few years it will become a killing app !

That said, I'm more skeptical on this race to the cloud : from my experience, Cloud should just be one way of selling a product, not the only one. It has a lot of cons and a lot of pros and customers should have the possibility to choose between "on-premise" and "cloud"  product, and change from one to the other very easily.

My main customer on Alteryx is a government agency that deals with highly confidential, personal data. They won't go to cloud. Not in the next ten years. But they would love to have the Alteryx Designer Cloud on their own server.

Best regards,

Simon

I'd like to request the ability for the Curators to change the priority on Apps in the Gallery.

Today we have a system where users are not allowed to set the priority on workflows. The Curators change the priority of scheduled workflows based on workflow runtime/ business need by going to Gallery Admin> Jobs> Scheduled Workflows, and then editing the schedule priority.

The problem that that we have a numbers of Gallery Members/ Viewers that run Apps through the day that are very fast to run, but depending on how big is the queue they can several minutes/ hour until a spot is free to run.

If would be very helpful to get a better UX if the curator can choose which apps should have a higher priority to run.

Thanks,

Mauricio Estevez

Currently, we see the Districts and Collections now compressed into a list view. 

Previously, the Server had the widgets feature which really showcased the self-service nature of the Sever. Losing that just made decreased the emphasis on user experience. 

It would be great to allow Server Admins to decide whether they want lists or widgets to be available toggles as a design feature for both districts and collections will be of great help.

In addition, regardless of the option, the image size and wording size should be much larger - easier for people to see. Right now, we have to zoom to 150% to make it easier for ourselves to see. Having the ability to control font size, font control with bolds, italtics, etc. will be very helpful as well.

currently, there isn't any way to fully delete (safely) a user from the gallery. So if there is a previous client or previous employee in gallery, we cannot clean up the gallery settings - only "disable". It would be great to have a "trash can" symbol next to the users where we can remove them from the server and keep all of the users clean.