Alteryx Server Ideas

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.

Currently the only filtering available in the Results tab in View Schedules is by Workflow Name. It would be nice to be able to filter by Status, so we can just look for potential problems, like warnings or errors. Currently, I have a job that runs every 5 minutes. That means I have to scroll through hundreds of rows, or about 12 pages using the default 25 rows per page, just to scan for potential problems in the last 24 hours.

The current setup of Data Connections, as of v11.3, relies on users to have the same aliases or connection strings available to easily share Workflows and publish them to a Gallery. In order to solve this, I propose that a system be created that allows users to establish "Local" and "Remote" connections. The Local connections will be used anytime the developer is creating a Workflow on his own computer, but will be automatically substituted with the Remote connection information once the Workflow is published. Remote connections may be filled with an Alias to a connection from the Gallery.

The primary benefit of this is that an organization will not need all of their developers to standardize their aliases and/or connections strings per connection. Instead, they will create one connection within the Gallery that will be distributed to developers and applied to the Remote column. This will generally reduce difficulties regarding the expansion of an Alteryx user base within an organization. Below I will outline two possible implementations of this:

1) Add a Remote Connection String field when adding a connection in the Data Connection Manager. This optional field will allow the user to set only one connection to an IO transaction, but maintain the Local-Remote functionality described above. Here is a mockup of how that might look within Alteryx Designer. 

2) Add a Remote Connection String field on each IO action within Alteryx. This will give the developers more flexibility in which connections are used where, but will also require more setup and maintenance time. Below is a mockup of how that might look.

Today in managing Alteryx server, we manually configure new connections using the front end.  However, this has some potential drawbacks as it makes it hard to easily track change history, or make bulk updates to multiple strings, and it also leaves room for user error on configuration.

In this case I'm pretty specifically looking to modify aliases on the server itself.  I'm not particularly concerned with distribution to a wider audience, and the usernames/passwords associated in this case should not be available for use locally by users.  As a part of this, I am trying to identify a method to reduce or eliminate the need for anyone (including the data connection manager) to need to know the password for the specified accounts.  As some of these accounts may be used by multiple systems, it would be significantly simpler to integrate this maintenance into existing automated processes, rather than have a manual step to update the Alteryx connection values on the Gallery.

This is specifically a challenge today with regards to specific usernames or passwords which need to be stored.  Alteryx saves these values using machine-level encryption, but that is difficult to generate automatically.  Having a supported method that would easily allow creation of this file with password-level information would greatly improve maintenance of the Alteryx Server, particularly from an IT automation perspective.

It would be great if i as a developer could create a DB alias connection and for it then to be available to other developers and distributed via the server.

Collaborative working like the above does seem rather limited at the moment.

each canvas in our environment goes through initial dev; then a testing phase; then into production usage after completing testing & peer review.

Currently the server environment has no concept of progression or promotion so we have to set up our own Dev; UAT; and Prod gallery & server - this really is very clunky because assets have to be manually copied across.

What would be more effective is:

- Allow a single asset to have a lifecycle (like you do in GIT) - so that it can go through dev and testing as a branch of the main code

- Once ready - user then changes the lifecycle type to "testing" or "UAT" and pushes it to users

- Once signed off, the user then promotes this to a production flow, and it replaces the current production version

There are a few areas where we'd need to do some thinking (dependancy tracking; branching; changing connection details as you promote so that you can hit the prod data stores etc) - but fundamentally this would go a VERY long way towards eliminating much of the admin involved in running the gallery.

We've confirmed with @KevinP that the Alteryx Gallery / Server API does not currently support downloading canvasses in unzipped data-stream format. (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/Server-API-Download-packages-for-surveil...)

Please can we add an API end-point that allows the following:

• Connect to the gallery and download a canvas; along with all of its sub-canvasses and helper macros. 
• Format required:
  • Plain XML (not zipped)
  • Provided in a data stream so that we can perform analytics and surveillance on this data
  • Fields required
    
    • Canvas filename
    • Application ID
    • Some unique ID per macro / sub-macro
    • XML for the canvas
    • Last run date
    • Last changed date
    • Environment (this is important once Server actually allows a Dev; UAT; Prod progression cycle - so we can see which environment people are in)
    • User details who uploaded
    • User details who are marked as the owners
    • Any other meta-tags on the canvas (important once server allows for meta-tagging of canvasses for categorisation)

Current API only allows this to be downloaded to a zipped file; which then needs to be unzipped; and then loaded back into a data stream.

Thank you

S

CC: @revathi @AshwiniChezhiyan @LizaNemchynova 

I would like to see the ability to post comments under workflow information to help with development and elicit feedback. Currently if there is a problem with the macro/workflow you must contact the owner of the workflow directly. It would be nice to leave the creator of the workflow a constructive comment, operating question or a thank you comment. Especially in the Public Gallery where the development time of new version could be reduced for both private individuals looking to share and macros developed by Alteryx that eventually turn into standard tools.

My company, a very large organization, is in the early implementation phase of Alteryx right now. My company requires frequent password changes and we plan on making heavy use of Shared Connections since there are also many shared data sources. Unfortunately, this would mean that every time a credential has changed that affects a workflow, the credential holder would have to contact Server Administration (me), and I would have to update any Shared Connections or other assets that use those credentials. This problem is exacerbated by also having to manage user permissions and which users belong in each Subscription Right now, that is not much of a big deal, but as the number of users begins to scale, this could become a very daunting task.

My current solution is to create Subscriptions for each Department, Group, or Team and give one person from that Subscription Curator permissions. This enables each Department to work more autonomously and reduces the load for Server Admin. The issue is that there is no permission level between the publishing rights of an Artisan and the ubiquitous acces of a Curator. So, with my solution, any one of the Subsription Curators can start using connections they're not supposed to have access to or deleting/stopping scheduled flows, intentionally or otherwise.

I propose that we find a middle ground between Curator and Artisan, a (Studio) Moderator. This person can be assigned one or more subscriptions by a full Curator and will have Curator-like permission, but only to the assigned Subscriptions. This means that they will be able to add/modify Credentials, Connections, and/or Scheduled under the envelope of their Subscriptions, but they won't have access to any others. I believe that this solution will mitigate the possible overflow of tedium to the true Curators while allowing the powerful communal features of Alteryx be used to their full potential.

Hi there,

Currently, when we download a version of Alteryx - we need to download a very large number of binaries across many different download locations.    Once we get these in, they need to go through InfoSec audits; then be packed for deployment etc.     this creates a very large admin overhead in that folk need to check for updates across multiple binaries and also create a significant number of different installs which then need to be rolled out across hundreds of workstations.

The request would be to change the approach to downloads for enterprise customers:

- Admin logs into the download portal

- They then select the components which they need (Designer; predictive; CREW macros; Microsoft starter pack; Tableau starter pack; JIRA connector from the gallery; additional predictive tools from the gallery)

- this then becomes the defined selection set.

- When any of these items are updated - the admin is notified

- When they download - these are then all built into a single installer binary which we can then download and roll out to all our workstations.

Many thanks

Sean

cc: @dataMack @adrianloong

As a Server 2018.4 admin, I need granular control of Server/Gallery defaults including:

1.) Pre-allocate AD users and groups (under Permissions) to specific Studios

2.) Control defaults for scheduling/priority/worker settings on Users

3.) Control defaults for workflow download/no-download at Gallery or Studio level

4.) Control defaults for notifications. Currently I have to check each notification template individually to disable it. Change template tile colors (or whatever) to provide visual queue as to which are enabled or disabled.

Above all, the tiled approach to displaying users, groups, studios simply isn't scalable. A simple data grid type display will allow higher information density allowing settings like: sharing, download ability, scheduling, credential type settings (studio default, artisan specified, runtime entered etc) to be easily reviewed. Basic server governance relies on easy visibility (reporting) of settings to ensure consistency...

In order for us to manage the large number of canvasses on our server - we need to add the ability for Admin teams to require additional attributes on every canvas:

For us, these mandatory attributes would be:

- Which team do you belong to (dropdown)

- What business process does this serve (dropdown - multiselect)

- Primary & secondary canvas owner (validated kerberos)

For the ones that have dropdown lists - we can provide the master data into a drop location or into a manually configured list on the server.

As a Gallery Admin I would like to be able to add and remove a user from local groups on the User page.

I realise that this would only work for local groups and that AD groups would need to be excluded (and indicated as unavailable for editing)

On the Users page it is quick and easy to see what Role each user has - UNLESS they have been assigned the "Default" role in which case it will depend on Gallery Default Role and which Group(s) they are assigned to.

I propose an additional column be added to the page to show the Effective Role for each user. The purpose of this change is to allow an administrator to quickly and easily confirm the effective Role of any Gallery use by viewing the User page, without having to check the user's group membership and the Role assignment that those groups provide.

For those users with a assigned Role other than "Default" that value will obviously match the assigned Role.

For users assigned the "Default" Role the page should show the result that would be returned by the appropriate permission resolution code when determining their effective Role from the Group membership and the Gallery Default.

[Screen image is from 2020.4 - with my suggested positioning for Effective Role added]

As a further enhancement a set of checkboxes showing the value of the special permissions e.g. Create Collections, would be good but might require a more significant re-design of the page and would only be saving a single click. I suggest instead that it might be useful to have an enhanced filter view of users which allows an administrator to view e.g. all users who can Create Collections etc.

I like to be able to access and run my apps from my iPhone.

Hi,

It would be nice if scheduled workflow credentials could be linked to the workflow and not the individual versions of the workflow.

It is problematic for the user that they need to remember to reschedule the workflow, whenever they publish a new version of the workflow.

Best,

Daniel

In larger organizations or organizations with global coverage, it is possible for users to be in different time zones from each other and the Alteryx server. 

WIth our implementation of Alteryx server, we have the server time zone set to that of our data warehouse, but this time zone is different than my own by -2 hours. In the case of scheduling a workflow in the future, I normally correct for this by setting the scheule in the time zone of the server and things work alright. 

Problem 1:

It falls apart is when I want to schedule something in the future, but it is within the timespan between my time zone and the server time zone. For example: It is 6PM my time, and 4PM server time. I want to schedule a workflow to run at 5PM server time (7PM my time). When I try to set this up with the Version 10 scheduler built into Alteryx desktop, it overides the date field upon saving to run the following day instead of today as it thinks im trying to schedule the run at a time that has already passed (which it has in my timezone, but not in the server time zone). Upon trying to edit this schedule to reset the date to today, it again reverts upon saving.  

The only way I have found to get around this is to reset the time zone of my computer to match the server time zone, then set the schedule, then reset the time zone of my machine back to local time again. This is not the best experience, and will likely be required more frequently for users as their time zone difference increases. 

Problem 2:

When wanting to run something server side immediately (I do this in cases where the runtime will be long, or im mobile and on a machine with a lower amount of processing resources) the "Once" option can be used in scheduler to push something to server and run it. In my case, due to the timezone difference, the default time set when trying to do this is the current time in my time zone, but 2 hours ahead of the current server time.

I have two proposed resolutions:

1) Transmit Server time zone information to the local scheduler to have everything involving scheduling in Server time. Also for any timestamp fields, include the time zone designation so its clear to the user.

2) Use information from the user's machine and information from the server to do timezone conversions behind the scenes so whenever scheduling or viewing schedules, all timestamps are in local time to the user. I feel this is the prefered solution for the best user experience, but would also be the more complex to implement. 

Thanks,

Ryan

I have been looking at the content in Alteryx Public Gallery for some time and I have had some concerns about the safety and usability of the macros/workflows in the gallery. 

I think there should be an option to rate, review and provide feedback on stuff that is out there on the public gallery. This will be helpful in many different way.

1. It will generate trust about the workflow/app. If I see that something is rated higher and has been used and commented by a lot of users I am more inclined to use it
2. It will provide a lot of ideas on how a particular workflow/macro can be used in different ways 
3. Review/Feedback will help the author to make changes as required or suggested by users.
4. The macro's will probably show up in google search based on key words provided by users in their reviews.

......

I had initiated a thread some time ago related to this, there is some useful information in there if someone has same concerns.

 https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Connect-Gallery/Can-Apps-and-Macros-in-Alteryx-public-Galle...

Thanks,

Ashish

Hello everyone,

I created before a post about managing chained workflows using the API.
After reaching out the support, it turns out to be impossible, which is unfortunate.

So I post this idea here, in case anyone is needing it too.

Feels free to ask me details if needed.

Thanks.