Alteryx Server Ideas

Some of our artisans are unable to publish straight from designer and it would be great if there was an "Upload workflow" button in the private studio just like there is for curators in the admin panel.

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.

In the interest of information and system security, would it be possible to provide a means to remove social media and email sharing options (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) from the SHARING drop down menus, such as through a configurable setting in the RuntimeSettings.xml file?

Currently there is no means (confirmed by Alteryx tech support) to remove these options from the sharing menu.  Sharing within the system can be controlled somewhat by controlling access to the system or specific output locations.Once the info leaves the system, there is no longer any means of control.

Providing a configurable option will allow locations to tailor to their specific needs.

On Success --> Do This

On Fail --> Do that

The lack of control and flexibility around the scheduler seems to cause people to bury the logid down in runner macros or unnessarily poll custom log tables to see if a status has changed.

I am aware of a couple of clients calling for this functionality. This can be performed via command line but it realy needs to be in the scheduler options.

When a workflow is run manually in the gallery the user is able to enter input parameters. However when using the schedule functionality this option is not available and a separate workflow needs to be developed to dynamically derive input parameters. Effectively two separate versions of the workflow need to be created and maintained.

If this functionality could be built into a future version of Alteryx this would be of significant benefit.

For professional alteryx admins - it is important to know if a particular asset has been updated (so that we can bring the updated version into our env), with some idea of release notes so that we can understand if the update breaks backward compatibiity and what has been changed.

Additionally - it would be very helpful for admins to be able to be notified of new assets created by particular authors whom I trust.

Apologies for posting this in the community ideas forum - couldn't find a better location.

There are a rich collection of Alteryx Tools which are housed in the public Gallery - and a sub-set of these are created by and certified by Alteryx.   Could we provide a mechanism to filter to only show these Alteryx Certified assets so that we can see which have the high level of trust?

Many thanks

Hello Community:

I was looking in the notifications part of the Gallery Admin and saw a glaring ommission: The validation email was something about a code, but nothing about a workflow. "What?!" I interrogo-banged.Where is "Email when workflow is complete?"

I would like to move that Gallery include an option (at the workflow level and globally within a studio (perhaps beyond, I'm a newb to Gallery)) that a user can subscribe to an email notification if the workflow completes (or errors out). 

Where I'm currently working, we have some workflows that take, literally, in the twenty-plus hour range. Instead of having to check when it is complete, it would be really nice to get an email from Gallery saying: "Hi guys! [Workflow X] is done! YAY!"

I realise there's an email tool in the rendering, but that is... shall we say, complicated. In this case, we're using an R-tool, so all the downstream tools are blind to the metadata. Filtering records down to one so that only one email is sent at the end of the chain is... challenging (remember that 20-hour thing? Try developing on a 20+ hour cycle. It's like 1970 up in here!). And totally counterintuitive. I also feel new users will have issues configuring an email tool; it took me 3 months to get ours to work and it only works from our server. Plus, it's a kludgy workaround. 

I feel that this would probably be easy to implement and fits the sensibilities of Gallery. 

Vote this up, folks!

Cheers,

Cedric

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

Hi all, Per this thread, it would be helpful if we could have finer control of scheduled jobs in Alteryx Server: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/Resource-control-on-scheduled-jobs/m-p/61016/hig...

Specifically:

- Dependancies (one job should run after another in a chain)

- lower priority (some jobs should go down the priority queue to allow for others so that high priority jobs are not blocked by other less important ones)

Thank you Sean

The gallery shouldn't allow to create data connections with already existing names.

For example, in designer it's difficult to choose which data connection we want to work with if they have the same name, please verify the images in attachment.

We have groups asking within our organization for ways to check the status of a running workflow in Gallery. They are wanting to understand which step in the process the workflow has completed for longer-running workflows.

They are looking for an experience similar to when running in Designer where they can see which tools have been completed. At the very least, they would like the log to be reported live and not shown at the end of the run.

Currently, the run feels like a black box where they do not know how close it is to completion or which steps it has made it through.

We have tried to build workarounds like the Email tool, but have been unsuccessful. For example, the Email tool does not send an Email until the workflow completes which defeats the purpose. The closest workaround is writing our own log along the way that can be reported on which is not a clean solution. 

Hello, Alteryx users,

My idea is simple but would make things way easier for the analytical app users on the Gallery.

Currently, the order is ascending and we can see all the files from all the applications we have run before.

It would help a million to see the most recent files first and only see the files related to this workflow.

Thank you,

Fernando Vizcaino

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.

In the Alteryx Gallery UI, it's possible to set up workflow credentials so that a workflow published to the gallery runs as a specific user.  

Unfortunately when that workflow is run from the Alteryx Gallery API, it appears to only ever run as the Alteryx Server Run-As account. 

Our developers in working with this figured out that if they called the (undocumented) API that runs the actual Alteryx Gallery directly, they can achieve what they want, but it seems a risky strategy.

The idea would be:

-Either unify the APIs so that the Gallery itself uses the same API to run workflows as what you present as the "Gallery API" (the eat your own dogfood way)

-Alter the Gallery API to enable us to run as a different workflow credential

Without this, we're forced to permission the run-as account to access anything that uses this method, which in turn then becomes a bit of a security hole (any workflow run will have access to everything that the run-as account uses) 

Hi,

@patrick_digan pointed out to me today that in my ignorance I thought that the "On Success - Show Results to User" option in Interface Designer did something on Alteryx Gallery, like it does when run locally.  I tried to prove him wrong (I've been manually checking off what outputs I want since day 1! How could it not have been doing anything?!) and failed miserably.  As far as we can tell, this functionality is simply non-existent within Gallery.

Please add this functionality so that we can suppress files (without reverting to hacky tricks like changing the output location so the Gallery can't see the output) with a simple check box.

Link to my shame, where I very openly explained exactly how I thought I had been solving this problem the whole time, and how after testing and review, it looks like I hadn't done anything with this configuration.

All these check boxes... and they don't change anything!

We really like the idea of the Server Usage Report.  But the PDF is somewhat limited and we use Power BI instead of Tableau.  It would be great if the Workflow had an option for outputting to Power BI.

I would like to suggest the idea of being able to handle row-level security data sources in a more seamless way using Kerberos passthrough, where Alteryx Gallery will pass the information that User A is running the workflow to the underlying DB and will authenticate as User A. 

We have many workflows that are built to handle different queries of a database that are reliant on knowing who is running the workflow in Gallery. We also have many regional workers, and we want to keep the administration of these connections to the data as simple as possible. 

For more information, check out the Community thread on this subject.

We have a lot of Alteryx users that generate their workflows in Private Studios and set them up as scheduled Workflows, but the assigned Workers/job tags in Private Studio aren't carrying over to the scheduled workflow, which has to be updated by someone with higher access.  This is creating a time consuming task for our administrator who have to update these scheduled workflows to make sure our unassigned Worker node isn't overloaded.