Alteryx Server Ideas

It would be really useful to be able to obtain the user name of some one running an app in the Gallery. This could be used for instance in row level security for people running an app that produces a report and that data is considered sensitive

I'm really enjoying the new Save As functionality to push to the gallery, but had a request that would make it even more useful for me. 

I saw that you can open workflows directly from the Gallery and edit them with version control, but it would be nice if it was possible to do a Save As on a local workflow and point it at an existing copy on the server.  I need to maintain a local copy of my workflow for dev/prod separation, but currently my way to push to prod is to do a Save As to my Private Gallery, remove the existing copy from the company gallery, and then share my newly created workflow into the company gallery.  This causes some headaches like no version control, switching out icons everytime, and overall just a messy way to push to prod.  

It would be helpful if there was a way to overwrite an existing workflow in the gallery rather than editing it directly.  

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

In Gallery 10, List Boxes (that are within a Radio Button) have their contents sorted horizontally.  Previously (Gallery 9.5) the contents of List Boxes was sorted vertically.  This new orientation makes it very difficult to find specific items within the list.  The problem is particularly severe for long lists, when it becomes common for the check box and associated text to become separated on two different lines.

With Version 10 of Alteryx Server Gallery, if new user signup is disabled, people see the following when clicking the sign in button:

If someone tries to fill out the "Join Now" section they then get:

In Alteryx Server Version 9.5, when new user sign up was disabled, the join now section of the prompt was not present. This is our prefered behavior. Another option would be to change the "Access denied" message to something more descriptive such as "New user sign up disabled."

Thanks,

Ryan

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.

It might be helpful to be able to use an API to call and pass parameters to/from an Alteryx App or Workflow on an Alteryx Server.  Then a user could use a  browser or another application to call an Alteryx app/workflow.

As a system admin, I need a simple, reliable way to back up the Alteryx Server without shutting it down first. A hot-backup (and restore) utility that includes a consistent copy of MongoDB plus any other server config files would allow me to do this.

It would be great if the admin could change some default settings on the Alteryx Gallery page. For example, where we have the list of apps, show Detail view and sort by App name ascending by default.

 

Allow the artisan to turn off the ability of a member to download app results.  Some of the information is highly confidential, and we don't want them to be able to easily print out a list of this information and have that list "floating around".  Or take sensitive client data with them to another job if they leave us and use that to profit their new employer.

When replacing an app in the gallery, it appears that you always see the original upload date (which is good to have), and then simply a version number.  It would be great if you could add an additoinal field that shows the most recent replace date.  That way you would know that "SampleApp v4" is the 4th replacment, and that 4th replacement happened on date mm/dd/yyyy.  Also, while it's replacing, there is no indication that it is doing the replace.  An hour glass or some indicator telling you to sit tight would be nice.

When a process is running in foreground, the GUI does an excellent job of giving feedback to the user as to which "step" the job is running and how much data is processing through the active tools.  When that same job is scheduled, the amount of information is limited to when the job began execution.

If a tool was able to give checkpoint status out to the user, we could better monitor the progress of scheduled jobs.  The visibility to the job is most important for long running jobs.  We've unfortunately had instances where we have had to cancel jobs and to restart them not knowing how close or how far from finishing they were.

Thanks for your consideration,

Mark

Analytics Gallery needs the ability to save my question choices - so I don't need to re enter them every time I run the app.