Alteryx Server Ideas

Currently, DCM credentials appear to only be used in combination with a DCM Data Source.  

For ease of use for my end users (non-Designers), I would like my end users to be able to save a user ID and password as a standalone DCM credential.  Then, I want the user to have the option to select that credential for use in two places:

1.  Run-As - when running a workflow on demand, the user should be able to choose their saved DCM credential.
2. Credential injection into Input Data or other relevant tools in Analytic Apps - I want to use the DCM Connection tool to build Analytic Apps that prompt my users to select their DCM Credential (NOT a full DCM Connection with data source - I don't want my users to have to set that up.)  When the user selects their Credential, their user ID and password should be securely encrypted and inserted into the existing connection set up by the App designer.

Having this functionality would remove administrative burden from both our Designers and the end users they support.

Currently you can only view the workflow results / history for other users workflows that are scheduled and the schedule is shared in the collection.

A lot of our workflows are set up to run on-demand, some as analytical apps and some as standard workflows. 

The first point of reference when a user experiences an issue should be to view the workflow results, but currently this is not possible and just gives an error "Access Denied" even when the tick box is selected within Workflow settings.

My suggestion is that you should be able to see the workflow results of any workflow that is shared with you (regardless of whether it is scheduled or run on-demand) as this would make fault finding and user support much easier.

Thanks

Rob

When saving a workflow to the gallery, none of the options I could choose from Set workflow credentials validates a workflow successfully when using database connections due to missing permission on the server (No specific Run As is configured on the Server). Apparently the server validates the workflow as following:

User is not required to specify credentials:No possibility to add credentials when running the workflow on the server. In that case, the workflow validates database connections with errors due to missing permission on the server. This error was expected.

User must specify their own credentials: This option is the most appropriate in case of working with database connections with regard to our use cases and security policies. Unfortunately this option is only enabled when the workflow is saved on the server already and run from the gallery. In case of the validation step when saving the workflow to the gallery, the server evaluates with the system user of the server. As a result, the validation fails. In that case, I expected the server to run the validation with the user from the Alteryx Designer.

Always run this workflow with these credentials: This option is not appropriate in terms of our security policy, since the workflow is permanently set with the users credentials.

So my suggestion would be to:

• Prompt dialog to enter my credentials for validation once or
• The server runs the validation with the User from Designer, where the workflow is going to be saved from.

Otherwise is see no benefit of the validation feature (with respect to our use cases and security policies)

I'm not sure if this is too similar to this server idea

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Ideas/Using-Microsoft-Flow-to-trigger-workflows/idi-...

but I'd love to see the ability to add webhooks to Alteryx Server to launch a workflow.  I believe that is how Flow (now PowerAutomate) can run an event.  I had to spend hours figuring out how to build a "Flow" workflow which would have taken me minutes in Designer.  For example, when I receive a new MS Forms Survey submission, I can shape the data and build a sharepoint list, rather than waiting for whatever interval I set in the scheduler.

We would like Gallery admins to be able to add any workflow to a collection - not just the workflows they authored.

The purpose is to have one collection where we have a set of workflows that were reviewed and approved for audits.

Only the reviewer could add to this collection

A better process Needed for Alteryx Backup and restore.

1. Why do we have to stop the service to do a backup,? We cannot stop a service in Enterprise platform just to do a backup.  we are not able to take backups because our jobs will be running 24X7 We Run jobs on Alteryx Server,
2. All of a Sudden our Windows server crashed and we lost all the data, The backup we have of Mongo DB was not perfectly restored on the new server which breaks the workflow, connections etc  due to encryption....
3. what is the purpose of backup if we cannot restore on a new server in case of DR

Please fix it ASAP,

On far too many occasions I have been working on a workflow in designer with either the outputs disabled via the configuration or using containers (preventing file creation/updating during testing) and I would save them back up to server without remembering to re-enable these outputs, which causes lots of issues down the line when users are trying to access these processes.

A simple warning on loading to the gallery that there are disabled tools and what tool id they are would mitigate this issue.

We have at the moment our server configured to work with SAML credentials. Whenever a user sets the credentials option to be "User must specify own credentials" the validation is performed using the servers own local user, giving out an error whenever some workflows with SSO data access are uploaded.

It would be great if a window would pop up or credentials could be configured for the validation to aviod seeing the error to show up.

Sometimes a schedule is enabled that we want to disable. We edit the schedule, click the button to disable the schedule, click "Save". Then refresh the page and it's enabled still. The schedule will not disable in some cases. In the cases where it does get disabled, clicking the "Save" button appears to have no action. There's no confirmation and the screen stays static. Two suggestions:

• Have some UI response confirming that the changes have been saved.
• Provide an error message with explanation when the changes can't be saved (or just fix the bug)

As an Admin, I would like to be able to see, from the Gallery, a single place where the history of workflows that have been run is displayed.  Right now I can only see workflows running or queued.  I would like to be able to look back at past executions and see status, runtime, errors, etc.

This data is currently available in Designer on our Alteryx Server.  But right now our system is just one environment.  I'm not sure if when we expand to multiple Gallery and Worker machines where I will have to look for workflow history.

Also, Workflow schedules can only be seen in Gallery, and not Designer.  So it would be nice to have everything in one place.

Everyone on our team would benefit from having access to each other's workflows -- including workflow results and scheduling -- but publishing them to gallery where any user in the company can run it/ download it would present a security issue. Functionality that is not met with Collections. I found a similar idea, but not anything that encompasses the whole thing.

It would be of immense value to have a Team Gallery - something intermediate to the company gallery and the private collection. This would enable our team to have access to modify, publish, schedule workflows as a team.

When a user publishes and schedules a workflow on the gallery, they have the option to specify their time zone to ensure that the execution of the workflow occurs at the appropriate time. However, if the workflow invokes the DateTimeNow() function, the captured time is in UTC. If it is important for the end-user to have that time that is captured be in their local time zone, they will need to manually (either within the workflow or as a user input for an Analytic App) specify the offset from UTC.

Instead, there should be an Engine variable that captures the offset (or the time zone) that the workflow was executed from (or scheduled in), which can dynamically adjust the DateTimeNow() output appropriately.

This idea is to allow users to configure the file view option for a workflow running in the gallery that produces file outputs. Today, there are two views that a user can toggle between (see attachment), but I don't believe there's a way to change the default view. This idea is to change the setting as either a global gallery setting, on a workflow-by-workflow basis, or both.

We have end users that miss the drop down menu (and the file count next to the drop down, and the label we've added in the analytic app that says there will be two output files, and...), so they sometimes miss the second file entirely. Setting the default view to the "list view" rather than the drop down view could help alleviate that pain.

Note: The screenshots in the attachment show two Excel files that could be combined into one file with multiple tabs. This is a pain point for other workflows, as well, that produce outputs in multiple file formats.

My team utilizes the Gallery API extensively and have found that we have processes that the API has listed as actively running, but cannot be found via the Controller's GUI.  As a gallery artisan, I can call flows via API, but cannot cancel these executions unless I reach out to the administrator group to kill them manually. 

It would be extremely helpful to add an endpoint with the ability to submit a specific job GUID and have the server/controller kill the execution of that flow and clear up the server capacity.  This could then be scheduled on a regular basis as a maintenance  task to keep the server clean.

Thanks

The current Gallery API executes a job until it reaches a completion state with either success or failure.  Once reaching that state, the callout to /v1/jobs/{jobId}/ will return an array of messages that can then be parsed to gather information about the execution of the job, similar to the output you see in designer or via the CLI when running a job directly.

It would be nice if the callout to the jobs endpoint would constantly update and return the messages array with each callout.  With jobs that take longer to execute, our Gallery API wrapper could then report back to us and let us know what messages have come out as the jobs runs.  For example, if a process takes 2 hours to execute, we might want to know how far along the job is or if it has met a special condition that will cause it to run longer, etc.  To do that, we could add in message tools that report info messages to us.  Unfortunately, these messages are ineffective if we are running via the API because we won't see them until the job has fully completed.

in the current alteryx gallery if we need to disable of enable the schedules workflows we need to manually enable or disable them.

example if we have 100 scheduled workflow. and we want to disable all of them and then enable them later. currently we spend hours to manually disable and enable each of them.

By adding a feature to select the workflows in scheduled to enable of disable the selected one at one which will save hours of time.

As per design Alteryx Server retains all FAILED jobs in the Queue and Results collections even when we set the server to keep run history and results for x days

Purging records from Designer involves manual activity

Proposing the idea of purging these error records through automation script:

Step 1: Stop Alteryx Server

Step 2: Backup Mongo DB

Step 3: Replace big size files: AS_ResultsFiles.Files.bson, AS_Results.bson, AS_ResultsFiles.bson, AS_Queue.bson with Empty .bson files of same name in the backup/AlteryxService

Step 4: restore MongoDB from the backup (with the replaced files

Step 5: restart Alteryx service.

When saving to our company's gallery, we must deselect dozens of assets for our numerous workflows every time they need to be resaved, which is very frequent.

I would like to suggest a select/deselect all button under manage workflow assets. This would save a considerable amount of time.

Thank you,
Daniel

On Server Version 2019.4 I was able to use a SQL query as an external data source for my analytic app options for a drop down menu, tree, list, etc. When we upgraded to 2022.4, this capability was lost and according to the article below a chain analytic app is the best, but unnecessarily complex work around.

Tool Mastery | Drop Down Tool - Alteryx Community liste déroulante dropdown