Alteryx Server Ideas

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

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!

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.

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 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

Hi Alteryx support team,

We would like to use the search functionality available in the schedules tab of Alteryx gallery and when anyone searches the schedule by typing the name in search box on schedules tab, he/she should get list of the results along with the schedule information such as frequency of schedule, times run etc.

As of now, when one searches results are displayed as jobs and their run history.

Case reference -  Alteryx, Inc Case # 00606791

Regards,

milan

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.

It would be great if you could overwrite an existing workflow when saving to the gallery from designer. It could be a simple popup with a yes/no option to overwrite/save a new copy. Currently, you would have to

1) Save your workflow to the Gallery.

2) Click on ok and be taken to that workflow.

3) Go back to your private studio.

4) Search for the app you want to replace.

5) Realize you have 7 copies of the same workflow with the same name and try to determine which one you want to replace. (this could just be a "me" problem)

6) Select that app

7) Click on replace workflow.

😎 type the name of the workflow in the box.

9) Look through your list of 7 workflows and choose the one that was just uploaded. Usually the first in the list I think.

10) Lament that it took way too many steps.

I recognize that you can open workflows from the gallery in designer which does allow overwriting, but I've run into issues with 1) external dependencies not working as expected (ie packaged assets don't quite work the way I want) and 2) about half the time it will simply give you root errors and then your only option is to save to a folder and then go through the process above.

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): 

Hello all,

This may be a little controversial. As of today, when you buy an Alteryx Server, the basic package covers up to 4 cores :
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Knowledge-Base/How-Alteryx-defines-cores-for-licensi...

I have always known that. But these last years, the technology, the world has evolved. Especially the number of cores in a server. As an example, AMD Epyc CPU for server begin at 8 cores :
https://www.amd.com/en/processors/epyc-7002-series

So the idea is to update the number of cores in initial package for 8 or even 16 cores. It would :
-make Alteryx more competitive
-cost only very few money
-end some user frustration

Moreover, Alteryx Server Additional Capacity license should be 4 cores.

Best regards,

Simon

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

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've seen various solutions/workarounds but this seems to be a table-stakes ask?  When scheduling a workflow I should be able to specify which parameter values to run with.  Just two of many use case examples - 

Use case #1 - a single analytic app could be scheduled multiple times, each schedule specifying a different line of business

Use case #2 - credentials, allow the user to schedule a workflow with their saved credentials.  When their credentials change all they would have to do is update the schedule parameters

(If you know a better way I'm all ears, not the API thought that isn't a bad way to do it, just not super Easy)

I would like to see the enhancement of being able to schedule a start and stop time for specific jobs that need to run multiple times per day, so they don't run during the nightly backup periods of the Alteryx server. This can cause the daily backups of the Alteryx Gallery to fail. Currently SQL Server Management Studio/SQL Server has the function to able to schedule start and stop times for specific job. Currently Scheduler page on Alteryx Gallery/Server lacks this feature.

SQL Server Management Studio

Schedules on Alteryx Gallery/Server

As the title says: please make the date modified data more granular e.g. yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS and not 6 months ago

The current behaviour is the same in designer & browser, but is more important in browser (first screenshot) as there isn't an indicator or method or sorting the order.

Situation:

As your analytics work grows - you find yourself using the power of Alteryx to create shared macros.    These act as an accelerator for a team because one team member can us a reusable solution created by another team member.   For example - many teams need to get data out of JIRA (or some other system) so you create a connector that everyone can use.

That's going well - and now you have 20 teams all publishing canvasses to your server (possibly 100s of canvasses running in production) which make use of your JIRA connector - all good so-far!

Problem:

BUT THEN - you discover an issue with the JIRA connector and you need to fix it and publish a new version!

It's at this point that you realise that the canvasses on your server which use your JIRA connector are NOT pointing to it, but they have made a copy and included this inside their canvas.   So when you fix the problem with the JIRA connector - no-one gets the fix!

This is because every application uploaded to the server is a yxzp file, which zips up a COPY of all the shared macros and uses this in an isolated way.

So - in order to get the new JIRA connector (with the defect repaired) used instead of the old one you now need to:

- Download EVERY canvas on your server

- Unpack them all to expose the sub-macros being used

- Inspect them to see if they are actually an instance of the JIRA Macro

- Make a list of the owner and application IDs

- reach out by e-mail or phone to every one of these folk to ask them to republish their Alteryx workflow with your new version of the JIRA connector.

Proposal:

Please can we revisit this - we really do need the power of shared macros - and we also need the ability to fix and manage these like a product over time.   This will have an impact on the engine (hence copying @AdamR_AYX ) 

Desired end-state:

- When you build a canvas using a shared macro - it doesn't store the macro itself, but rather a reference to the version on the server - unless you explicitly decide to break the connection and take a copy.

- When you check this canvas into the server - your application / yxzp does NOT include a copy of the shared macro - instead it has a reference link

- this means that Alteryx Server can now track which canvasses use this shared macro very simply

- When I fix this shared macro - I can then do an in-place update; or if the interface is not the same (i.e. different inputs or outputs) then this has to be a new version and the users will stay pointing to version 1.

This is how shared assets are managed in a micro-service world, which is the way that all of our architecture is going - and it seems important that we build this thinking into the Alteryx infrastructure too.

@AdamR_AYX ; @Treyson ; @SteveA @DerekK ; @BlytheE 

We leverage Active Directory groups to manage user permissions to most of our company's resources like databases, file shares, applications, etc.  This idea is for the ability to manage a Gallery Data Connection via an Active Directory group.  In many cases, our AD group membership actually dictates what permissions a gallery connection should have, but we must manually add/remove users to the Alteryx connection to keep it synched with AD.

I think there are several ways Alteryx could be enhanced to support this; i.e. the AD group could be specified on the connection itself or it could be inherited from a Studio where the subscription is enhanced to support assigning AD groups to it (which could benefit other areas of Alteryx).

I'm told by Alteryx support that this functionality is unsupported but to post the idea here.  If anyone knows of workarounds to this limitation I'd certainly be interested!

This idea has been touted in different flavours over the years (but not implemented), but I'd like to push it a little further:

1. Create the ability to collaboratively edit an Alteryx workflow - e.g. like you can edit Microsoft documents collaboratively. If the front-end is primarily an XML interface, this should in theory be possible?

2. Version control (not version tracking) - i.e. automatically state the differences in scripts between versions and allow for checking in and checking out of code

3. Power BI & Tableau Prep have the ability to see exactly what changes were made and to reverse steps to get back to a specific stage of development: it would be great to have a panel that tracks all the edits you've made since you started editing the workflow

In simple terms, a modern, interactive way for multiple developers to work together, but also to encourage the use of Server to "check in" your application and to avoid developers saving the same file over & over again locally.

In prior versions, Gallery Admins could easily and quickly reactivate users that were deactivated (e.g., and employee leaves the company so we inactivate their Gallery account, but then they come back to the company in a few months with the same name and email).  

Now, the only way to do this is to edit the Mongo page.

We need a way via the UI to reactivate users, like we did in the old UI.

I suggest adding an option in the current User List/Grid to be able to filter for Inactive users.