Alteryx Server Ideas

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 

Using current version of the server - you can see that there is no OAuth managed or published API endpoint for canvas delete (screenshot 1).   However this API does CLEARLY exist as you can see if you inspect what happens when you hit the delete button (screenshot 2 clearly shows the API being called - but it requires user login security token)

Please can you enable this API for OAuth - the API already exists, it just needs to be exposed with the others.

CC: @BlytheE 

2019.4+ Server now prompts users to select an Encoding Type when downloading a csv on the gallery. Unfortunately there is no way to disable the prompt of which encoding option to utilize or an ability to select a system default. Please provide these server options as this is causing confusion across departments. 

.csv output

.yxdb output, csv format

(many users like the preview provided by yxdb but want excel download)

During development in Designer, when the workflow is configured to output to csv it already has the encoding configured, please provide the option to at least default this at output on the gallery:

.csv config

The only alternative at this time is to republish all workbooks configured to output .csv or .yxdb to be .xlsx. This is not ideal.

Note: Scheduled jobs are not affected - I tested a scheduled run and csv files were successfully written out to a file share on the server. Content format appears to not be impacted. 

Thanks!

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.

It would be good to have these table headers sizable, so that it can be expanded to display complete Name (and other fields).

The mongo db back is a working process but I would like to replace individual workflows and not the entire server state.

Currently the e-mail settings for the server are set up using a wizard and are not available within the admin UI.

Please could you add an explicit section to the Admin UI to allow the admin team to set up approved SMTP settings, allowing this all to be managed in one admin console.

Further: Can you allow the admins to push these settings down to the desktop users.   This would allow the admin team to control the SMTP usage and prevent data leakage.   It would also reduce complexity for the user since the SMTP settings are all pre-set making eMail tools; and Events easier to set up.

It would be very useful to have a standardized method to set up notifications to the server admins and to the job owner themselves if an alteryx canvas fails (error).

My understanding is that currently the only way to do notifications on failure for every canvas is for every canvas to individually set up events.   On a large implementation, this becomes very difficult to manage.

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.

Hi Alteryx, 

Now, under the Job Tab, it is only show the status of running job.

Suggest to add one new page for showing the run history of each workflow/job.

1. Workflow name

2. Priority 

3. Assigned Worker

4. Start time

5. End time

6. Duration

7. State

8. Job Type (schedule or manual tracker)

9. Owner

10. Message ( e.g. error log)

Best regards,

Samuel

With Alteryx Server 2019.4, new users cannot create Collections by default. 

As Alteryx Server admin this causes much manual effort on my side, because I need to configure new users manually. 

Alteryx claims to be a tool for automatization and I do not see how this new feature fits into Alteryx's vision.

I wish that there were tools, which allow me to automatize the management of users on the Alteryx Server. 

With a growing number of users on the Alteryx Gallery, manual user management is not an option!

I wish there was a way to create custom roles on the Gallery and assign them to AD groups, similar to "Permissions".

Those custom roles could include the privilege to create Collections, schedule Jobs, etc.

I would also love, if there was a way to give granular access to the Data Connection menu to users. 

I have already addressed this topic to the Alteryx product manager in Q1 2019 and I hope this feature will be implemented in the future. 

Hi Alteryx,

The scale of the column width in Alteryx Gallery is fixed.

Sometime may not show the whole word of that column, it is very inconvenience.

Actually, not only in gallery but also in designer. Like the Manage Data Connections pop-up window. 

Even in 2019.4, the display problem hasn't been improved. 

Can Alteryx improve the UI of gallery and designer asap?

Best Regards,

Samuel To

Hi Alteryx,

When a staff leave the company, his/her AD account will be removed from the AD directory,

However, the user record is still exists in the Alteryx gallery. For example, still existing in the user list of data connection and the permission tab.

Can Alteryx provide the following features ?

1. Identify the user that do not exist in the AD directory anymore.

2. one button to remove all of the setting related to that user in the gallery.  

Best Regards,

Samuel

All of the default values for the RuntimeSettings.xml can be found in the C:\Program Files\Alteryx\bin\RuntimeData\RuntimeSettings.xml.

These values are overridden by the RuntimeSettings.xml file in the ProgramData folder. Unfortunately, there is no “formal” documentation right now.

The suggestion would be to show users the universe of XML tags and their corresponding accepted value configs, and other data related to the XML entity.

Element Name ServiceProviderEntityID -> child of Authentication -> grandchild of SystemSettings

My company uses R Shiny and maybe in the future Python Dash to create multiple analytic apps, dashboards, etc for multiple people to run across our company. One thing that would be nice to to have these R Shiny workflows run off of the Alteryx Server as that would allow us to use Alteryx Server to keep permissions and ease of use.

I propose an update to the Alteryx Server that would allow for R Shiny apps to be run in the Alteryx Server with all functionality of custom R interactive plots, etc etc just like what you'd see in one hosted on a R Shiny Server.

The benefits of this would allow for my company to only have to manage one server instance (Alteryx) to run all of this. Since R/Python is allowed/used in Alteryx workflows already, can you add the ability to visualize R Shiny code/plots/interactions/etc within Alteryx Server itself?

Currently if there is a password change, I have to download my workflows, update the password in the Tableau connector, and reupload the files. 

This would enable groups with a single sign on to ensure scheduled workflows are not interrupted. 

Are there any plans to add support for the Spatial Object, File Browse and Tree questions for the Gallery REST API?

I see via the Interface Viewer in Designer that the "answers"/values to these questions are just (messy) XML I realize the File Browse could be difficult because it would involve accommodating some type of BLOB data but the Spatial Object (one or more lat/lngs describing a point or shape) and the Tree questions seems to be fairly straightforward.

We currently get around the Spatial Object limitation by specifying a latitude and longitude (for a Point) in text boxes. For shapes (polygons) we just stuff the WKT (Well Known Text) representation of the polygon in a text box. This works fine but requires special handling on the workflow side. 

I have a chained app that is running on the gallery/server. When I run it, I see status changing from Processing to Running, but the window doesn't show a meaningful message as to which app is running. Is it possible to show that in the Browser window which reflects what stage is currently running in the Chained App? 

See snapshot of window below.

This would be super useful to monitor the progress of the chained app currently executing on the server. 

We use the Server API to manage our server environment - and we recently noticed that the Workflows API (/admin/v1/workflows) ignores any canvasses after the 10 000'th submission.

For example:

• If we don't use any offsets or limits - then we get 10 000 applications
• If we use an offset of 5000 with a limit of 10000 - we get 5000 applications (i.e. anything after canvas 10 000 is being ignored)
• if we use an offset of 9990 with a limit of 100 - we get 10 rows returned (i.e. anything after canvas 10 000 being ignored)

By querying Mongo directly (appinfos collection) we know that we have 18 800 or so unique applications in our environment.

Please can you remove this cap from the API so that it can be used to query any number of canvasses on a larger environment?

cc: 

+  @Hemanth @marydest24 @Shreyasi @Sotoll @Kosi @revathi @Bethanyturner012  @TanyaS