Alteryx Server Ideas

When saving a workflow to the Gallery, I would like an option on the Save window to save directly to a collection. This can be an existing collection, or would have the ability to create a new collection. The current process requires you to log into the Gallery after saving the workflow and move it to the appropriate collection.

Currently, this is completely manual with whoever is assuming the schedule creating it under their profile and then the old schedule being deleted.

This can happen often in organization where a user leaves the company or assumes a new role requiring some else to maintain those schedules. It would be convenient if there was an option to reassign the owner of a schedule to simply this process.

We have several workflows that call other workflows (i.e. via the Conditional Runner macro) but are running into some versioning challenges since we moved to storing all of our workflows in our gallery.  When I publish a workflow that references another workflow, I can bundle it up with the workflow when I save it, but then Alteryx places that workflow into the /externals directory, which is obvioulsy not the same as the workflow that we've saved to our gallery.  An example:

I have two workflows in our gallery...one that generates a TDE and one that calls that one if certain file availability and time conditions are met.  The "master" version of each is in the gallery, which is what we want...

...but when I load or save the Sales Analytics workflow in Designer, I have to bundle the TDE workflow with the main workflow in order for it to run from Gallery.  But now I've created a disconnected version of the TDE workflow and if I forget to update it when I update the version in the Gallery, I'll be running the wrong version.  I know I could store these workflows in a network directory, but that seems to defeat the purpose of the Gallery.

If I'm not missing something insanely obvious, I think this would be a very important feature enhancement, namely the ability to pull in a Gallery workflow into another workflow.

Apparently I click too fast sometimes when saving a project, but there are a number of times where the workflow name hasn't populated when saving to the gallery and it ends up saving a blank file name. This is a pain because I can't do anything with the one in the gallery because there is nowhere to click on it, so I can't use the replace function and have to re-save it and re-add it back into any collections that it was in.

I realize that I just need to slow down, but I do this frequently enough where it absolutely drives me crazy. Being able to change file names in the gallery would be a big plus instead of just using the replace option.

Hi all,

Currently, it is very challenging, nearly impossible, to distribute your workload between worker nodes as the image below. Curators should be able to manage this in multiple ways since the end-user doesn`t have a full understanding of the server architecture or strategy behind the idea.

It would be helpful to have the worker tags working similarly to the credentials pyramid where we can have levels of permissions. That way, we can have collections, user groups or even single users with worker tags configured.

This is an addition to the idea suggested by @ivane_meimban 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Ideas/Enable-Curators-to-assign-default-worker-tag-a...

Thank you,

Fernando Vizcaino

As a Gallery Admin I would like to be able to add and remove a user from local groups on the User page.

I realise that this would only work for local groups and that AD groups would need to be excluded (and indicated as unavailable for editing)

On the Users page it is quick and easy to see what Role each user has - UNLESS they have been assigned the "Default" role in which case it will depend on Gallery Default Role and which Group(s) they are assigned to.

I propose an additional column be added to the page to show the Effective Role for each user. The purpose of this change is to allow an administrator to quickly and easily confirm the effective Role of any Gallery use by viewing the User page, without having to check the user's group membership and the Role assignment that those groups provide.

For those users with a assigned Role other than "Default" that value will obviously match the assigned Role.

For users assigned the "Default" Role the page should show the result that would be returned by the appropriate permission resolution code when determining their effective Role from the Group membership and the Gallery Default.

[Screen image is from 2020.4 - with my suggested positioning for Effective Role added]

As a further enhancement a set of checkboxes showing the value of the special permissions e.g. Create Collections, would be good but might require a more significant re-design of the page and would only be saving a single click. I suggest instead that it might be useful to have an enhanced filter view of users which allows an administrator to view e.g. all users who can Create Collections etc.

Hey Alteryx Dev Gurus - 

I've got a situation wherein the user runs something in Gallery, and complains.  I have to log in as that user to view the output files that came back out.  As a super user, I should be able to have all seeing ability!  Thanks!

brian

When opening a canvas - it is possible to open from the gallery, which is important in a team environment.

However - as you work on this canvas - if you hit save, it does not save a new version to the server and increment the original (as would happen on sharepoint) - instead it asks you to create a new file.    

Please can you change this behaviour as follows:

- If I open from the gallery then when I save I'm updating the same Gallery asset and incrementing the version ID by 1.

- The only time I would save in a new file is if I use Save As; and explicitly pick a new file.

 cc: @jalvarezv

We are taking an incremental feed of all server canvasses in order to look for patterns - however there is no option on the server admin APIs (the Workflow API specifically) that allow you to filter by date.

Please can you add to this API to allow API users to specify an upload/updated date filter and only take items after this date.

cc: @jalvarezv

There are two key APIs that we use for extracting canvasses for governance & surveillance:

- the Workflows API which lists all canvasses on the server;

-  and the API call which returns a packaged version of the application by AppID

Unfortunately - when we query for all workflows to get the first list - there is no flag to indicate that a subset of these are actually deleted.   The result is that you need to make the second call to find this out which is wasteful.

Please add a "deleted" flag to the Workflows API so that we can identify which applications have been deleted without having to call the specific App ID post.

CC: @jalvarezv

Currently when running an Alteryx Workflow from the gallery via the API, it doesn't get logged in the user interface in the same way that running it interactively in the gallery GUI does - a shame as it then becomes harder to know the traffic and performance of a workflow run in this way.  

I would like to see some functionality in the Alteryx Gallery in which you can select multiple schedule workflows to disable/enable. Currently as an admin if I have many schedules I need to enable/disable I need to go into each schedule manually to disable or enable. This is okay for one or two, but I have about 20-30, it is very time consuming. I would like to see maybe some checkbox functionality next to the workflow to select and then an option to either disable all selected or enable all selected.

Hey there,

Below you can see few of my suggestion to improve Alteryx Server. 

Idea for Alteryx Server monitoring:

• Increase data what could be seen on workflow results.
• Possibly create a report with filter option (to filter by user, gallery, workflow and etc.), which would at least contain data like:
  • Successfully ran workflows, count, percentage.
  • Failure rates, counts and etc.
  • Live data for monitoring purposes.
  • etc.
• Possibility to connect to workflow results data (live data) with other tools like Tableau or Power BI to create dashboards and etc. to monitor and act on the error as soon as possible.
• Give a chance for other users to check on the workflow statuses and etc same like workflow owner.

Give server more functionality with:

• Ability for server automatically retry workflow based on configurations: in example:
  • retry flow in specific time (for example in 30 minutes)
  • number of possible retries
  • based on specific workflow (other) results ability to trigger to run another workflow
  • (Maybe there is a better way) ability to run macros which would for example open MS Excel, and run macro inside it. I have some of the workflows where workflow opens excel, runs macro inside, that macro triggers special Add In which connects to Essbase, it pulls the data, saves excel file, and then alteryx continues working with the file. So if such or similar workflows could be run on Server that would be awesome.
  • This is extremely exiting one: possibility to create environment for self-service users, which it would not be something like gallery (because gallery is more suitable for Alteryx Designers/users).
    • in that one environment admin could grant access for user and tick what specific user could see and run.
    • so for admin it would be one environment, and user would see only what is needed for him/her.
    • in that environment user would also be able to schedule self-service workflows to be received in example by email, or BOX drive or any other way. Scheduled workflow would have to be approved by an admin before it would be actually scheduled. 
  • I have not tried this one myself, but that would also be great if all alteryx server environment could be accessed by mobile devices (of course, some features would be limited).

 Hopefully you will find these suggestions interesting and useful. 

Regards,

Aurimas

@SteveA did an article about server logging a few years ago which was very helpful.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Engine-Works-Blog/A-deeper-dive-into-Server-logging/ba-p/22389

... and in the training events at Inspire this year there was a session on how to find and interpret server logs.

it would be very useful for large server environments to move away from discrete log files as much as possible, and instead move towards a world where the logs are stored in a data format, and one logging infra is used for all so that an admin team can see these all in one place.

Granted - the initial boot-up of a server, where it needs to connect to the logging DB is going to be a challenge - but after this initial primary boot sequence it would be great if all server logs and logging events were stored in a database of some kind so that we can analyze and collect events.     That way, server admins can have a great UI experience; as well as a great analytical experience without having to regex through multiple different .LOG files.

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 there are certain locations on server that are paginating content results:

• /gallery/#!apps/studio
• /gallery/admin/#!apps
• /gallery/admin/#!subscriptions
• /gallery/admin/#!users

Each of these pages require users to either know exactly what they want to find by using keyword filtering or know exactly what page they want to go to and use the bottom arrows/page numbers to navigate to that page. Ditching pagination for something more intuitive helps users that may not be as acclimated with the depth of content when there are a lot of results, and also saves users multiple click interactions to find what they want.

There are tons of solutions for this, but infinite scroll is the most user-friendly & least taxing server & client side.

https://infinite-scroll.com/ has code & examples, and jquery seems to be the most widely used implementation.

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