Alteryx Server Ideas

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.

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.

Hi,

I've got an app in my company's gallery that I've updated 11 times, so in the gallery it says "version 11". I noticed when I click on that area, it brings up a window that shows all 11 of the apps I've uploaded over time, with options to make them the published version & to download. This confused me since each time I update the app I get a warning saying the app will be deleted, which is what I want.

So for this app, I have a 800MB file within it, which would mean that on my gallery server I have 11 versions of an app that each contain at a minimum 800MB of data. I've recently been told by support that this is as it's intended, and if I want to get rid of the all the different versions, I should deleted the app entirely and start anew. This of course would change the URL to the app, requiring the updating of documentation and redistribution of that documentation to over 100 users. And I lose the number of times the app has been run, which doesn't work for me.

My idea is to have another option in the window that shows all the different versions with the options to download, but this option would be to delete previous versions...COMPLETELY, knowing that the owner would no longer have the option to download the version or make it the published version. Having this would allow the owner to maintain the original app with the option of dropping previous versions that are really not wanted anymore.

Enhance the v3 APi for workflows - /v3/workflows/{workflowid} - to get information for first n versions and/or last n versions of the workflow.

The problem

The current API will return information about all versions of a workflow. If a workflow has several hundred versions, you'll get all version information, much of which is useless and can take a long time to process.

The (potential) solution

Allow the API to take parameters like first n versions and last n versions. This will allow the API to return only the respective version information that would be of interest to the user.

The red box in the image is the enhancement in swagger:

Hi all,

I've found, i guess, a bug on the Gallery. It's not really an issue as we've found a workaround for it. 

Whenever you're in need to delete a workflow that is owned by your co-worker, the Gallery doesn't let you instantly delete it (yes, we're in the same private studio) (screenshot 1).

To work around this issue, you just have to replace the specific workflow by a random workflow you own (basically i just upload a workflow with a browse tool in it, screenshot 2). 

When replaced, you get the god power to delete the workflow and thus also deleting the workflow of your co-worker. 

It would be convenient if i could just delete the workflow without this workaround tough :-)!.

Screenshot 1 - Not being able to delete a workflow owned by a co-worker.

Screenshot 2 - After replacing the workflow by a random workflow....

Greetings,

Seb

For a given DB connection - there's a need to be able to specify the owner for this specific connection.

Reason for this is that the credentials for a given DB are not all managed by the central admin team - so we'd want to say that a given DB connection is owned by a particular person so that this can be updated frequently as passwords change.

For resilience - our particular policy would be to have 2 owners so that if one person resigns or changes roles, it invalidates the primary and reverts to the secondary - and then asks the new Primary to create a backup owner.

While working in the Gallery, I think the file browse tool should allow the user to import a file without selecting a sheet or <list of sheet names> as is does locally.  

For example, I have created an app in which the user is able to import a file with multiple sheets, and all sheets are brought into separate input data tools with a single file browse tool (shown below).

Since the user does not select a sheet name, the file browse tool only brings in "SelectedFileName.xlsx|". The action tool is then set to replace a specific string "SampleFileName.xlsx|". This allows the input data tools to take this new file name, and add each respective sheet name to the end.

However, when working in the Gallery, the user is required to select a sheet name or list of sheet names, meaning a file browse tool is required for each sheet that you would like to import (shown below). This is a huge inconvenience for the application user, as they have to select the same file numerous times to import every sheet. 

Please let me know if you would like me to provide any more information, I would be happy to do so.

Thanks,

Matt

Please provide the ability to bulk add/delete users to a gallery. This would be useful for on-boarding/off-boarding large companies, departments, and external customers. For public-facing galleries, this would provide us the ability to on-board/off-board entire customers of ours. 

Starting with Windows Sever 2016 edition one could use Docker containers technology on windows environments. My idea is to dynamically convert Designer jobs/workflows  to Docker containers at runtime.

Today in managing Alteryx server, we manually configure new connections using the front end.  However, this has some potential drawbacks as it makes it hard to easily track change history, or make bulk updates to multiple strings, and it also leaves room for user error on configuration.

In this case I'm pretty specifically looking to modify aliases on the server itself.  I'm not particularly concerned with distribution to a wider audience, and the usernames/passwords associated in this case should not be available for use locally by users.  As a part of this, I am trying to identify a method to reduce or eliminate the need for anyone (including the data connection manager) to need to know the password for the specified accounts.  As some of these accounts may be used by multiple systems, it would be significantly simpler to integrate this maintenance into existing automated processes, rather than have a manual step to update the Alteryx connection values on the Gallery.

This is specifically a challenge today with regards to specific usernames or passwords which need to be stored.  Alteryx saves these values using machine-level encryption, but that is difficult to generate automatically.  Having a supported method that would easily allow creation of this file with password-level information would greatly improve maintenance of the Alteryx Server, particularly from an IT automation perspective.

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.

It would be useful there was the concept of a description for Alteryx content, which was displayed within Gallery, as even with logical folders, naming conventions & tags when there are several hundred items available this additional metadata would be highly beneficial to users to know what the content they can see actually does. The ability to search this description would also be highly useful.

Currently the only filtering available in the Results tab in View Schedules is by Workflow Name. It would be nice to be able to filter by Status, so we can just look for potential problems, like warnings or errors. Currently, I have a job that runs every 5 minutes. That means I have to scroll through hundreds of rows, or about 12 pages using the default 25 rows per page, just to scan for potential problems in the last 24 hours.

At the moment when you give the "assign job" permission the user can choose any worker, it would be great if there was a way to assign workers to users or groups.

Example 1 (worker 3 is assigned to one group):

Worker1 - Assigned to ALL

Worker2 - Assigned to ALL

Worker3 - Assigned to ArtisansGroup1

In this scenario, all Gallery users have access to Worker 1 and Worker 2 and the ArtisansGroup1 has access to Worker1, Worker2 and Worker3.

The current setup of Data Connections, as of v11.3, relies on users to have the same aliases or connection strings available to easily share Workflows and publish them to a Gallery. In order to solve this, I propose that a system be created that allows users to establish "Local" and "Remote" connections. The Local connections will be used anytime the developer is creating a Workflow on his own computer, but will be automatically substituted with the Remote connection information once the Workflow is published. Remote connections may be filled with an Alias to a connection from the Gallery.

The primary benefit of this is that an organization will not need all of their developers to standardize their aliases and/or connections strings per connection. Instead, they will create one connection within the Gallery that will be distributed to developers and applied to the Remote column. This will generally reduce difficulties regarding the expansion of an Alteryx user base within an organization. Below I will outline two possible implementations of this:

1) Add a Remote Connection String field when adding a connection in the Data Connection Manager. This optional field will allow the user to set only one connection to an IO transaction, but maintain the Local-Remote functionality described above. Here is a mockup of how that might look within Alteryx Designer. 

2) Add a Remote Connection String field on each IO action within Alteryx. This will give the developers more flexibility in which connections are used where, but will also require more setup and maintenance time. Below is a mockup of how that might look.

each canvas in our environment goes through initial dev; then a testing phase; then into production usage after completing testing & peer review.

Currently the server environment has no concept of progression or promotion so we have to set up our own Dev; UAT; and Prod gallery & server - this really is very clunky because assets have to be manually copied across.

What would be more effective is:

- Allow a single asset to have a lifecycle (like you do in GIT) - so that it can go through dev and testing as a branch of the main code

- Once ready - user then changes the lifecycle type to "testing" or "UAT" and pushes it to users

- Once signed off, the user then promotes this to a production flow, and it replaces the current production version

There are a few areas where we'd need to do some thinking (dependancy tracking; branching; changing connection details as you promote so that you can hit the prod data stores etc) - but fundamentally this would go a VERY long way towards eliminating much of the admin involved in running the gallery.

We've confirmed with @KevinP that the Alteryx Gallery / Server API does not currently support downloading canvasses in unzipped data-stream format. (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/Server-API-Download-packages-for-surveil...)

Please can we add an API end-point that allows the following:

• Connect to the gallery and download a canvas; along with all of its sub-canvasses and helper macros. 
• Format required:
  • Plain XML (not zipped)
  • Provided in a data stream so that we can perform analytics and surveillance on this data
  • Fields required
    
    • Canvas filename
    • Application ID
    • Some unique ID per macro / sub-macro
    • XML for the canvas
    • Last run date
    • Last changed date
    • Environment (this is important once Server actually allows a Dev; UAT; Prod progression cycle - so we can see which environment people are in)
    • User details who uploaded
    • User details who are marked as the owners
    • Any other meta-tags on the canvas (important once server allows for meta-tagging of canvasses for categorisation)

Current API only allows this to be downloaded to a zipped file; which then needs to be unzipped; and then loaded back into a data stream.

Thank you

S

CC: @revathi @AshwiniChezhiyan @LizaNemchynova 

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