Cloud Quest #22: Unofficial Holidays

[AYXAcademy]

Hi Community,

We posted the solution JSON file to Cloud Quest 21. Check it out and let us know what you think! Send suggestions to academy@alteryx.com or leave a comment below!

Let’s dive into this week's quest!

1. Download the provided JSON file containing your starting data and workflow files.
2. Upload the provided Cloud Quest 22 Start.json file into your Analytics Cloud library.
3. All necessary datasets are contained within Text Input tools in the workflow.

For more detailed instructions on how to import and export Designer Cloud workflow files, check out the pinned article Cloud Quest Submission Process Update. 

Scenario:

We are officially in the holiday season here in the US! In honor of this celebratory time, let’s discover some unofficialholidays listed on nationaldaycalendar.com.

For this week’s quest, your task is to create a two-column table with all these holidays in chronological order.

Hint: 

The DateTime tool will parse string dates with a warning if the format is inconsistent.

Useful DateTime Specifiers:

%d = Day number

%B = Month

%b = Mon

Spoiler

A combination of the Formula, DateTime, Sort, Select, and Transpose tools should solve your problem, but not necessarily in this sequence.

If you find yourself struggling with any of the tasks, feel free to explore these interactive lessons in Alteryx Academy for guidance:

• Getting Started with Designer Cloud
• Building Connections in Designer Cloud
• Building Your Workflow in Designer Cloud

Once you have completed your quest, go back to your Analytics Cloud library.

• Download your workflow solution file.
• Include your JSON file as an attachment to your comment.

Here’s to a successful quest!

[alexnajm]

Done!

Spoiler

[JeffF]

I solved this one based on the hint, not how I would have I would have solved it normally.

Spoiler

Method 2 doesn't use a formula tool.

[geoff_zath]

Spoiler

 

[Qiu]

That is a lot of DateTimeParse

Spoiler

[ggruccio]

I parsed out the dates and months and standardized them.  Then the Date_Time conversion worked in one step.  Created a string version of the date for presentation.

Spoiler

[RWvanLeeuwen]

Rather than inputting all reasoning in one formula tool, I thought it would be cool to visualise just how polluted this dataset is and how much of reasoning a developer needs to input if we cannot rely on automatic dateparsing libraries

Spoiler

Alteryx dateparse has issues with Mon compared to Month so I tackled all Mon before doing the same thing again but for the Month variants

[RWvanLeeuwen]

I had a go at building something visual and dynamic: see my visual on public.tableau.com for the dynamic version of this image