Engine Works
Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
This blog post is referring to functionality that will be in our next major release. Beta users can preview this feature in the latest Beta release of Alteryx. Please send an email to products@alteryx.com if you are interested in participating in our Beta program.
There are some exciting new features in the selection of Input and Output Data Sources that I hope will make things easier in 7.0!
The first one is a new Split Button. The left side with the Open or Save icon goes to the Folder Browse popup like it always has. The new right side with the down arrow displays a menu with four connection options and a history of your last 10 Input/Output selections.
The Database Connection option replaces the database button which was previously on the Folder Browse popup. This menu contains an option to each type of database connection which Alteryx supports as well as a list of the last 10 Database Connections you have used.
The new 32 Bit Database Connection is similar to the Database Connection menu displayed below and is available with the 64 bit Alteryx engine. It allows you to connect to 32 bit ODBC and OLE DB drivers from the 64 bit application.
The last new menu option is the Alias connection. The Alias menu will contain a list of all the User and System Aliases available on your machine.
What is an Alias?
An Alias is a way to store your database connections in one place. Many users are faced with changing their passwords once a month. Or perhaps you are creating test modules and you have to change your connections from a test database to the actual release database. This new type of connection will give you one place to go to change your passwords or anything about your connections. You can change your password or connection once in the Alias Repository and all of your modules using that Alias will run with the new password. The Alias will be transformed at runtime into the actual connection.
This new feature will save you a significant about of time because you won't have to edit each module that has that database connection.
