Engine Works
Under the hood of Alteryx: tips, tricks and how-tos.
How does one automate that which cannot be automated?
We are in an information age. An age where someone can monitor the security of their home and unlock their care from a mobile device; start streaming a movie at home, move to an iPad, and finish on a plane; and even blend, cleanse, and predict data with little or no data science knowledge. And yet many, if not all of us, at some point have tried to gain access to data within our own organizations only to be met with the solution of “we can email you an Excel file”. Really?!? I can put money into my Starbucks account via my phone, and have Starbucks scan and recognize the payment, deduct the cost from my account and give me my bonus stars for the transaction, but the only solution you have to give me data is to email it to me? Now is a good time to tell you something important about myself – I’m lazy. I loathe manual, tedious, repetitive tasks. I often joke with my coworkers that I’m going to automate everything I do so I can sit and watch YouTube all day. In fact, were I to successfully automate myself out of a job I would consider that the single greatest accomplishment of my career. As you can probably imagine, I was not willing to manually download and process Excel files each week. Fortunately, I come from a software development background and was able to write code to extract attachments from Outlook emails and baked that into an SSIS package that ran weekly.
Working with the SDK
My biggest obstacle was interpreting the sample code - figuring out how to separate the xml config as input from the xml config that was reading the input. It makes perfect sense now, but when I was trying to understand the custom tool architecture and input file interpretation simultaneously for the first time I had some trouble.
Once I had a working tool I went back and forth with the folks at Alteryx and there were some limitations there with getting them the install and sharing attachments. I discovered I could wrap the install into a yxzp file and include instructions and a help file. JP was very helpful with identifying some of the nuances of working with the SDK and offered some suggestions on improving the tool. I needed to incorporate the "UpdateOnly" parameter because the C# code was executing every time a new tool was added to the canvas. I didn't know that the Alteryx Engine had a special feature where it runs the workflow (with no actual records other than metadata) every time a new tool is added.
He also suggested I add some date filtering capability to the tool, allowing people to avoid downloading their entire inbox if they select “Inbox”. For this I added a configuration element for the user to input a query string and included a link to the documentation to build the query.
Using the Outlook Input Tool
You may be tempted to point this sucker to your Inbox right out of the gate, and I don't know what your Inbox looks like, but if it looks anything like some of our testers, I'd advise against that. Play with your drafts folder or deleted items first.
You may find copying the search syntax from Outlook into the Query String helpful:
As for me, this is how I've been using the tool. In this example I filter out a specific Excel file and send it through a Dynamic Input tool to see the results. I'll leave it up to you to discover new and interesting ways to consume the files that you no longer have to manually fish out of your inboxes.
What's included in the package
You'll find an Alteryx *.yxzp file attached to this post. When you open it in Alteryx Designer, you will see installation instructions:
and a help file
The workflow is a single RunCommand tool that will install the Outlook Input tool. You can find my source code on Git Hub.
I hope you find the Outlook Input tool useful. This has been a fun and exciting project and I can't wait to see what creative ways the community finds to use this tool. Use the comments below to let me know your experience working with the tool.
UPDATE 8/1/2017:
A new version is available on the gallery: https://gallery.alteryx.com/#!app/Outlook-Tools-Install/597b35c2f499c716ec34a782.
Changes:
- Implemented paging to prevent timeouts through the Exchange Web Services when working with large inboxes and complex filters. Note: you still may need to adjust throttling settings on your server: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj945066(v=exchg.150).aspx.
- Updated the installer to remove previously installed versions of the tools so it's not cluttering up your programs list.
