Alteryx Server Ideas

I am noticing what I think it's a big gap in terms of turnover and job changes.  Even though you can add workflows to a Collection for development and update purposes. Only the original owner/publisher can see the version history for a workflow. At least that appears to be the case in 2020.1

Is there any discussion for the road map to include a way to transfer the ownership of a workflow from one user to another? this would alleviate the need to publish a brand new version and then reset all the scheduling. 

Wanted to grab some attention here regarding the Alteryx gallery search engine (which also bleeds over into searching for schedules and jobs when troubleshooting). 

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm pasting two pictures (one attachment) of searching our gallery for the word "Contour" and the word "Signal". Both of these words are in the title of a single workflow - when I search for the word "Contour", the workflow pops up. When I use the first word in the workflow, which is "Signal", it doesn't pop up. 

I appreciate all that Alteryx does, but I wouldn't think this should be a difficult issue to fix, and I would imagine there are other frustrations with the functionality here. 

I have three team members all in the same private studio. We can see each others' workflows. However, when looking at a workflow that another team member has published to the gallery, it looks like:

1. The workflow has never been run
2. The workflow is not scheduled to run

This is a massive impediment to collaboration because my team handles ETL for most of the company. If a user complains that their data isn't up to date, whoever receives that support ticket needs to be able to see if the workflow is actually running and whether it was successful or had an error during the last run.

Preventing a team from seeing this for each others' workflow schedules and results means that the only person who can deal with an issue is the person who originally made the workflow. Which makes the idea of a shared private studio wholly pointless as we may as well be operating in different universes.

Please create a studio-level setting where all members of a studio can see all schedules and results of all workflows in that studio.

When an artisan moves positions (within or external) away from their current responsibilities, their collections and workflows should be able to be transferred via an administrator to another user.

Hi

In a heavily used server environment, and depending on how workflows are deployed, it is possible to accumulate a vast number of "one off" workflows that could/should be deleted  as they would never be used again. In one of our environments we have over 1 million of these.

Currently we are manually deleting them 500 at a time but have asked if there is a way to script the delete process to make it more efficient. We have been told that to really delete a workflow you would need to touch at least 4 collections.

Can we have a Delete workflow API in one of the next releases in order to address this issue?

Thank you

Tom Diroff

There is a strong need for more APIs to be introduced in Alteryx Server so that our Admin teams can provide automated solutions to our users. My understanding is that a lot of these will be introduced into Alteryx Analytics Hub however, it is also needed in Alteryx Server.

I would propose that the internal APIs for Collections and Scheduler be exposed to the Admin Key/Secrets so that we can use these APIs to move our Users workflows directly to their collection or automatically schedule for them, if needed. It seems that all this would take would be to release the Authorization from internal to the Admin on the API.

APIs I am requesting be released:

• PUT .../gallery/api/collections/{collectionID}/apps/{appID}/
• POST .../gallery/api/scheduler/

My team currently uses the API to call a large number of workflows via a Python based scheduler process.  We use this currently by having ~10 users in a single subscription (Private Studio).  

All of the Private Studio sites on the Alteryx help state that they are going away in the near future to be replaced by individual studios and Shared Collections.  

From our testing, this would kill our processing as we cannot have an API for 1 Private Studio call workflows from a different private studio even if they have access through a shared collection.  

Are there plans to adjust the API endpoints in the future to better account for this?

Our IT department is looking to move to the Collections based structure now in preparation for the removal of the current Studio setup, so another question is when the structural update is planned to go into effect (which server version should we expect this?) so that we can get ready to account for this or if we can ask them to back off a little.

Thanks

So - one of the biggest challenges that we have with the MongoDB used by Alteryx Server is that we continually have issues with locking (where our admins have to go in and undo locks)

Additionally - the current implementation of MongoDB connectivity does not support full Kerberos authentication which means that we're on a non-compliant install (which in a large enterprise is an uncomfortable place).

Given that a very large amount of what the server does is transactional - it would make sense to have an option to use a large-scale SQL server instead of using Mongo.   For large enterprise customers, there must be flexibility to allow the databases that they have large supported instances of (my strong preference would be MS SQL 2016).

MS SQL natively supports XML so all the canvasses can be stored in native format.   Additionally, MS SQL allows very fast query across XML, and given the clustering and reporting capabilities in MS SQL, this would dramatically increase our ability to self-manage our infra.

Given that Alteryx is looking more and more at large Enterprise customers - a move to a large-scale clustered SQL env as the back-end would be a very positive move.

NOTE: as we consider DB options for a SQL backend - please consider your large-scale enterprise customers.   For example - MS SQL or Oracle or DB2 are all much more prevalent in enterprises than databases like Postgres - so it's important to focus on the enterprise support for the DB that you choose.

+ @Deeksha @avinashbonu @revathi @BenBu

Hello, I would like improved user management features and/or training

• Display 100 does not seem to work consistently
• Click /navigate from user to user – once I select a user would like to go to next user
• Changes I make with filters refresh every time I go back – which means I have to constantly reset my view in between each user
• Modify user settings in collections – would like to modify user settings instead of delete and re add user

I love the gallery data connection feature - we're going through some big systems architecture changes, resulting in new locations for many datasets. Having a single place in the Gallery Admin area to update connection information works beautifully.

We're running into issues with the gallery-hosted data connections when trying to run some apps on our private gallery though. The trouble comes up when the gallery-hosted data connection appears inside a macro that's part of an app. We get an "Unable to translate alias" error when trying to run these types of apps.

If we have an app using gallery-hosted data connections that are outside of a macro, the gallery is able to resolve the connection alias fine and work properly. The issue only appears when the gallery data connection is part of a macro used inside an app.

We use macros a lot in our app development because it allows us to use standard methods for accomplishing common tasks. Using macros also enables us to set up automated testing workflows to make sure our processes produce expected results. As it is, we're unable to take full advantage of the gallery-hosted data connections because they don't work within macros, and instead have to continue using hardcoded connection strings. These are a bigger maintenance burden as our underlying systems evolve and are updated.

Now, gallery does not support AD group , need to setup user one by one.

If gallery support AD group synchronization, it is more convenient for gallery admin to manage large number of users.

By assigning AD users to AD group, it will reduce the maintenance task of gallery admin, since gallery admin don't need to grant rights in the gallery directly. 

I’ve had a query from a Team here at my organisation regarding OAuth2. They are trying to investigate whether a Robotic Process Automation Tool can be integrated with the Alteryx Gallery API.

It uses OAuth2 but my understanding is Alteryx Gallery uses OAuth1. 

Can Alteryx Gallery API be enhanced to use OAuth2? A plan to support OAuth2 authentication for a REST API in a future release?   

The only reference I can find to this idea is here : https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Connect-Gallery/Share-Results-in-a-Collection/m-p/231 .  It references that the feature of "sharing workflow results" was "on the Roadmap" in 2014.  I did some searching through the current Ideas page and cannot find anything.  I also reviewed the release notes since Alteryx 10.5 and cannot see that this was added.

A user approached me today with a problem of "Many people need access to the results of this data, and I want everyone to be able to see all the results".  While you could potentially email these results to a specified user set, that would require maintaining both a collection and an email tool in the job, and could potentially cause notification fatigue if users only care when they go to the Alteryx Gallery.  Similarly, results could be saved to a networked location, but that would require a user to go to two locations in order to find this information.

As such, having a toggle that allows users with permission to view a workflow, to also see the results of any/all users, would be huge. 

When posting an app to the Gallery, if the app has, say, one PCXML output for the user to see, and one Excel file for the user to download, it would be helpful for to be able to specify which shows first to the user.  For example, I have a PCXML that gives the user summary tables, and instructions on how to go to the drop down above and select the second report, click on the Excel icon, and download it.  But if the Excel report shows up first, then there is no ability to give them instructions and many simply won't be savy enough to go find the PCXML in the drop down.

In order to migrate workflows from our UAT environment to a Production server environment, we are looking for an API capability to work with the server:

- Query canvasses by name or ID (to get a list of canvasses)

- Extract Canvas to a particular location (by ID)

- Upload canvas including dependancies (with parameters for team; collection; etc)

This would assist with automating the UAT to Prod process until Alteryx Promote can step into this gap.

CC: @rijuthav @jithinmony @HengHe @RajK @ydmuley @revathi @Deeksha @MPistone @Ari_Fuller @Arianna_Fuller @JoshKushner @samnelson @avinashbonu @Sunder_Sriram @Rahul_Thakur @Rahul_Singh 

Using current version of the server - you can see that there is no OAuth managed or published API endpoint for canvas delete (screenshot 1).   However this API does CLEARLY exist as you can see if you inspect what happens when you hit the delete button (screenshot 2 clearly shows the API being called - but it requires user login security token)

Please can you enable this API for OAuth - the API already exists, it just needs to be exposed with the others.

CC: @BlytheE 

We use the Server API to manage our server environment - and we recently noticed that the Workflows API (/admin/v1/workflows) ignores any canvasses after the 10 000'th submission.

For example:

• If we don't use any offsets or limits - then we get 10 000 applications
• If we use an offset of 5000 with a limit of 10000 - we get 5000 applications (i.e. anything after canvas 10 000 is being ignored)
• if we use an offset of 9990 with a limit of 100 - we get 10 rows returned (i.e. anything after canvas 10 000 being ignored)

By querying Mongo directly (appinfos collection) we know that we have 18 800 or so unique applications in our environment.

Please can you remove this cap from the API so that it can be used to query any number of canvasses on a larger environment?

cc: 

+  @Hemanth @marydest24 @Shreyasi @Sotoll @Kosi @revathi @Bethanyturner012  @TanyaS 

I'm really enjoying the new Save As functionality to push to the gallery, but had a request that would make it even more useful for me. 

I saw that you can open workflows directly from the Gallery and edit them with version control, but it would be nice if it was possible to do a Save As on a local workflow and point it at an existing copy on the server.  I need to maintain a local copy of my workflow for dev/prod separation, but currently my way to push to prod is to do a Save As to my Private Gallery, remove the existing copy from the company gallery, and then share my newly created workflow into the company gallery.  This causes some headaches like no version control, switching out icons everytime, and overall just a messy way to push to prod.  

It would be helpful if there was a way to overwrite an existing workflow in the gallery rather than editing it directly.