The latest release of Alteryx Designer includes a very welcome addition: the Control Container. It gives users interesting new possibilities for building dynamic workflows. In this blog, I briefly tell you what challenges the Control Container can help you with.
When does what happen? / Orchestration
Control over the order of execution in a workflow can be quite a challenge. Writing and reading with the same file is a case in point. So sometimes users choose to split their workflows into multiple parts. There are then multiple files to maintain anyway. And if order is determined with scheduled workflows on Alteryx Server, there is additionally a timing challenge (because the first one always runs out...). With other solutions, although you keep one workflow, it becomes complex again rather quickly.
With Control Containers, this is no longer an issue. When you connect Control Containers to each other, they will perform their task neatly one after the other. And you decide in what order, in one workflow.
Is anything happening at all? / Conditional performance
Sometimes you want to be able to turn certain parts of your workflow on or off dynamically, preferably based on what's in your data. But how?
With Control Containers, this can be done easily and quickly. In fact, a Control Container has an input that can be used to turn it on or off. This input can be connected to data from your workflow - on/off logic is then quickly created.
What happened? / Logging
Alteryx writes log files of the execution of your workflow. Those are ... somewhere. And you may not want to have to go through everything, but only the log data of a part you're testing.
Control Containers send out a log of only the Tools you put in them - as workflow data! So you can easily create a log file of exactly what you want to know, in a place that suits you, in a file format that suits you.
This log data can of course also be used directly in your workflow for conditional execution. So you can have a warning or error message from a Tool kick off a process component.
Conclusion
Control Containers offer users some powerful new capabilities. This new feature alone is reason enough to give Alteryx Designer 2023.1 a try, it seems to me. Want to know more? Then read this blog, in which I explain in detail exactly how Control Containers work.
Photo by Vishnu R Nair: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-at-concert-1105666/