Notifying yourself or others

Debugging and notifying users of what’s going on with a workflow execution is a very important practice that we need to implement when developing Alteryx workflows/macros.

The Message tool allows us to do this, by providing a very flexible and powerful set of features to track and notify us of whatever we want at any point in a process. From a simple status message as a breakpoint and counting read records to evaluating a condition or a data integrity rule, we can use the Message tool to decide when to display a message, a warning, or an error (which will force the workflow to stop), or even decide to force the workflow to stop passing records downstream through the tool.

Getting ready

Download the test set for this recipe from here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Alteryx-Designer-Cookbook/tree/main/CH10/Recipe06.

We’ll use the Message tool to let a user know when a process starts, provide a record counter, and let them know...