This weeks project was to make an Alteryx App. The first thoughts was what the hell we haven’t been taught this, but after reading through the tutorial made available on Alteryx things started to make sense. During the brief, the possibility of making the app link to Tableau made me think about what I actually wanted to achieve with the project.
The next step was to find a data set I wanted to work with. My first thought was to try and find a way to extract data from a rugby league website. But this would have taken too much time to extract the correct information and then also produce an app to go with it. So my next thought was- well I never know what airports I can fly to from a specific airport.
I found 3 data sets based on airlines, airports and routes. These datasets were in the format of a CSV file. Perfect for Alteryx and meaning the data cleaning process wouldn’t be too hard. This was true the cleaning process was good, but the joining process was something else.
Before trying to join the data, I made sure I could actually run a Tableau workbook, using the dataset I created to update said workbook, to enable to viz the data coming from the app (I have made a blog about how to do this here). Once I had sorted this is was time to figure out what I wanted my end point to be. I knew I wanted a hub and spoke graph running from Tableau, and to be able to filter via flying from airport, how many miles they wanted to fly and what region they wanted to fly from. Now the question was how the hell do I achieve this.
Below is my Alteryx workflow up until the start of app creations
Now to start creating the interface of my app. The first one is a drop down to enable a selection of a source airport. I had to import a separate file into this drop down as I had too many airports. This was the first dilemma, the second was finding the correct formula that would work with my Tableau file. One problem I came across was if I changed the airport name in the formula, and didn’t change it within the action tool the filter would not work. This was the problem when I presented my work on Friday. Once I had corrected it I managed to make it work by changing what was in the action tool.
Next was a numeric up down tool. I wanted to use this to allow the user to select how many miles they wanted to travel away from their chosen airport. I was then questioned as to why would anyone want to search for this, I would rather search by a region or destination. So I made the numeric default value a high number so it gave all available airports, and then those that want to change this number can have it as an option.
And the final interface was as suggested, have a destination region. I created this as a list box. The difficulty with list boxes is greatly explained by Simona here. I wanted the user to be able to select more than one region for their destinations.
Ok so now I have bored you with the nitty gritty details of my workflow and my app interface. I will now hopefully wow you with a demonstration of this finished app.
I hope you enjoy my app. I am trying to figure a way to publish to Alteryx Gallery but because of all the files attached to the app and tableau, I have yet figured out if this will work.
Thanks for reading, feedback is welcomed as always.
Bye for now
Lorna