Depending on the project complexity, the number of tools and the connections between them in your workflow can drastically increase. Getting more items on the Alteryx canvas reduces the readability and visibility of your workflow. When you prepare your project for the client or yourself, you want to keep it clean and tidy. It is not only a good custom, but it will help you get back to this workflow someday and recall everything that you did for the project. At the same time, your client developers might need to understand your work to integrate it into their system. So, how to keep it tidy?
- Spend 5 minutes adding a client’s company logo, project name and project description using the comment tool.
- Combine tools into meaningful cohorts, placement into containers and name them appropriately.
- Dye cohorts in one colour, create a legend to identify colours.
- Name or comment tools. You probably do not want to name every single tool for clarity; for instance, to understand the setup for the cleansing tool, open its configuration with a standard number of options, and comment on this tool would be redundant.
- Use wireless connection between containers so that you won’t have a net of connections intersecting each other, and the workflow will look clean. To make connection wireless, one needs to highlight the connection, press the right mouse button and find the option Make Connection Wireless. You can still see the connection when you press outcoming or incoming tools used to connect them. Similar to wifi signs next to outcoming and incoming anchors will appear as shown below on the picture.
- If you have supplementary data validation or check, however, it is not a part of your workflow, then create a separate container and leave it disabled and shrank next to the containers it is linked to, as shown below:
- Use your own creativity to keep it clean.
- Start applying these rules from the beginning of your project to save time in the future.
- You can obtain a clean workflow like this or better:
Have a nice and clean workflow!