You may remember from a previous blog that my first attempt at the Alteryx Advanced Exam was unsuccessful. One of the reasons for this was that I didn’t realise there would be questions on Alteryx Gallery (and indeed, didn’t even know what Alteryx Gallery was!) This meant lots of googling during the exam – not ideal.

Since then, I have retaken the exam and been successful (woo!) We were lucky enough to have a lesson on Alteryx Gallery at the Data School, so I thought I’d summarise my learnings here. Hopefully it will be a good revision material.

What is Alteryx Gallery?

Alteryx Gallery is also known as Alteryx Server. If you’re familiar with Tableau Server, this sentence alone should be enough to give you a basic understanding. It is a place to share workflows (and macros, apps, etc), create schedules for these to refresh automatically and even govern how Alteryx is being used within a company.

How is it Structured?

There are two main sections to Alteryx Gallery: a public area, and an area that requires sign in credentials to view the content.

Public Area

In the Public Area, content can be categorised into Districts. Think of these like project folders. For example, in the below image, there are four Districts. This area does not require any sign in credentials and so anyone with the Gallery URL can access this content.

When we click into the Training District, you can see that this contains an app and a workflow.

Area Requiring Sign in

Private Studios

If you have sign in credentials for a Gallery, you will be assigned to a Private Studio. Each user can only be part of one Private Studio at a time. This is the area that you will share content that you wish to be private. It is often the case within a business that there will be a Private Studio for each function e.g. a Finance Private Studio, an HR Private Studio etc.

Collections

There may be projects within an organisation that span across multiple functions. Since a user can only be part of one Private Studio, this could cause issues, as you may think that the content would have to be duplicated in different studios.

Luckily there are Collections to solve this problem. The content will be stored in one Private Studio, but a collection can be created to ensure that specified users of different studios can also access the content.

What else is good to know?

Different user types

Much like Tableau Server, users can be assigned different roles on the Gallery which allows them to permission to do different things. The best explanation of this can be found in Alteryx’s documentation.

Versions

Content on the Gallery will have different version history saved. You can see that there is a latest version and a published version. These don’t have to necessarily be the same, as you can see for any version, there is the option to make this the published version instead.

Why would you want to do this? Maybe a bug has been discovered in the latest version of the workflow and you temporarily need to downgrade to the previous version, to keep things running. This is very simple to do within the Gallery.