Thanks to the brilliance of @RobertB during last year’s Alteryx Innovation Days, we now have a command line tool in beta that generates visual markup in the Designer to compare two workflows. Using the tool is simple:
1. Open the Command Prompt and navigate to the AlteryxGui executable
cd C:\Program Files\Alteryx\bin
2. Use the below command to launch the Alteryx Designer with a comparison between and
AlteryxGui.exe /diff
Please note: All Designer instances must be closed before running the instructions above.
The Designer will then open up with a side-by-side comparison of the two workflows, marked to show the differences between them. Differences like:
- Tools that don’t appear in the other module get a big red box behind them
- Tools with changed configurations get a hashed red box
- Tools that are the same but have something different immediately up or down stream from them get a red arc on the side
- Connections that are different get drawn in red
Essentially, any changes that affect what the workflow does at runtime should be marked in red one way or another, while cosmetic changes are ignored. This looks like:
Before:
Workflow 1
Workflow 2
After:
Workflow 1
Workflow 2
Running the command line tool will open up a new instance of Alteryx with your workflows compared visually.
Thanks to @BenBu for his help providing detailed instructions!