In my previous blog documenting my approach to Alteryx Challenge 313 I reflected on the benefits of documenting workflows in order to handover work and better explain what the different parts of the workflow achieve. I have since remade the flow and the macro within it with the TIL documentation guide and wanted to upload images of the two for comparison.
First we have the basic flow, because lots of the action is happening in the macro it might appear that documentation is not all that useful the flow looks fairly simple to follow.
Yet when we compare to the documented one I notice some key benefits of documentation even in a simple instance. First, it allows for explanation of steps for example using recordID as a field to group with. Second, it draws attention to and explains a join; explaining what the join term was and why the join was done (to reintroduce the original number lost in the iterative process). Finally the grey section clearly indicates sections that an end user would interact with and allows us to follow the connection to track which parts of the flow it is impacting.
Next we have the iterative macro, the labels on the tools help indicate the types of things going on in the flow but this one is slightly harder to follow and perhaps lacks detail. A newer user might pick up this macro and wonder why there are three update values. Why is there a text input that joins mid flow? What is the condition attached to the iterative output?
Documentation helps explain these questions. We can clearly label the original input the iterative output that is to be sent in again along with an explanation of the condition attached to send something back into the macro. An explanation for the 3 update values and a breakdown of all the things happening in a single formula tool. We get additional information on the lookup table and the terms it joins upon and also the data structure of the output ready for concatenation outside of the macro.
Overall, I am really happy with the results of documenting the workflow, it was not too difficult to retrospectively add in the documentation but on larger projects I can certainly understand the importance of doing it as you go with workflows being more complex. In the long run I certainly think the documented flow will be easier for me to understand if anyone asked me about this challenge.