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Alteryx API does not support file broswer question

6 - Meteoroid



There is an important fact that the alteryx API does not support FILE BROWSER as a question tool, which is stated at the documentation . That fact makes me cannot run my app via alteryx API, which include the File broswer question to get the uploaded data. The error info is "The workflow contains question types that are not supported by the api."  


My user case is I would like to upload a file on my own webiste, call the app to run and let the output result render on the external site.    

Can I aviod the file browser question tool or have an alternative soulution? The API documentation doesn't mention it. so I hope to get some clue here.


Thank you in advance. 



Hi @chenlu,


Uploading a file is not as simple of a process as uploading data, the file would need to be landed on a server first, as the HTML/js doesn't open the file and extract the data. That as well as obvious security implications that would rely on the user to check are some of the reasons why it's not available on the API.


The way I have done this on projects previously is to put a file upload on the webpage that lands the file on WAMP/IIS server (even better if you already have a fileserver setup). You can then call the API to kick off a process that grabs the file from that server. The other mechanism that I've seen, but not used is using the HTML to upload it to a Google Drive/Dropbox folder, however be careful of privacy in this case.




We are considering adding File Browse support to the API in the future. The proposed solution would be to have a file upload API endpoint that would return a reference ID for the uploaded input file. Then the POST jobs endpoint could take that reference ID as an answer to the File Browse question. 

Let us know if that solution is adequate for what you're trying to do. There's no commitment yet on time frame, but it should be soon since we've gotten a lot of interest.