Encrypting your Alteryx Workflows/Macros/Apps

There are a number of reasons you might want to ‘encrypt’ your Alteryx assets, but the two that spring immediately to mind are 1) You don’t want anyone to be able to edit your file and perhaps more importantly 2) you may have credentials stored as plain text within the process that you don’t want people to be able to access and rip out.

Fortunately, within Alteryx it is possible to encrypt your workflows and it’s really easy to do too, in this blog we are going to show you how to do exactly that.

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Within your Alteryx file (whether it be an workflow/application/macro) you can should navigate to the ‘Options’ tab on the top toolbar, before going to ‘Advanced Options’ and selecting ‘Encrypt Workflow’.

This will bring up a pop-up window whereby you can control the encryption process.

The first step is to specify the location where you want to save encrypted file. By default it will save to the same location as your existing file, with “_encypted” suffixed onto the file name. You can control this however you wish, but just remember, if you overwrite your unencrypted version, you won’t ever be able to edit your original!

The second option allows you to specify whether you want all users, or just certain users to be able to run use your file. If you place any serial numbers in this box only those people will be able to use your file, otherwise everyone will still be able to use it (just no-one will be able to open it!).

The option refers to ‘serial numbers’. From some research, this seems to be the email address associated with a license. However, this may just be because of how our companies licensing is set-up, and it could be different with your organisation. So, to be sure, we’d recommend selecting the ‘Help’ tab on the top toolbar and selecting ‘About’, here your serial number will be displayed.

You can enter multiple serial numbers, by simply adding one per line.

The final set of options allows the you to control where the encryption should ‘expire’ or not. This is up to you of course, but the help guide suggests this prevents you from ever running this file ever again, so again, perhaps use the expiration date with caution!

And thats it, you hit save and your file will now be encrypted!

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Encryption prevents all users from being able to edit the asset. If a user tries to open the asset in Alteryx Designer, they will be presented with a message which tells them that the asset cannot be opened.

If the asset is an Alteryx Macro and users have been given permission to run the macro, then users will be able to use the macro within their workflow process, however they will not have the ability to see inside the macro as you can usually (by right clicking and hitting ‘Open Macro’).

Also, if the user tries to be sneaky and open the workflow in a text editor (remember an Alteryx workflow is just a XML document) they will be presented with a load of nonsense, and not the true underlying XML.

Tah

Ben