Supported File Formats

This section contains information on the fie formats and compression schemes that are supported for input to and output from Alteryx Analytics Cloud (AAC).

Note

To work with formats that are proprietary to a desktop application, such as Microsoft Excel, you do not need the supporting application installed on your desktop.

Filenames

Note

During import, AAC identifies file formats based on the extension of the filename. If no extension is provided, AAC assumes that the submitted file is a text file of some kind. Non-text file formats, such as Avro and Parquet, require filename extensions.

Note

Filenames that include special characters can cause problems during import or when publishing to a file-based datastore.

File Path Length Limits

Maximum character limits for file paths:

File paths to sources for imported datasets:1024
Tip
This limit (storagelocations) applies to both files and tables.
File paths to output files: 2048
Tip
This limit (writesettings) applies to files stored on any file-based storage location.

Forbidden Characters in Import Filenames

The following list of characters present issues in the listed area of the product. If you encounter issues, the following listings may provide some guidance on where the issue occurred.

Tip

You should avoid using any of these characters in your import filenames. This list may not be complete for all available running environments.

General:
```
"/"
```
Seb browser:
```
"\"
```
Excel filenames:
```
"#","{","}"
```
Spark-based running environment:
```
"{", "*", "\"
```

Native Input File Formats

AAC can read and import directly these file formats:

CSV
JSON
Note
AAC can read JSON natively but often requires additional work to properly structure into tabular format. Depending on how you've configured AAC (v1 or v2), JSON files might require conversion before they are available for use in the application.
Note
AAC requires that you submit JSON files with 1 valid JSON object per line. Consistently malformed JSON objects or objects that overlap linebreaks might cause import to fail.
- Recommended limit of 1 GB in source file size. Since conversion happens within the Trifacta node, this limit might vary depending on the memory of the Trifacta node.
- Each JSON record must be less than 20 MB in size.
- Filename extensions must be .json or .JSON.
- For best results, you should quote all keys and values and import them as strings.
- You can escape quote values to treat them as literals in your strings using the backslash character (\).
- When you import the values into the Transformer page, AAC re-infers the data type for each column.
Plain Text
Parquet
Note
When working with datasets sourced from Parquet files, lineage information and the $sourcerownumber reference are not supported.

Converted File Formats

Files of the following type are not read into the product in their native format. Instead, these file types are converted using the Conversion Service into a file format that is natively supported, stored in the base storage layer, and then ingested for use in the product.

Note

Compressed files that require conversion of the underlying file format are not supported for use in the product.

Converted file formats:

Excel (XLS, XLSX, XLSM)
Note
Other Excel-related formats, such as XLSB format, are not supported. If you are encountering issues, try to Save As to XLS, XLSX, or XLSM from within the Microsoft Excel application.
In some cases, there might be a precision loss of 5*10^(-8) or 0.0000000500 while converting Excel to CSV.
Tip
You can import multiple sheets from a single workbook at a time. AAC supports up to 399 sheets.

Native Output File Formats

Designer Cloud can write to these file formats:

Note

Some output formats may need to be enabled by an administrator.

CSV
Excel