Drop down list not working

Hi,

I am a beginner in Alteryx Designer, and I what I am trying to do is to provide a drop down list interface, using one of my table's column.

I have 3 columns: Record ID, Location and Status in my table. What I am trying to achieve is use the Location in the drop down interface, after filtering only Closed records, and using the selected Location to finally filter my output. It seems to be working fine until the drop down interface, but the filter tool after that does not seem to extract the proper value that I want.

I have looked for similar solutions here in the community, and found this. However, I am not sure why mine is still not working when logically, my workflow seems to be correct. Can someone help me to understand what is wrong in my workflow?

Appreciate the help in advance! Thank you!

Alteryx test dropdown.yxmd

Workflow

Interface Tools

Accepted answers

AbhilashR

Hi @roosechua, Alteryx Designer by design does not display results of a Browse tool unless we explicitly instruct it to do so. To display the data click on View>>Interface Designer option and then select the Browse tools which you want to view as part of the output.

Hope this helps!

All comments

philipmannering

Hi @roosechua . Your workflow seems to be working fine. What "proper value" do you want?

apathetichell

hypothetical question - in your real data are there spaces (or other special characters) in the Location value column you are using in your Drop Down?

If so you you should put recordid as your column name/location as your value - then feed it into a dynamic replace set to first row contains fieldnames and the into the dropdown.

When you crosstab in the name some characters become underscores - and you should see this in your dropdown. It won't work with your filter though because "Location_A" and "Location A" are not the same...

roosechua

@PhilipMannering , thanks for taking a look into this.

This is the result that I would like to see, but somehow when I run it from my end, I am not getting this same result. I am getting this instead.

Alteryx test dropdown run.jpg

roosechua

@apathetichell, yes, it will actually have some spaces. I just used it as an example, but, yeah, I saw it on my test earlier regarding the additional steps I would be making if I use Location as my drop down choice. I will take note of this in my workflow design.

Thank you!

apathetichell

@AbhilashRgets the win here - your results log is telling you that there are matches in your filter (ie results) but without the interface designer setting you won't see them from a browse tool.

AbhilashR

Thanks @apathetichell! and great point about blank spaces being replaced with an underscore by the Crosstab tool. That scenario didn't even occur to me - definitely helped me remember my basics 🙂

roosechua

Ahh, I get it now! Did not know that you need to do this. Thank you so much everyone! 🙂

KrishnaKuchibhotla

Thanks everyone for your sharings. @roosechua , Can I request for the updated solution please. I am working in similar scenario, but I had tried multiple ways including the drop down connecting to external source with Name and value fields, but for some reasons the value is not getting filtered.

My drop down inputs would be something like Questions - What's your name,Where are you working etc

and the inputs excel consists of Questions column and corresponding answers like Krishna, XYZ company etc

Scenario is keeping this questions as the interface tool in dropdown and fetch the respective filtered answer as output. My filter formulae will be [Questions] = "What's your name" and replacing these values with Actions.

Pls let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks

Krishna

roosechua

Hi @KrishnaKuchibhotla, the issue that I had was resolved by AbilashR, which was to include the browser tool on the Interface Designer. However, on your end, I think it might have something to do on the resulting dropdown choices, as mentioned in the reply from apathetichell here, which is something to do with the crosstab tool replacing your header spaces with underscores. It means that if one of your column headers is "Where are you working", it will become "Where_are_you_working" when it goes into the dropdown tool, and you will need to convert it back somehow to the original value, without the underscores, before using it as a filter in your next tool.

Attached is my test workflow that I used for this question.

Alteryx test dropdown.yxmd

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