Alteryx Connect Ideas

Our department has a site that manages request access to database, application...etc. The user will have better experience with the tool when they can click on the request access button and it directs them to the form that we use. 

We can tag all objects but when we want to find all the objects with a specific tag that is not possible.

In the advanced search it should be possible to search for all objects. with a specific tag.

The tag should be a part to the search boost.

Example. I have 10 tables that I tag "Finance". When users search for finance the tables should appear even though finance is not a part of the table name, column names or description

Each workflow state has a very useful option: «Persistent» flag.

I understand how it works, but I would like to setup the system somehow to allow users to see public state by default.

My approach is simple. A lot of users visit Alteryx Connect for searching and reading. And I want to show them ‘public’ (official, approved) state of objects by default, not draft versions.

If the user would like to edit an asset, he/she can exit from public mode explicitly.

Big organizations have strong security policies and one of our potential customers would like to distinguish superadmin actions (login, change the config, change permissions) from other action. For example, they ask to change logging level (from INFO to WARN) when superadmin is logging in.

Manage permissions based on entry type. E.g. I set up some folders structure and I’d like to allow to users only create glossary terms, not new folders. So if I set up CREATECHILD permissions, it allows to create subfolders as well. 

Our customers would like to see propagated data lineage. For example, if some columns in different tables are linked together, obviously, tables have dependencies as well. So it is a good option to have the possibility to view child objects' relationships. It allows analysing impact and data lineage between objects deeper. 

Hi Alteryx team,

It would be great if it was possible to install/upgrade and configure Alteryx Connect using scripts. This would enable us to deploy Alteryx Connect using script deployment tools such as Urbancode Deploy. This functionality was recently requested by one of our customers, who has most of their application installations/upgrades automated this way.

Thank you very much for considering this idea.

Kind regards,

Jan

Hello,

I'd like to suggest a "view as" on each page (like facebook) or a clear identifier that only certain people can view page. 

As an admin, I have to set permission setting for different group. It would be helpful to clearly see the permission setting as sometimes I forgot. 

Thank you.

Hi Alteryx Connect team,

I would like to propose a change to a currently available feature - the alternate names.

On our client deployment, we are loading a number of databases, Alteryx Galleries and reporting servers. For the business users, some of the automatic names that are assigned to these source systems do not make much sense. Would it be possible to enable the alternate names for front-end editing after automatic loading? I know that the feature is available even for these assets, but I guess it is disabled in the config files.

Thank you very much for considering this idea.

Kind regards,

Jan Laznicka

Hello Alteryx Team,

Would you consider creating a metadata loader for Databricks? I can imagine this being a part of the Analytical workflows section and be catalogued in a similar way like Alteryx workflows. On a number of clients, we are seeing Databricks jobs being used as a complement to Alteryx workflows and a possibility to have them both catalogued in Alteryx Connect would be of great benefit.

Thank you very much for considering this idea.

Regards,

Jan Laznicka

Hi Alteryx Team,

We are very glad that the custom field functionality is available in Alteryx Connect. We were wondering, if it would be possible to enhance this functionality and enable additional features like the following:

1. Location of the custom fields
   • The custom fields currently appear in the bottom right part of the asset pages. Very often, we are loading important informtion into these fields and it would be very helpful to be able to put them for example directly under the description field.
2. Text editing options in the text fields
   • It would be great to have similar editting options in the text custom fields as in the description field. This would enable us to customize the look and feel of the pages and together with being able to move the custom fields around, this would be a great benefit for our users.
3. People icons in Picker fields
   • One of the things we are using picker custom fields for are the different roles that we assign to Connect users - for example data stewards. It would be great for this "people" type of fields to have the same "icon" look as the out-of-the-box Owner and Contributor fields available in the Asset Details section.
   • Another idea would be to have the possibility to put these "people custom fields" directly under the Owner and Contributor fields.

Thank you very much for considering these ideas.

Kind regards,

Jan Laznicka

Dean has inspired me to want Voice Activated Alteryx Connect so while I'm having my coffee in the morning I can have Alterexa explain the new data sources that were curated yesterday! Please make this happen!

I'm using HP Vertica as a data source of Tableau.

At this time I'm considering to install metadata management tool in my company.

But there is no name of HP Vertica on available list of Alteryx Connect.

I would be grateful if Alteryx could release a metadata loader of HP Vertica.

The share of Vertica increase gradually in Japan.

We have some scheduled workflows that utilize the download tool for API calls. When we scrape them with connect there aren't any references to them in the "Relationships" or "Data Connections" areas.

Even if this is something that would be difficult for Alteryx to scrape through a workflow, I would love the ability to create entities like this and manually connect them as a data source. Like we have some partners where there 10 to 15 API calls are required to pull the entire data set. It would be great to know which workflows reference those APIs so that if changes are made on their side, we can easily identify which workflows are impacted.

I published a workflow today that scans a directory for files and then pushes them to a Dynamic Input. I noticed that on Connect there is no relationship there anywhere referencing that we are scraping a directory. 

Connect has the db inputs and outputs and the "File Input" that references what the Dynamic input is originally set to go find, but there is nothing referencing the directory other than any notes that I have added to the description. 

The reason that I think this may be important. We connect to a folder where FTP files are dumped by a powershell script and we want to go through that folder with Alteryx and pull and upload as needed. However the file that existed in the original input (when we created this workflow) no longer exists. So the visual relationship is broken in Connect as soon as that file is dropped. If perhaps we don't have a tool that references this sort of connection to a directory, having the ability to designate a dynamic connection to the original file might be good instead. We just want to be able for those in the future to reference a location, rather than a file that hasn't existed in a while.

@OndrejCsummarizes connect as "a state-of-the-art Data Catalog with a social twist".  

I define it in a broader fashion as data analytics social network, a collective intelligence or #datahive...

I would propose adding Analytics projects and related documents and the relevant relationship data;

• Project charter,
• Solution approach document,
• Data dictionary,
• Project timeline (a gantt chart etc.)
• Roles & responsibilities

 into the picture so that any team can track their Data Science project progress there...

 Here is a nice process flow view of a DS process

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/team-data-science-process/overview

 A Microsoft Project view of the Analytics projects at hand...

as per the title, when selecting "Use in workflow" a user should have the option to connect with the in-db tools when applicable rather than being stuck on a green input tool with an odbc connection. Ditto when searching from the omnibox in designer. 

In order for us to make sense of Connect assets in an environment with hundreds of users; thousands of canvasses and databases etc - we need to strongly categorise and describe every asset using mandatory tags.

Every asset needs to have mandatory tags

- The admin team set up the list of tags which are required for different types of assets 

- For example - every Alteryx Canvas may need Product; Process; Team - every DB table may need Product and Tech Team

Admin team need to be able to define these tags and the acceptable values (which can be a tree)

When searching for assets - these meta-tags need to be available as filters

Example:

• Asset is identified by the scanners and brought into Connect
• Owner is then required to describe their asset using the mandatory tags set up by the admin team
• Product (this is a tree that would be controlled centrally – admin can add or update this list; users have to select 1 or more products that this canvas relates to)
• Business line
• Team (tree based)
• Is this regulatory (Y/N)
• Public / Private
• Plain-text description
• In this case – every asset needs 6 tags; with the taxonomy(valid values) controlled centrally

CC: @DavidM @Arianna_Fuller

The addition of the On-Premise PowerBI loader is very beneficial. The current loader grabs PBI workspaces, workbooks, dashboards, and database connections all important to the PBIX files. It would also be an huge benefit if Connect could capture Paginated Reports (RDL file extension) information. 

Thank you.

Jason Melik