Alteryx Connect Ideas

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

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

Hello Alteryx team,

Can you please includeSAP Crystal Reports loader in the Connect for Future Release.

Thanks

Sri

Hi Alteryx team,

Would it be possible to add functionality to restrict selected Designer users/licenses Input Data tool to only show a Connect source/file?

This would remove the risk of users investigating data through Designer that they are not be entitled to, and could be used to support/strengthen a data governance/compliance model by ensuring users are only using vetted data, but still gives each user freedom to self-serve and create their own workflows.

Thanks for considering,

Andrew.

The current "File_Loader" only pushes data to the Data Sources section in connect. We have a number of reports that are stored in a file location. Our current option is to bring the report into connect under 'Data Sources' and manually move them to 'Reports'. We have to do this every time the file_load is ran. Additionally, the are currently shown as inputs to workflows when they should be outputs.

Having a file loader for Reports would be greatly beneficial to document within the Connect Platform.

Can we have about me section in the profile? just add a description box. This will allow people to add their expertise and more information about themselves.

A lot of information is not captured when colleagues run numerous SQL codes on server. Oracle, SQL Server, Azure and others...

Would there be a clever way of capturing and archiving all this queries run?

It may be wise to collect these for several reasons;

1. SQL code profiling is an important matter especially for DB admins. You can see the most required tables and fields etc.
2. Also have a grasp on most frequent and time consuming joins to enhance DB performance
3. Figure the queries that can be replicated in Alteryx and deployed to a server so that no business user needs to run SQL code instead  they will be reverted to the gallery.

So found out a similar feature is now available in SQL Server 2016 -->  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/performance/monitoring-performance-by-usin...  

When Alteryx connect is first installed to a company with a small alteryx designer base, you do not benefit from lineage.

There are not much workflows at hand. So in order to realize Alteryx connect's immediate benefits I'd like to suggest;

a company-wide Data Quality Score.

1. Let's score each data element in distributed data stores
2. And automatically give a simple scale between one and five
   • 1 equals to, “we don’t know”
   • 2 data is entered or updated prior to 1 year, has conflicting data
   • 3 would be the norm and means customer provided this data, as accurate and as up-to-date as they have entered it and ‘agreed’ to share with you.
   • 4 means we cross checked the data with 3rd party sources or the addresses work in Google Maps”.
   • 5 equals to “we had the customer or the representative validated the address in last 3 months”.
3. The scale will be based on;
   • Missingness
   • Information value (variance is high or not, if there is no variance no info useful thru the column)
   • How many times that column is addressed in other tables
   • Format (structured like a telephone number ###-##-## or semi structured like an address)
   • Is it an ID column
   • Is it a Datetime column, any discrepancies in date time columns etc.
   • Time since last update of data
4. Once we have some lineage information than we'll weight th data based on how frequently it's needed, how many formulas are requiring the field etc.

And as soon as we install connect we'll have a grand vision of our data and even we'll be able to track the status of our whole distributed data assets with a trend line if we are going better or worse... Here is an example;

Would Alteryx please consider putting a "notes" page for gallery apps.  This would help the developer of the apps give notes and "how-to's" to the users.  

Currently if you want to get to the Microsoft Forms data you need to export to Excel,

This could be done manually or another way such as leveraging RPA.

It would be very beneficial if there was an ability just to connect directly to the data without having to leverage RPA and getting the data in real time if possible

Hello all,

I just had a meeting about Collibra. And there is a feature I would like to see on Alteryx connect : an addon to the browser of the user so that he can make a copy pasta from the dataviz application (https://marketplace.collibra.com/listings/desktop-app/ ). Very nice in demonstration and in real life.

Best regards,

Simon

After loss of data on our client's Alteryx Connect instance, we started to think about regular automated backup of the Connect (or at least of the H2 database). It would be great if this was implemented in Connect (currently we have to do it manually) and we won't need to writte an extra script.

Thank you very much for consideration of this feature!
Best Regards,

JanK

Hello,

It would be very beneficial from an end-user experience if we could provide more information on the Tool Details portion in Connect. Below is an example:

In Connect it tells us a filter tool is used and the expression. What's missing is a title if one is supplied in Designer. This would be incredibly beneficial as this will provide more context to the end user why an expression was used. Below is what's found in the Designer:

If a Name field can also be brought over it will help provide more meaning to the Expression.  

Thanks!

Jason

Hello!
I have a potential feature enhancement for the database-based Metadata Loaders. This has been tested with the PostgresSQL loaders, however I suspect this is something that is reflected across all database loaders.

This suggestion is simply for constraints of the fields to be brought into connect, with the names of the fields. So for instance the following:

is visible in Connect as:

What would be nice is two additional columns, 'Not Null' and 'Primary Key'. Or alternatively, a 'constraints' column, that contains these constraints, so that it does not have to be documented manually following an import.


Thanks,
TheOC

Our customers face up with asset name limitation – 200 chars.

This number of chars is not enough in many cases when they describe glossary terms.

Please extend this limit at least twice (to 400 chars)

Hello,

Could you make saving filter settings inside folders for each user individually?

We a have a lot of terms and other assets, and when user works with his own assets he would like to return to folder with last filter settings.

Otherwise user has to set up filters again.

Virtual folders are not convenient because if each of thousand users will create his own virtual folder(s) it will be hard to navigate inside thousands of virtual folders.

Hi Alteryx Team,

I would like to suggest an improvement in the Alteryx Connect connect_catalina log file.

Currently, the log file contains only a timestamp and in order to get to a date + time combination, it is necessary to use the name of the file itself. Would it be possible to include the date information directly into the log? The use case is for example an integration with log monitoring tools. I am working closely with a monitoring team on a project and their feedback was, that it would be much easier to implement the integration with the date directly next to the timestamp.

Thank you very much for considering this idea.

Kind regards,

Jan

It would be great if the File loader could recognize the SQL file extension to read and display the SQL script in Connect. An example would be similar to how the DDL is visible when you look at views in Data Sources. This would provide a large benefit when researching overall data usage and mapping to other data sources and workflows.

When I add descriptions to tables or columns in Connect then use that asset in a workflow, I would like to see the same table and column descriptions within the metadata in Designer. To illustrate, I've shared some screenshots...