Let Alteryx treat "A + B" = "B + A"

[jensroy]

So now I am going to give personalization a go and I ended up with a pickle. So, I have a small Alteryx question on “filter”. Do you have a cleaver way to deal with this:

Hi! I am working on a data set for personalization. In my case "a customer who read this article A also read Article B".

This could be the input

Then i do a self join on customer, and remove the rows where both values are the same:

 

Then introducing my challenge. In my case, A + B is the same as B + A

These are in Princip the same. Much like 1+2 = 3 and 2+1 = 3.

Is there a good way to tell alteryx  that “1+2” and “2+1” actually is the same. I wish to only keep one of the values.

What I tried to do was to convert these strings into numeric values using this:

HexToNumber(MD5_ASCII([Field 1]))

Because then I could say Give me the first record of :HexToNumber(MD5_ASCII([Field 1]))+HexToNumber(MD5_ASCII([Field 2]))

Hex to numbers is a very long numeric value so it might not be likely to cause a problem but theoretically “1,5 + 1,5” is also 3, just like 1+2 or 2+1.

Any smart way to fix this?

Sample workflow is attached.

[patrick_digan · Accepted solution]

@jensroy I would add a recordID at the beginning and then after your join only keep the records where RecordID < Right_RecordID. That way it will only take the first of the matches

[jensroy]

Thanks, that worked great! It reduced the rows from 2,3 million down to 800k. Removing other unwanted rows and now I'm down to 400k. Not a bad days work! Thanks mate