Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas
Share your Designer Desktop product ideas - we're listening!Submitting an Idea?
Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!
Submission Guidelines
Hello!
I appreciate this is a very underused element of Alteryx Functionality, however, I have noticed a few issues with the description of fields.
Firstly, if you set a description on a field within a select tool:
And then attempt to clear the description later in the workflow (in another select tool), you cannot. When you delete the description, it will clear back to the original value (in this case, 'test'):
This can be easily recreated, and can be more applicable to yxdb outputs that contain the description of fields. In that scenario, you cannot go back to the previous select tool and remove the description. The closest you can come to easily clearing the description is replacing it with a space ' '.
As a secondary issue, as current the score tool removes field descriptions and overrides the source. For example if I open the Score tool example workflow, and add a select tool/description:
You can see the meta data going into the score tool:
But unfortunately the output of the tool looks like:
Showing that it has completely removes the descriptions, and also replaced all of the 'source' information. My suggestion for this would be that it would not replace the source information or descriptions.
Thirdly - and quite a niche issue, but an int64 field specifically will break when the description differs between the data and the model.
Again, easy to recreate within the Ccore tool example workflow. Apply a Select tool to both streams, setting 'First_Years' to an int64. Within the bottom stream (the model creation), set a description, in this case, 'test':
Make sure to leave the top streams description blank.
Run the workflow, observe the error:
Error: Score (106): Score: The variable testFirst_Years is missing from the input data stream.
Interestingly, it seems to be using the description as part of the name within the Score tool, which is causing issue when the descriptions differ. My suggestion for this would be that it would not utilise descriptions at all.
Kind Regards,
Owen
