Concatenate Unique

[smoskowitz]

Hello --

Many times, I want to summarize data by grouping it, but to really reduce the number of rows, some data needs to be concatenated.

The problem is that some data that is group is repeated and concatenating the data will double, triple, or give a large field of concatenated data.

As an example:

Name                                         State

A	New York
A	New York
A	New Jersey
B	Florida
B	Florida
B	Florida

The above, if we concatenate by State would look like:

A	New York, New York, New Jersey
B	Florida, Florida, Florida

What I propose is a new option called Concatenate Unique so I would get:

A	New York, New Jersey
B	Florida

This would prevent us from having to use a Regex formula to make the column unique.

Thanks,

Seth

[abhishek_alteryx]

This is a good idea in fact. Using two Summarize tools followed by join is one option but it's not wrong to have this choice of Concatenate Unique. Using it or not depends on the user. There can be a trade-off between Speed and Design Complexity, but, let user decide and justify this thing. 

[AudreyMcPfe]

yes PLEASE!!!!!  Spotfire has this function and moving a lot of my ETL to Alteryx I am missing this big time.  If it didn't take 4 tools to accomplish the same thing it might not be a big deal, but this should absolutely be an option in the summarize tool!  🙏

[peterr_h]

@AudreyMcPfe not sure on your exact implementation, but should only take two summarize tools to reach the desired result (rather than 4)?

[haraldharders]

You need two summarize tools in order to generate a unique concatenate of a single column + maybe a sort tool in between if you want sorted entries.

If you want generate unique concatenates of multiple columns at once, you need to perform two summarize tools per column and join everything together afterwards again. That quickly results in quite complex workflows.

[Ivan2023]

This is my creation.

[AudreyMcPfe]

@shawn_jacob32 thank you!!!!!!  :)