Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I would really love to have a tool "Dynamic change type" or "Dynamic re-type" which is used just as "Dynamic Rename".

 

• "Take Type from First Row of Data": By definition, all columns are of a string type initially. Sets the type of the column according to the string in the first row of data.
  

  Col 1	Col 2	Col 3	Col 4
  Double	Int32	V_String	Date
  123.456	17	Hello	2023-10-30
  3.4e17	123	Bye	2024-01-01

• "Take Type from Right Input Metadata": Changes the types of the left input table to the ones by right input.
• "Take Type from Right Input Rows": Changes the types based on a table with columns "Name" and "New Type".
  

  Name	New Type
  Col 1	Double
  Col 2	Int32
  Col 3	V_String
  Col 4	Date

Hi:

 

I believe the ability for Alteryx Designer to read from/write to parquet files will enhance its capability to serve the DSML community better. Potentially someone can design this connector as part of the App community but given the importance parquet file formats have gained as a columnar storage format (as opposed to something like Avro - which is a row storage format), Alteryx supplying native connectors to such files would be awesome. 

 

Thank you,

Shiva Badruswamy

Principal Architect - DSML

Stratascale

The Idea behind the Password Masking is - we have "Download Tool" from the "Developer Tab" - which is used to Download files from the given site. For example, let's take Mainframe. I have a scenario where the Alteryx Workflow should connect to the Mainframe FTP Server, download the required file which is used for downstream transformation. For the download, I get the Username and Password information from the Database table (to reduce manual intervention and prevent errors). While passing the Username and Password as a parameter to the Download Tool Macro (Custom Macro - accepts the Username/Password, Filename dynamically) - the Alteryx Workflow will obviously show the username and password in the result window (as it is considered as an output data from Input Tool). Now I want that particular password field to be masked, so whenever the particular Workflow is shared to the User - the password field remains unexposed. I know there's a way to mask a particular field using "MD5 HASH" formula, but that helps to mask anything related to Dataset and not a password (as it may consider it as a new string and not a valid password). This feature would be really beneficial to Developers who use the download tool often. A New Tool or a Custom Macro - embedding this feature would be great for users who needs Masking functionality.

Hi Team,

 

Download tool is not updated their encryption policy. This stool still support SHA-1 but as per the organization requirements they want higher encryption mechanism. As in my case we are using SFTP connection and we want to download the data but my SFTP server using SHA-2 encryption due to which we not able to configure the workflow. 

Please upgrade the Download tool for better experience in alteryx.

 

Regards,

Kaustubh 

 The Download tool is so much more than Downloads. Think about the situation where you are using the Download tool to upload invoices and try explaining that to co-workers. "Oh yes - I'm going to implement the API to upload the invoices using the Alteryx download tool..." Could we call it the Curl tool or something?

File has a different Schema than the first file in the set- This is error received in Dynamic Input Tool, when there is change in data type any column in the file.  My File has a column Which comes in " V String" Data type but suddenly it comes in " Double" then this error will come.

 

Tool should ignore this error and consider incoming data in a data type defined while in configuration, so request to provide feature to configure data type in Dynamic Input Tool.

Hi team,

There are some things that we would like to do with the download tool that currently are not possible:

 

1. use client side certificates to sign requests. This is a requirement for us in a project where we are interacting with the API of our customer's financial system. They provide us with a certificate and it is used to sign our requests, along with other authentication.Currently we have to use the external command tool to execute a powershell script using invoke-restmethod to do this interaction. I would much prefer to not have more tools in the chain.

Client certificates are described in the TLS 1.0 specification: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2246 (page 43), and I believe them to be supported by cURL.

 

2. Multipart form-data. We have a number of workflows where we need to send multipart form data as part of a POST request. As this is not supported by the Download Tool, we have again used the external command tool to execute invoke-restmethod or invoke-webrequest in powershell. I don't know if modification of the Download Tool would be the best thing here, vs having either a dedicated tool for multipart form data, or having an HTTP POST specific tool that was able to handle multipart form data. What I envisage is something like the formula tool, with the ability to add an arbitrary number of cells, where we could use formula to either directly output a value from a column, synthesise a new value, or directly enter a static value). The tool would then compose this with boundaries between the parts, and calculate the content-size to add to the http request.

Because Alteryx  Designer is using basic authentication (not our standards like Kereberos and NTLM), Alteryx Designer failed to pass our proxy authentication.  Our network security support decide we will use user agent to identify the request is coming from Alteryx Designer and let the authentication thru.  Then we realize Alteryx Designer also does not set the user agent for the HTTPS request.  We are requesting Alteryx set the user agent value for the download tool https request,

Using the download tool is great and easy to use. However, if there was a connection problem with a request the workflow errors out. Having an option to not error out, ability to skip failed records, and retrying records that failed would be A LIFE CHANGER. Currently I have been using a Python tool to create multi-threaded requests and is proven to be time consuming.

Hello AlteryxDevs - 

 

Back when I used to do more coding, some of the ORMs had the ability to return back to you a natively generated primary key for new rows created; this could be really useful in situations wherein you wanted / needed to create a parent / child relationship or needed to pass the value back to another process for some reason.  

 

As it stands now, the mechanism to achieve this in Alteryx is kind of clunky; all I have been able to figure out is the following:

 

1) Block until done 1.

1a) Create parent record. Hopefully it has an identifying characteristic that can be attached to. 

2) Block until done 2.  

2a) Use a dynamic select to go get the parent record and get the id generated by the database. 

3) Block until done 3. 

3a) Append your primary key found in 2a.  Create your children records. 

 

I mean it works.  But it is clunky, not graceful, and does not give you any control over the transaction, though that is kind of a more complicated feature request. 

 

Thanks!

 

Would love to see the Workflow - Configuration > Runtime > Record Limit for All Inputs option extended to Dynamic Input tools.

 

 

 

 

1) Add cURL Options support from within the Download Tool

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/File-Transfer-Protocol-FTP-Download/tac-p/41...

 

The Download tool allows adding Header and Payload (data), which are key components of the cURL command structure. However, there is no avenue to include any of the cURL options in the Download tool. Most of the 'solutions' found have been to abandon the use of the Download tool and run the cURL EXE through the Run Command tool. However, that introduces many other issues such as sending passwords to the Run Command tool, etc. etc.

 

With the variation and volume of connection requests that are being funneled through the Download tool, users are really looking for it to have the flexibility to do what they need it to do with the Options that they need to send to cURL.

 

2) Update cURL version used by Alteryx Download tool to a recent version that allows passing host keys

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Download-Tool-with-SFTP-and-multiple-K...

 

cURL added the option to pass host keys starting in version 7.17.1 (available 10/29/2007). The option is --hostpubmd5 <md5>:

 

https://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html

 

And it appears that the cURL shipped with Alteryx is 7.15.1 (from 12/7/2005😞

 

PS C:\Program Files\Alteryx\bin\RuntimeData\Analytic_Apps> .\curl -V
curl 7.15.1 (i586-pc-mingw32msvc) libcurl/7.15.1 zlib/1.2.2
Protocols: tftp ftp gopher telnet dict ldap http file
Features: Largefile NTLM SSPI libz

 

Thanks for considering!

 

Cameron

Currently pip is the package manager in place within the Designer. Unfortunately this is something that doesn't fit our requirements as Data Scientists. We prefer using conda due to the following reasons:

1. conda manages also non-Python library dependencies. This way conda can be used to manage R packages as well which comes in quite handy (even tough not all packages from CRAN Repository are available)

1. conda provides a very simple way of creating conda envs (similar to virtualenv but with conda one can also install and manage pip packages --> virtualenv cannot install conda packages!) to isolate required packages (with specific versions) used in a workflow (e.g. for a Python Tool in Designer).

 

So I would like to have conda instead or additionally to pip and would like to create my conda envs where I install the packages I need for a specific task within my workflow. Moreover, if you think about to feature an R jupyter notebook capability (like the Python Tool) it could be beneficial to change from pip to conda for managing packages in both worlds.

With SSIS, you can invoke user precedence contraint(s) to where you will not run any downstream flows until one or more flows complete.  A simple connector should allow you to do this.  Right now, I have my workflow(s) in containers, and have to disable / enable different workflows, which can be time consuming.  Below is a better definition:

 

Precedence constraints link executables, containers, and tasks in packages in a control flow, and specify conditions that determine whether executables run. An executable can be a For Loop, Foreach Loop, or Sequence container; a task; or an event handler. Event handlers also use precedence constraints to link their executables into a control flow.

Add a button to the zoom tools toolbar that zooms the workspace to all selected tools.

Add a button to the zoom tools toolbar that zooms the workspace to all tools.

Dynamic Input should either:

 

(a) have the option of merging files with different field schemas

 

(b) Return a list of rejected filepaths

 

One of the problems I have with using Alteryx is the frequent need to input a bunch of files, but a few have an extra/missing field. The extra/missing field is often unimportant to me, but it means that the dynamic input doesn't work.

We use the test tool extensively in our App and Macro authoring. It would be very useful to have the ability to label the tested values so that when the Test tool writes to the output window it’s more descriptive.
Example:
Currently this is the report
Error: Market (1): Tool #235: The test "The count of Columns does not match the count of Labels." failed: TargetNumRecords(#2)==102, NumRecords(#1)==106
 
 
A more useful report would be
Error: Market (1): Tool #235: The test "The count of Columns does not match the count of Labels." failed: Columns (#2)==102, Labels (#1)==106

The Alteryx icon image on the Windows tab at the bottom of the screen should change or change color when running and when a module has finished running. I got this idea from Teradata SQL Assistance. When the query is finished the little icon (which is sunglasses) changes from red (running) to green when complete. 

If you have a complex SQL query with a number of dynamic substitutions (e.g. Update WHERE Clause, Replace a Specific String), it would be nice to be able to optionally ouput the SQL that is being executed. This would be particuarly useful for debugging.