Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Motivation:

I have an app that a team at my company uses to (sort of) quickly verify transactions. Our legacy VBA application was pretty slick, but in Alteryx it is fairly clunky.

Problem:

I can not figure out, after a reasonable amount of searching, how to get the Alteryx app to display data before inputs are added. This seems like such an obvious feature-- I have written many Shiny apps that do exactly this. The current Alteryx app is very inefficient. The user must run one app to select a case to review. That app downloads a pdf with the info on it. The user must then run another app that closes the case with the needed information. This process is very slow and inefficient and the users are starting to  migrate back towards 2 excel spreadsheets.

Solution:

We need a way to display a data table or spreadsheet (or whatever) on the app itself. The workflow needs to be: Open app, select case, data pops up,  off-app work, cases are updated and saved into the ledger. If this solution is available, please show me how to do this. If this is not available can the feature request be considered.

Thank you,

Bryan

Would it be possible to have the text wrap inside the box when we are creating new formulas?

It would be great if the interface tools would include a back button that will let the user go back and forth the chained apps.

The beauty of workflow constants is that a user can change a value in one place and it will be effective everywhere in the workflow where the constant is used. I want to be able to update the workflow constant value itself using an App interface. If I use interface tools to update the constant value wherever it appears, the constant loses its value and beauty. This becomes a maintenance nightmare and an interface tool clutter. Can I have a new tool or a current tool in the interface palette which allows me to change workflow constants in the interface? Thank you.

it would  particularly interesting to develop a WMS support in Alteryx.
To include other Maps like bing, google, HERE instead of CloudMade to display geo informations.

Mathias

Now that Alteryx releases updates to Designer every quarter I'll likely be updating my copy of Designer frequently. Meanwhile, my IT team doesn't want to have to update Server every quarter to stay compatible. Problem there is, when I create workflows in the latest version of Designer they can't run on the older version of Server, nor on the Gallery. 

Some features that would allow me to work around this: 

1. If I could elect what version I want to use when uploading to the gallery. 
2. If instead of having to upload workflows from within Designer (which thereby opens  the workflow in whatever version I have installed on my machine) I could upload workflows from the Gallery website by navigating to a folder on my directory and selecting a given workflow. That way I could open the workflow in Notepad beforehand and alter the version number to match Server. 

I'm guessing this is a niche problem that few others will encounter: 

1. Not everyone is as big a nerd as me and will insist on updating Designer each quarter
2. Other companies may have IT teams that update Server each quarter
3. You can install an admin and non-admin version of Alteryx on your machine (I plan on doing this once IT responds to my internal service request).
   1. You could use the admin version for the latest and greatest version of Alteryx
   2. You could use the non-admin version to match whatever version of Server IT has installed and use that to upload (first opening the workflow in notepad to manually overwrite the version number to match server) 

I would like to see a way to partially execute  a workflow (specifically for an App) for the purposes of allowing user to make selections based on a dynamic data flow.

Ex:

1. Database Selection Interface

Click Next

2. Select from available columns to pass through to the output file.

Click Next

3. Pick from selected fields which fields should be pivoted.

Output file and complete run time

This was a simple example to explain a case, but the most common use I could see is for APIs. 

Hello,
Recently I've been building quite a few chained apps for specific use-cases. Some of which are typical to be run in Designer, and have many chains.

This may just be a multiple monitors pain, but when running a chained app, if I submit the first app and continue to the other if I have dragged the Analytic app window anywhere - it will reset back to its original position.

I have found this to be a pain point especially in demonstrating Analytic Apps to someone, as I tend to show one of my screens, and have to drag the new Analytic app window over at each stage. It would be a great QOL difference to have this retain its position.

Basic example for demonstration (showing both monitors):

Step 1: Run the first chained analytic app (See attached)

Step 2: Drag the app interface over, fill out the app, hit continue:

Step 3: Notice that the app interface has reset back to the right monitor:

This does seem to always start on the PC 'primary monitor', however, I don't tend to use my Alteryx on my primary monitor, and have requirements for my other monitor being the primary. I am hoping as a QOL change, it can either be changed to remember where it is (ideally) or if easier to implement, open on the monitor that has Alteryx Designer open.

Please see attached the workflow I used for an example, let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,
TheOC

The ability to create Interface tools would be helpful. I would to edit multiple actions at the same time on a single tool, but it needs to be done dynamically. All of these tools exist within the standard tool set, but the standard action tool only allows for one action to be done per tool.  

Other Examples:

-Radio Button Groupings (only 1 scenario can be selected within a group instead of one radio button per designer interface)

-Replace textual selection with a graphic selection:

                       Please select a Park to run the report for:

                      Islands of Adventure     Universal Studios      Both        vs                IOA          Universal Studios         UPR

-Toggle List Box Options where: 

Survey Import

Hi all,

When testing a macro with interface tools in use - the value that is used if running in normal execution (hit the big play button) is 0 or blank, irrespective of the value set for default on the component.

e.g.

• put an up-down component on a canvas with a default value of 200
• Then hook it up to a formula box
• Then output the value 
• The value which is output is 0

Please can you change this so that the value passed through the interface tools in testing mode is the specified & configured default value?

Thank you

Sean 

When running an app on your desktop, nested radio buttons work wonderfully.  You can collapse groups and drill down to your heart's content.  If you promote the app to the gallery, it doesn't work.  I reported this as a bug to Client Services.  Their response leads me to believe that they designed it this way.  I'd like nested buttons to work both as a local app and as a gallery app.

Please star this idea if you agree...

Dear Mark,  

This email has been sent to confirm that your technical support ticket has been closed. Please contact us if you need any further assistance.

Case #: 00095540

Case Subject: Radio buttons- different functionality between Gallery and local version

Your comment:  

when using radio button to activate a sub set of questions that also use radio buttons then entire group has to be unselected then reselected to make additional change either activate/deactivate selectoins.

link to recorded webex that demonstrates issue: https://alteryx.webex.com/alteryx/lsr.php?RCID=740fd707be5e4654ba659f25713f8cdb

One major improvement in version 11 is that you can now schedule workflows directly in the Gallery. One thing I miss though is the ability to see the whole log from the workflow (messages, warnings and conversion errors).

I have made a workaround by using the list runner (Crew Macros), but I think this should be a functionality on the server itself.

To see the workaround and the expected output, you can watch this video:

https://vimeo.com/214995668

Debug mode is fantastic, but it is a pain to navigate to it through interface designer. I suggest a shortcut button next to the 'run as app' button on the top toolbar.

Hi,

I was just working on an application that targets a back end database, which is currently manually refreshed.  A user on my side requested that we include a "Data Last Refreshed on" text on the application, so that users would see it whenever they ran the app.

I was able to accomplish this by using a Drop Down tool populated using the "External Source" List Values, which is not connected to any Action tool.  However, this is a somewhat ugly solution to the problem - it creates one more clickable object for the user that doesn't actually do anything.

I think having a "Label" tool, which functioned similar to a Text Box (multiline support) but did not allow users to enter values, that included the "External Source" option from the List Box/Drop Down, would be a huge help for Application Development.  This would let you create a configurable message for your users, be it a Last Refresh, runtime instructions, or even a Last Run Date for the application.

Use case:  Person running app to select folder from limited list similar to how the tree tool allows for a user to select one or more files.  This selected folder would then be connected via an Action tool to a Directory tool (or by adding a formula tool to a Dynamic Input).  The Folder Browse Interface does not have the ability to restrict or provide a starting parent folder.  The app below pulls data from SharePoint site, which cannot be easily browsed to.  Currently I have the user select a file in the required folder, then use RegEx parse and a Formula tool to pull in all requested files from that folder.  It would be a better user interface if the user selected a folder.  A test sample of the workflow is attached (final version ends in an Alteryx database this is picked up in a chained app).

I'm adding a 'Dynamic Input' tool to a macro that will dynmaically build the connection string based on User inputs. We intend to distribute this macro as a 'Connector' to our main database system.

However, this tool attempts to connect to the database after 'fake' credentials are supplied in the tool, returning error messages that can't be turned off.

In situations like this, I think you'd want the tool to refrain from attempting connections. Can we add a option to turn off the checking of credentials? I assume that others who are building the connection strings at runtime would also appreciate this as well.

As a corollary, for runtime connection strings, having to define a 'fake' connection in the Dynamic Input tool seems redundant, given we have already set the 'Change Entire File Path' option. There are some settings in the data connection window that are nice to be able to set at design time (e.g. caching, uncommitted read, etc.), but the main point of that window to provide the connection string is redundant given that we intend to replace it with the correct string at runtime. Could we make the data connection string optional?

To combine the above points, perhaps if the connection string is left blank, the tool does not attempt to connect to the connection string at runtime.

It is important to be able to test for heteroscedasticity, so a tool for this test would be much appreciated.

In addition, I strongly believe the ability to calculate robust standard errors should be included as an option in existing regression tools, where applicable. This is a standard feature in most statistical analysis software packages.

Many thanks!

Following unexpected behaviour from the Render tool where outputting to a UNC Path (see post) in a Gallery Appliction, on advice of support raising this idea to introduce consistent behavior across all tools where utilising a UNC Path.

Perhaps a little niche but it's something I come across quite a lot so thought I'd throw this out there as a quick QoL suggestion!

Currently when developing apps and such, we often just show results to end users via a Browse tool. However, when this output is a large table of data or a map for example, the initial results window doesn't scale out and we can often only see a tiny edge. To add to this, if we do want to resize the initial results window, we have to manually drag this as there is no maximise option like in other interfaces. Below is a quick example of what I mean.

App runs and produces this output:

The actual data/results within:

To get this second image, I have had to manually click and drag the outer edges of the Browse window, due to the lack of a maximise button. I'm aware that we can click to pop this out to a new window that does have a maximise option, but this feels like an unnecessary additional step.

So the idea here is fairly simple. Either a) increase the default size of the results window, and/or b) add a maximise button to Browse outputs.

Cheers,

Nathan