Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

One of the tools that I use the most is the SELECT tool because I normally get large data sets with fields that I won't be using for a specific analysis or with fields that need re-naming. In the same way, sometimes Alteryx will mark a field in a different type than the one I need (e.g. date field as string). That's when the SELECT comes in handy.

However, often times when dealing with multiple sources and having many SELECT tools on your canvas can make the workflow look a little "crowded". Not to mention adding extra tools that will need later explanation when presenting/sharing your canvas with others. That is why my suggestion is to give the CONNECTION tool "more power" by offering some of the functionality found in the SELECT tool.

For instance, if one of the most used features of the SELECT tool is to choose the fields that will move through the workflow, then may be we can make that feature available in the CONNECTION tool. Similarly, if one of the most used features (by Alteryx users) is to re-name fields or change the field type, then may be we can make that available in the CONNECTION tool as well.

At the end, developers can benefit from speeding up workflow development processes and end-users will benefit by having cleaner workflows presented to them, which always help to get the message across.

What do you guys think? Any of you feel the same? Leave your comments below.

It would be great if we could have a Windows Active Directory data connector tool added to the standard Alteryx toolset.

MS Excel Power Query and PowerBI both can connect to Active Directory for use as a data source, but are both very cumbersome to use.  Having a connector in Alteryx that can read AD data into a workflow would be super helpful for a long list of use cases.  A couple that are top of mind for me are:

-Leveraging group membership info for dynamic distribution of reports or datasets

-Being able to build reporting and dashboards about the organization (useful for Tech audit, HR, etc.) 

I've seen links to an old project on GitHub of someone that started development on this, but the method (just copy these random .dlls into your program directory) is seriously frowned upon by any enterpise IT.  Would be great if Alteryx could pick up that work, polish it a bit and add it to the actual Alteryx Designer toolset.

The Delete and connect around in the right click menu is really nice for not having to go find the connector and re plug it in. I would ask that there is essentially the same option when cutting a tool. When the tool is cut the data path is uneffected. Also, it would be nice to be able to right click(or left click and ctrl+v) on a data path and paste the tool directly in, instead of having to paste then connect everything back up. Lastly, I often find myself pulling out the wrong tool/wanting to replace a tool with another. I think it would be nice to have the option of dropping a toll directly onto another to replace it. Again connecting drectly into the data path.

Currently with Alias Manager you can only create Aliases for database connections. 

We use HDFS Connections to write files to HDFS so it would be really useful to use an Alias especially when promoting workflows to Alteryx Server. 

Hi

While the download tool, does a great job, there are instances where it fails to connect to a server. In these cases, there is no download header info that we can use to determine if the connection has failed or not. 

Currently the tool ouputs a failure message to the results window when such a failure occurs. 

Having the 'failed to connect to server' message coming into the workflow in real time would allow for iterative macro to re-try. 

Thanks

Gavin

As Tableau has continued to open more APIs with their product releases, it would be great if these could be exposed via Alteryx tools.

One specifically I think would make a great tool would be the Tableau Document API (link) which allows for things like:

- Getting connection information from data sources and workbooks (Server Name, Username, Database Name, Authentication Type, Connection Type)

- Updating connection information in workbooks and data sources (Server Name, Username, Database Name)

- Getting Field information from data sources and workbooks (Get all fields in a data source, Get all fields in use by certain sheets in a workbook)

For those of us that use Alteryx to automate much of our Tableau work, having an easy tool to read and write this info (instead of writing python script) would be beneficial.  

Wild card read option (Sales_*.csv ) works for reading files of the same structure available on a standard windows network/local fileshare. It would be good to have the same feature for reading from HDFS via the HDFS connection option using the input tool.

Regards,

Sandeep.

Create new connector to pull Salesforce Reports

We are a large company with tens of thousands employees using Salesforce on a daily basis. Over the years, we have worked with Salesforce to make many customizations and create many reports to provide data for various reporting needs. However, we have increasingly found it inefficient and prone to error to download the reports manually. We have many teams using the Salesforce reports as a base to create additional business insights.

Alteryx is a great tool to manage data ETL and workflows, but it does not support pulling data from Salesforce reports directly. Instead, it only offers connectors to pull data from base Salesforce objects. The data from Salesforce objects such as tables can be useful, but do not necessarily offer the logical view of Salesforce reports, and may require a lot of efforts to reconcile the data consistency against the reports our users are used to. Sometimes, it may be impossible to repeat producing the same data from Salesforce tables as those from Salesforce reports. That in turn would cause a lot of efforts spent by the reporting teams, their audience, and users of the Salesforce reports to match things up.

Salesforce does not have any out-of-box solution to schedule downloading the reports. At our request, their support team did some research and have not found a good 3rd-party solution in the Salesforce App Exchange ecosystem that supports this need.

I strongly believe this is a great opportunity for Alteryx. Salesforce already has an API that allows for building custom applications to pull Salesforce reports. However, most Salesforce users are more business oriented and do not necessarily have the appetite to engage with their IT staff or external resources provide to develop such apps and bear the burden to main them.

I have attached the Salesforce Reports and Dashboards API Developer Guide for your reference.

Sincerely,

Vincent Wang

We've been researching snowflake and are eager to try this new cloud database tool but are holding off till Alteryx supports in-database tools for that environment.  I know it's a fairly new service and there probably aren't tons of users, but it seems like a perfect fit since it's fully SQL complaint and is a truely native clouad, SAAS tool.  It's built from scratch for AWS, and claims to be faster and cheaper.

Snowflake for data storage, Alteryx for loading and processing, Tableau for visualization - the perfect trio, no?

Has anyone had experience/feedback with snowflake?  I know it supports ODBC so we could do basic connections with Alteryx, but the real key would obviously be enabling in-database functionality so we could take advantage of the computation power of the snowflake.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention the topic and find out if it's in the plans or not.

Thanks,

Daniel

Please add the ability to interface with Oracle Siebel CRM. Preferably, this would be a built-in connector similiar to the SFDC Connector.

Please add a configuration to the RedShift bulk load to EITHER use access keys or an IAM EC2 role for access. 

We should not have to specify access keys when we are in an IAM enabled environment.

Thanks

Hi All,

It would be a given wherein IT would have invested effort and time building workflows and other components using some of the tools which became deprecated with the latest versions.

It is good to have the deprecated versions still available to make the code backward compatible, but at the same time there should be some option where in a deprecated tool can be promoted to the new tool available without impacting the code.

Following are the benefits of this approach -

1) IT team can leverage the benefits of the new tool over existing and deprecated tools. For e.g. in my case I am using Salesforce connectors extensibly, I believe in contrast to the existing ones the new ones are using Bulk API and hence are relatively much faster.

2) It will save IT from reconfiguring/recoding the existing code and would save them considerable time.

3) As the tool keeps forward moving in its journey, it might help and make more sense to actually remove some of the deprecated tool versions (i.e. I believe it would not be the plan to have say 5 working set of Salesforce Input connectors - including deprecated ones). With this approach in place I think IT would be comfortable with removal of deprecated connectors, as they would have the promote option without impacting exsiting code - so it would ideally take minimal change time.

In addition, if it is felt that with new tools some configurations has changed (should ideally be minor), those can be published and as part of
promotions IT can be given the option to configure it.

Thanks,

Rohit Bajaj

Would like to direclty query Hyperion Cube / Essbase data source directly - please propose functionality in next release or add a user macro to the gallery.  Thanks -cb

I noticed that Tableau has a new connector to Anaplan in the upcoming release. 

Does Alteryx have any plans to create an Anaplan connector? 

I find that when I'm using Alteryx, I'm constantly renaming the tool connectors. Here's my logic, most of the time:

I have something like a Join and 3 browses.

1. I name the L join something like "L: on product/location join"
2. I then copy that descriptor, and past it in the Annotation field
3. I then copy that descriptor, select the wired connector, and paste that in the connection configuration

MY VISION:

Have a setting where I could select the following options:

• Automatically annotate based on tool rename
• Automatically rename incoming connector based on tool rename

THE GUTS/REQUEST:

If I rename a tool, and "Automatically annotate based on tool rename" is enacted, it will insert that renaming at the top of the annotation field. If there is already data in that field, it will be shifted down. If I rename a tool and "Automatically rename incoming connector..." is on, then the connection coming into it gets [name string]+' connection' put into its name field. I included a picture of the end game of my request.

Thanks for your ear!

Have been using Alteryx GA component and found some issues, apart from the setup teething problems I was having.

So thought I’d let you know , in case it’s just not me who is suffering…

We do a fair amount of marketing for our Private business and like to measure conversion of the pipeline.

I’ve been looking at Lead -> Account -> Trade

Have been drilling into lead data with little source identifiers which are appearing in a NULL bucket..

When using Alteryx

I noticed that the Profiles for my id do not appear fully in Alteryx via the drop down..

It picks up QA profile data instead of the live profiles and does not show the whole set ?

Tableau works correctly showing the complete set of GA profiles

I don’t have the full set of profiles…

Maybe config related but why bring in some profiles and not others when I can access fine from GA directly and via Tableau ?

Trying to set these profiles and config files seemed problematic – reset to default removes the 4 config files, when you run again it doesn’t create them.

Had to keep a copy of these and put them back in manually or cpy an old widget and run a new one up from that …

Resetting the profile and saving caused other errors to appear related to the Tokens…

Found that annoying and a waste of time… immature (arghh) !

I think the Alteryx implementation is immature and not as good as Tableau and you have more work to do…! But may just be me !

Can you help improve it as I’d like to pull and blend reliably via Alteryx and do this for a range of dates to avoid sampling data

I do love the product but love this a little less than anything else …

I’d also love to be able to pull from Tableau data sources into Alteryx as we have all of our history in Tableau server

Has anyone else wanted the same ?

Obviously you can store to TDE but want the reverse… to pull from Tableau server

Below is a list of DBMS rankings as of August 2016

(for an updated and longer list see: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking)

I personally look for; HBase, Splunk, MariaDB, Couchbase, Amazon Dynamo, CouchDB connections...

I want to connect to Salesforce without Security Token.

Salesforce doesn't need Security Token when we set Login IP Ranges.

Actual Condition:

1. In Salesforce, I set Login IP Ranges like below so that Salesforce doesn't require Security Token.

2. I could connect to verify custom object definition viaSalesforce Input without Security Token

3. When workflow rub, Salesforce Input shows error message.

Thank you for considering our request.