The Product Idea boards have gotten an update to better integrate them within our Product team's idea cycle! However this update does have a few unique behaviors, if you have any questions about them check out our FAQ.

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

Featured Ideas

Hello,

 

I had a business case requiring a cost effective and quick storage solution for real time online sourced survey data from customers.  A MongoDB instance would fit the need, so I quickly spun up a cluster on Mongo Atlas.  Atlas was launched by MongoDB in 2016 as a database-as-a-service deployed on AWS.  All instances for Atlas require TLS/SSL to connect.  Currently, the Alteryx MongoDB connector does not support TLS/SSL connections and doesn't work against Atlas.  So, I was left with a breakdown in my plan that would require manual intervention before ingesting data to Alteryx (not ideal).

 

Please consider expanding this functionality on all connectors.  I am building Alteryx out in my agency as a data platform that handles sensitive customer information (name, address, email, etc.).  Most tools I use to connect to secure servers today support this type of connection and should be a priority for Alteryx to resolve. 

 

Thanks,

Mike Schock

 

 

 

 

Tableau allows users to do three very useful things to make data more usable for end users, but this functionality is not available with the Publish To Tableau Server tool.

 

Foldering of dimensions/measures

Folders.jpg

 

Creating hierarchies out of dimensions

Hierarchy.jpg

 

Adding custom comments to fields that are visible to users when they hover

Comment.jpg

 

This functionality allows subject matter experts to create data sources that can be easily understood by everyone within their organizations.  

 

Please "star" this idea if you would like to see functionality in Alteryx that would enable you to create a metadata layer in the "Publish to Tableau Server" tool or in an accompanying tool.

At our organization we are required to change our passwords every few months forcing a change to my Tableau Server password.  How does this relate to Alteryx?  Well, every 90 days I have to change my password in the "Publish to Tableau Server Tool" for all of my workflows.  This is quite a cumbersome process that could be eliminated with AD.

 

If you dislike manually changing your for each workflow that uses this tool then "star" this post!

 

 

 

In alterxy BI teams, we often need to hit the same data-store - however if shared connections are not adopted in the server environment, there's currently no easy way to share the connections among the team (none that I know of)

 

Would be great if there were a "share" button on the data connections tab in the designer, so that we could share connections with a team, or export known good connections to a file that can be kept under config-management / version control.

 

Thank you

Sean

Alteryx needs to package SAP, JD Edwards and ADNIS and BPCS connectors as part of it's native offering. This will increase the value proposition of Alteryx designer from just data blending to full self service ETL. Most of the large organizations have data extraction challenges and will experience business user empowerment and big productivity gains if native connectors and data extraction across major ERPs is enabled. Some of these productivity gains can in turn be used to make a business case for Alteryx designer licenses.

Hi all.

 

We're heavily using SalesForce and one of the reasons we've purchased so many licenses was support of SFDC.

However, our implementation is set up based on a Custom Domain.

Unfortunately at this point our connector does not support Custom Domains. 

Please, kindly review and possibly add SFDC authorization option that supports Custom Domain. Like Excel, Tableau and others does1.jpg

Not sure if any of you have a similar issue - but we often end up bringing in some data (either from a website or a table) to profile it - and then an hour in, you realise that the data will probably take 6 weeks to completely ingest, but it's taken in enough rows already to give us a useful sense.

 

Right now, the only option is to stop (in which case all the profiling tools at the end of the flow will all give you nothing) and then restart with a row-limiter - or let it run to completion.   The tragedy of the first option is that you've already invested an hour or 2 in the data extract, but you cannot make use of this.

 

It feels like there's a third option - a option to "Stop bringing in new data - but just finish the data that you currently have", which terminates any input or download tools in their current state, and let's the remainder of the data flush through the full workflow.

 

Hopefully I'm not alone in this need 🙂

Hi there,

 

When you use DB connection aliases that are saved in Alteryx, it's currently not easy to edit them when you move a database to a different location.

 

Can we do something simliar to the "Edit Password" function, but which allows the user to also edit the database or server, so that this applies to all workflows using this alias?

2017-05-07_20-23-01.png

I have had multiple instances of needing to parse a set of PDF files. While I realize that this has been discussed previously with workarounds here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Can-Alteryx-Parse-A-Word-Doc-Or-PDF/ta-p/115...

having a native PDF input tool would help me significantly. I don't have admin rights to my computer (at work) so downloading a new app to then use the "Run Command" tool is inconvenient, requires approval from IT, etc. So, it would save me (and I'm sure others) time both from an Alteryx workflow standpoint each time I need it, but also from an initial use to get the PDFtoText program installed.

Hi All,

 

It would be great if Alteryx 10.5 supports connectivity to SAS server.

 

Regards,
Gaurav

Our company is implementing an Azure Data Lake and we have no way of connecting to it efficiently with Alteryx.  We would like to push data into the Azure Data Lake store and also pull it out with the connector.  Currently, there is not an out-of-the-box solution in Alteryx and it requires a lot of effort to push data to Azure.

Hey all,

 

The join tool currently does not allow case-insensitive joins, but the find/replace tool does.    Additionally- even if both sides are identical, the join tool will not join "Sean's house" to "Sean's house" because of the non-letter character in the middle.    Finally - if one side is a string(2), and the other is a vString(200) - even if you have a single identical character on both sides you get uncertain outcomes unless you force the type

 

Please could you consider amending the join tool to include 3 new options or capabilities:

- Case insensitive join

- Allow full Unicode character set in join

- Full match across text types (irrespective of string size) - this would allow a string(2) value to match to a string(100) value as long as the string(100) value only has the same 2 characters in it as the string(2) value

 

That would remove a load of work from every text-join that's being done on every canvas we do.

 

Thank you 

Sean

 

 

It would be awesome if I could re-display the users selections to them before I continue with the remainder of the workflow in an analytic app. That way, I could collect all of the UI inputs, do my validation on the values provided and then re-display the selections/options/text to the user so they can confirm that they are correct and they wish to continue, or they can stop the processing and make changes via the already-open UI without having to re-enter everything from scratch.

 

Then, when someone selects something that's potentially harmful or very time consuming, I can confirm their selections and alert them to potential issues.

Give us the ability to connect a control parameter to an interface tool so that I can change interface elements based on previously entered data when chaining analytic apps together.

 

This would enable us to:

- have dynamic text for a radio button/checkbox.

- have dynamic text for a dropdown box prompt or a listbox prompt.

- pre-populate a text box based on inputs from a previous selection

- change the min/max and default values on numeric up down input

- default base map, zoom level, reference layer, draw properties

- select the default selected date on a date box as well as changing the prompt for a date box

- change the default file types for a file browse tool

I want to use Alteryx to pull data from a SharePoint List.  This shouldn't be a problem, but I use SharePoint Content Types.  Alteryx won't allow me to import any list that has Content Types enabled; thus rendering the SP list input type not usable. 

My interim workaround is to create a data connection thru excel to the list and then pull the data in that way, but optimally, I would like to pull directly from the list.

 

Content types are a best practice in SharePoint, so any list or library in my site collection contains them.

 

Please update the SharePoint list input to support content types.

 

thank you,

 

Someone else inquired about this but I didn't see an idea entered /

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/SharePoint-List-Input-Problems-importing-content-types...

 

0 Likes

Cisco, which has been building enterprise networks, and is literally close to the Internet of Things, is creating some data products, perhaps a platform, perhaps a suite, to handle big data. Part of their offering is DNA Data Virtualization (http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/enterprise-networks/dna-virtualization/index.html). Compare Cisco at 75,000 employees to SAS at 15,000. 

Hi,

 

It'd be great to have a specific connector for Hubspot. It' a marketing automation Platform such as Marketo.

 

Thanks.

There are some minor tools like Twitter Search (http://www.alteryx.com/resources/blending-social-media-data-without-it) and Grazitti's Facebook Page crawler...

 

But we need tools for accessing and blending more of the existing semi-structure social data,

 

  • no YouTube connector to search between videos and track impressions yet...
  • no LinkedIn connector to crawl public and full profiles (with permission) to do HR analytics yet...
  • no Instagram connector yet, to crawl marketing data and do trends and competition search
  • no Flickr connector to grab pictures to do Image search and recognition...

 

Top social media sites Updated February 1, 2017;

1 | Facebook 1,100,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors
2 | YouTube 1,000,000,000

3 | Twitter 310,000,000

4 | LinkedIn 255,000,000
5 | Pinterest 250,000,000

6 | Google Plus+  120,000,000

7 | Tumblr 110,000,000

8 | Instagram100,000,000
9 | Reddit 85,000,000

10 | VK 80,000,000

11 | Flickr 65,000,000

12 | Vine 42,000,000
13 | Meetup 40,000,000

14 | Ask.fm 37,000,000

15 | ClassMates 15,000,000

Right now, I have to do a little voodoo to get a user to select a sheet within an excel doc to use as a source.  My use case is that I have an excel file provided by other users in which the relevant data could be in one of many excel sheets, and there isn't a good programmatic way to determine the right sheet.  Thus, I want to prompt my user to select the sheet when running an analytic app.

 

I have to start with a file browse option to prompt the user for the excel:

File Browse Options.JPG

From here, the prompt will only ask for a file:

 

file selection.JPG

 

 

At no point will it prompt for the sheet it wants within the file.  And the action options don't give you the ability to change the sheet (it reads it from the file input after the pipe):

 

action options.JPG

To solve this, I have to create a app that only prompts for the excel sheet and then set it to output the sheet names.  From there, I do a little formula magic to split it into key-value pairs with the value being the entire file path pipe concatenated with the sheet name, save it to a file, then read the file in a second workflow which presents the sheet names in drop downs.  It looks something like this:

 

prompt flow.JPG

 

This all seems unnecessarily complex given Alteryx seems to have already figured this out in designer:

 

sheets.JPG

 

My idea:  Use the same file selector in the "Input Data" tool for the File Browser when setting the File value from an Action.  It would save me from having a separate workflow just to prompt a user for an excel sheet.

 

Thanks!

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.

 
Select Tool 2.png

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

Select Tool.png

 

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.

Top Liked Authors