Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Yeah, so when you have 15 workflows for some folks and you've actually decided to publish to a test database first, and now you have to publish to a production database it is a *total hassle*, especially if you are using custom field mappings.  Basically you have to go remap N times where N == your number of new outputs.  

Maybe there is a safety / sanity check reason for this, but man, it would be so nice to be able to copy an output, change the alias to a new destination, and just have things sing along.  BRB - gotta go change 15 workflow destination mappings. 

The idea is the ability to skip tools in a workflow. Check the attached example:

Input (TRX_TABLE): Contains transactional raw data (unstructured & uncleaned data)
Filter (TRX_DATE <= 90 days from TODAY): It only filters the data 90 days old from today. Works as an incremental data loader
If the filter tool is NOT SKIPPED the workflow loads the filtered data (incremental behavior)
If the filter tool is SKIPPED the workflow loads all the data (full behavior)
This way I can quickly switch between both modes for testing & production environments

Create a standardized Mailbox application that could bolt onto Alteryx Server, to handle incoming attachments from sources like a Service Desk (Service Now for example) and other applications.

Essentially anything that regularly exports data in the form of an emailed attachments to which Alteryx could, using a series of predefined user rules and a designated email address, put those attachments into various directories ready for processing by automated Alteryx workflows.

This would save a huge amount of time as people currently have to manually drag and drop files. At least the on board Alteryx designers here haven't been able to come with a solution. Would also save any messy programming around systems like Outlook and bending any security issues within those systems. Many, many other applications have this simple feature built in to their products, especially service desks. I believe there would be a huge benefit to this very simple bolt on.

I've run into an issue where I'm using an Input (or dynamic input) tool inside a macro (attached) which is being updated via a File Browse tool. Being that I work at a large company with several data sources; so we use a lot of Shared (Gallery) Connections. The issue is that whenever I try to enter any sort of aliased connection (Gallery or otherwise), it reverts to the default connection I have in the Input or Dynamic Input tool. It does not act this way if I use a manually typed connection string.

Initially, I thought this was a bug; so I brought it to Support's attention. They told me that this was the default action of the tool. So I'm suggesting that the default action of Input and Dynamic Input tools be changed to allow being overridden by Aliased connections with File Browse and Action tools. The simplest way to implement this would probably be to translate the alias before pushing it to the macro.

This may be too much of an edge case...

I would like to be able to feed a dynamic input component with a input file and a format template file, so make the input component completely dynamic.  This is because I have excel spreadsheets that I want to download, read and process hourly throughout the day.  Every 4 hours another 4 columns are added to the spreadsheet, thereby changing the format of the spreadsheet.  This then causes the dynamic input component to error because the input file does not match the static format template.  I would be happy to store the 6 static templates, but feed these into to the dynamic input with the matching input file, thus making the component entirely dynamic.  Does this make sense???

BTW, my workaround was to define six dynamic inputs, filter on the file type, then union the results:

Hi, 

I am currently using Oracle Discoverer Tool which has option to drag or place an results column of a table or cross tab on to page items so that I can further filter the results. This helps the user to filter large results set without even downloading the output. I have attached a screenshot of current tool with page items.

Regards,

Sunil

Can we have string function that parse the string between 2 indices?

As FindString can find particular string occurrence,we can easily get required part of string easily from that index till required index.

or If we want entire remaining string we can have a function like:

Substring(String,StartIndex,EndIndex) Where endIndex can be : Length(String)-1

I setup a generic template because the excel files do not have a consistent schema.   This is the template

which is interpreted as text

When I feed files into the dynamic input tool the output configuration is

This is the schema of the first file read by the DI tool.  Why didn't it use the template?

The requirement to have all the schemas match is difficult - especially with excel.

I would like to suggest the input tool have a checkbox to override the data driver and interpret all columns as text.

Read excel as text

https://www.connectionstrings.com/ace-oledb-12-0/treating-data-as-text/

It would be great if it were possible in future to adjustment Analytic App buttons.

For example Run instead of Finish or so... and so on!?!

Best regards

Mathias

Please ignore this post! I just discovered the amazing dynamic input tool can accomplish exactly this 🙂

This is no longer a "good future idea" but simply a solution already provided by AlterYX!  Thanks AlterYX!

Hello everyone. I think it would be incredibly helpful if all input tools (database / csv files / etc..)  had an input stream for data processing.  

This input stream would cause the tool to fire if and only if at least 1 row of "data" was passed into it.  This would work similar to the Email tool, as the input would simply not fire if no records in the workflow were passed into it.

By making this change, AlterYX could then control the flow of execution when reading / writing to database tables and files without having to bring in Macros or chained applications.

The problem with having to use batch macros and block until done to solve this problem is that it obfuscates your workflow logic, making it much harder for another developer to look at the workflow and understand what is happening.   Below is an extremely simply example of where this is necessary.

Example: any time you are doing a standard dimentional warehouse ETL.

Step #1: Write data to a table with an auto-incremented Key

Step #2: Read back from that table to get the Key that you just generated

Step #3:  use that key as a foreign key in your primary Fact table.

Without this enhancment you need at least 2 different workflows (chained apps or marco's) to accomplish the task above, however with this simple enhancement the above task could be accomplished in 3 tools.

This task is the basic building block of almost all ETL's so this enhancement would be very useful in my opinion.