Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I recently cam across a limitation in Alteryx, where we can't download non-CSV files using Amazon S3 download tool. There is currently support only for CSV, and couple of other formats but we are using JSON files (.jl) extensively and not having the tool download the files into the workflow is disapointing as now i have to build a custom code outside Alteryx to do that before I can start my workflow.

Can this be please given prompt attention and prioritized accordingly.

This wasn't pretty (actually, it was challenging and pretty when I was done with it)!

 

My client receives files that include a static and dated name portion (e.g. Data for 2018 July.xlsx) within the file there are multiple sheets.  One sheet contains a keyword (e.g. Reported Data) but the sheet name also includes a variable component (e.g. July Reported Data).  I needed to first read a directory to find the most recent file, then when I wanted to supply the dynamic input with the sheet name I wasn't able to use a pattern. 

 

The solution was to use a dynamic input tool just to read sheet names and append the filtered name to the original Full Path.

[FullPath] + "|||<List of Sheet Names>"

This could then feed a dynamic input.

 

Given the desire to automate the read of newly received "excel" data and the fluidity of the naming of both files and sheets, more flexibility in the dynamic input is requested.

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

Add a tool to the right-click menu that would place all currently selected tools into a container.

I need support for outbound data streams to be gzip compressed.  Ideally, this would be done by a new tool that can be inserted into a workflow (maybe similar to the Base 64 Encoding tool).  Just including it in the Output Tool will not address my needs as I will be sending gzip payloads to a cloud API.  There are two main reasons why this is necessary (and without it, quite possibly a roadblock for our enterprise's use of Alteryx):

 

1. Some APIs enforce gzip encoding, therefore Alteryx cannot currently be used to interact with such APIs
2. When transmitting large volumes of data across the Internet, gzip compression will significantly decrease transmission times

Per my initial community posting, it seems that in environments where the firewall blocks pip the YXI installation process takes longer than it needs. My experience was 9:15 minutes for a 'simple' custom tool (one dependency wheel included in the YXI).

 

Given the helpful explanation of the YXI installation process, it seems the --upgrade pip and setuptools is causing the delay. Disconnecting from the internet entirely causes the custom YXI to install in 1:29 minutes.

 

My 'Idea' is to provide a configuration option to install the YXI files 'offline'. That is, to skip the pip install --upgrade steps, and perhaps specify the --find-links and --no-index options with the pip install -r requirements.txt command. The --no-index option would assume that the developer has included the dependency wheel files in the YXI package. If possible, a second config option to add the path to the dependencies for the --find-links option would help companies that have a central location for storing their dependencies.

For an email event, there are several defaults that are shown in the body (e.g., %User%, %ComputerName%, %WorkingDir%).

It would be nice to add a date in there, maybe %Date% or %DateTime% or something like that which would display the computer system time.

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!

Can we have some support monitoring information added to the summary of each tool during/after a workflows run so we can determine how much memory is being used per component and per workflow run.  Not just what is the default minimum.  This will help to identify where in our workflow we can improve and/or help us by adjusting the default memory usage for sort/join tools on a workflow basis.

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.

It would be nice to improve upon the 'Block Until Done' tool.

 

Additional Features I could see for this tool:

1: Allow Any tool (even output) to be linked as an incoming connection to a 'Block Until Done' tool.  

2: Allow Multiple Tools to be linked to a 'Block Until Done' tool. (similar to the 'Union' tool)

 

The functionality I see for this is to enable Alteryx set the Order of Operation for workflows and Allowing people to automate processes in the same way that people used to do them. I understand there's a work around using Crew Macros (Runner/Conditional Runner) that can essentially accomplish this;  howerver (and I may be wrong).  But it feels like a work around, instead of the tool working the way one would expect; and I'm loosing the ability to track/log/troubleshoot my workflow as it progresses (or if it has an issue)

 

Happy to hear if something like that exists.  Just looking for ways to ensure order of operation is followed for a particular workflow I am managing. 

Thanks,

Randy

When working with a transactional API, it would be beneficial to allow for multiple threads to process the workload concurrently.  A single threaded consumption is a good start, but for more volume a throttled multi-threaded tool would be very helpful.

Currently the R predictive tools are single thread, which means to utilise multi-threading we need to download separately a third party R package such as Microsoft R Client.

Given this is a better option, should this not be used as the default package upon installation?

 

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.

Dynamic Input is a fantastic tool when it works.  Today I tried to use it to bring in 200 Excel files.  The files were all of the same report and they all have the same fields. Still, I got back many errors saying that certain files have "a different schema than the 1st file."  I got this error because in some of my files, a whole column was filled with null data.  So instead of seeing these columns as V_Strings, Alteryx interpreted these blank columns as having a Double datatype.  

 

It would be nice if Alteryx could check that this is the case and simply cast the empty column as a V_String to match the previous files.  Maybe make it an option and just have Alteryx give a warning if it has to do this..

 

An even simpler option would be to add the ability to bring in all columns as strings.  

 

 

Instead, the current solution (without relying on outside macros) is to tick the checkbox in the Dynamic Input tool that says "First Row Contains Data."  This then puts all of the field titles into the data 200 times. This makes it work because all of the columns are now interpreted as strings.  Then a Dynamic Rename is used to bring the first row up to rename the columns.  A Filter is used to remove the other 199 rows that just contained copies of the field names.  Then it's time to clean up all of the fields' datatypes.  (And this workaround assumes that all of the field names contain at least one non-numeric character. Otherwise the field gets read as Double and you're back at square one.)

As a security enhancement, the default passwords setting should be encrypt for user. Although this is critical for security my users have overlooked this even with training. They truly aren't culpable if they forgot. If it is the default then they must consciously change the it to an insecure setting.

 

From a security perspective the current default setting is backwards.

Grant Hansen

While it is good to have the test tool stop outputs based on tests, it isn't too insightful to users on the full details of these error messages. It would be more useful to have an output location for a test if these errors appear so that end users can troubleshoot instead of the workflow developer having to work through all of the error messaging.

 

There are workarounds for this that can be used, but they are often extensive and require the addition of significant logic. Adding optional outputs to the test tool would be a simple fix that could save a lot of hours of debugging when end users find an error.

When moving external data into the database, the underlying SQL looks like:

 

CREATE GLOBAL TEMPORARY  TABLE "AYX16020836880b41e08246b59ee8c"

...

 

My client would like to add a prefix to the table as:

 

CREATE GLOBAL TEMPORARY  TABLE MMMM999_DM_USER."AYX16020836880b41e08246b59ee8c"

 

where MMMM999_DM_USER is supplied in the configuration.

 

A service account  automatically sets the current session to something like MMMM999 (alter session set curent schema=MMMM999;)

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,

It would be very helpful if there was a tool that could stop the workflow without throwing an error. Currently, you can use the message tool to throw an error on a certain condition, and then enable the "Cancel Running Workflow on Error" option in the Runtime settings, but when the workflow is stopped in this way, many other tools don't function such as the Output Data and Email tools. Simply adding a tool that stops the workflow without erroring that also allows the other tools to finish their job would be great.