Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi!

So Dynamic Select is a wonderful tool - but in Formula mode it effectively acts as a filter. It drops all of the other fields which don't match the filter and they disappear - floating in the workflow ether, dreaming of the Join tool or other way they can be given XML life anew.  It would be super cool if in stead of just having those Fields which are true exit and continue into the workflow if the False fields could be launched back into the workflow space via a False anchor like on a filter tool....

Hypothetical situation - I'm looking to isolate some fields and convert them to a different format based upon name or other characteristic. I'm doing this not to jettison my data set, but to improve it. I run dynamic select and multi-field tool, and suddenly I'm scratching my head. How do I rejoin my workflow with my new and improved data easily? The most direct, albeit stylistically immature way is apparently to a a new_ to my newly created new type fields, join the old fields versus the datastream and drop both of the old fields in place of the New_ versions (soon to shed their prefixes in a dynamic rename)... It works, but it could be much easier.

Thanks!

Hello All,

As of today, Alteryx can use the proxy settings set in Windows Network and Internet Settings "Server pulls the proxy settings displayed in Engine > Proxy from the Windows internet settings for the user logged into the machine. If there are no proxy settings for the user logged into the machine, Engine > Proxy isn't available within the System Settings menu.". Then, you can override the credentials (but not the adress) in system settings but also in user settings.

The issue : in many organizations, there are several proxies that you can use for different use case. And by default, it can happen access to API are blocked by these proxies. The user, which is not admin cannot change his Windows Settings... and even if it's done by IT, it will impact all the system, including other software and leading to safety failures.

What I suggest :
-ability to change credentials AND adress

-a multi-level settings for both credentials and adress:
    default : Windows Settings
    System Settings
    User Settings

    Workflow Settings

    Download tool/ Settings

Best Regards,

Simon

Please consider making the Count Record tool configurable so that users can receive a visual read of results in canvas. This would quickly assist in ensuring a user's ability to verify a workflow is functioning as expected or not. Currently there is no in canvas visual cue tied to the counter. If a user is expecting a certain count result (e.g. zero), the user has to click on the count records function to see if the result meets expectations or not. Users may spend a lot of time checking each stage of a workflow to ensure everything is flowing appropriately. A visual cue of results would reduce that time to check. Outside of runtime errors, there is currently no visual cue to indicate a possible problem or unexpected exception to a filter or other macro.

Two suggestions:

1) Allow users to color code count results in specific count results or ranges. (e.g. if a user is expecting a zero count, allow them to change the color of the counter to red for anything not resulting in zero and green if count is zero). Or allow them to set a color range depending on the count total (e.g. a user may need some visual tolerance indicator with a count under 100 as green, 101-200 as yellow, 201-300 as orange and 300+ as red).

2) Show the actual count in the Count Record macro icon.

Thank you!

When building API calls within Alteryx there are a few common steps required

1) Build out the URI for the API call (base URL plus any query parameters)

2) Deal with authentication, such as basic authentication requires taking a key and secret, base 64 encoding and passing this into the tool

3) parsing the results out and processing these downstream

For this idea I am specifically focusing on step 3 (but it would be great to have common authentication methods in-built within the download tool (step 2)!).

There are common steps required to parse out the results, such as using Filter (to check for a 200 response), JSON parse, text to columns and then cross tab to get the results into a readable format. These will all be common steps anyone who has worked with APIs will be familiar with:

This is all fine for a regular user to quickly add in and configure these tools. However there is no validation here for the JSON result being as expected, which when embedding an API into a batch macro or analytic app means it can easily fail.

One example of a failure which I've recently come across is where the output JSON doesn't have all fields (name:value pairs) depending the json response. For example using the UK Companies House API, when looking at the ceased to act field at this endpoint - https://developer-specs.company-information.service.gov.uk/companies-house-public-data-api/resources... the ceased to act field only appears in the results if a person has actually ceased to act. This is important if you have downstream tools such as a formula to create a field [Active] where you have:

IF ISNull([ceased_to_act]) THEN "Active" ELSE "Ceased to Act" ENDIF

However without modification the macro / app will error if any results are returned where there is not this field.

A workaround is to add in the Crew Ensure Fields or union on a list of fields, to ensure that the Cease to Act field is present in the output for all API calls. But looking at some other tools it would be good if an expected Schema could be built in to the download tool to do this automatically.

For example in Power Automate this is achieved as follows:

I am a big advocate of not making things unnecessarily complicated. Therefore I would categorise this as an ease of use feature to improve the experience of working with APIs within Alteryx and make APIs (as load of integrations are API based) accessible to as many users as possible.

Hello gurus - 

I think it would be an important safety valve if at application start up time, duplicate macros found in the 'classpath' (i.e., https://help.alteryx.com/current/server/install-custom-tools, ) generate a warning to the user.  I know that if you have the same macro in the same folder you can get a warning at load time, but it doesn't seem to propagate out to different tiers on the macro loading path.  As such, the developer can find themselves with difficult to diagnose behavior wherein the tool seems to be confused as to which macro metadata to use.   I also imagine someone could also arrive at a situation where a developer was not using the version of the macro they were expecting unless they goto the workflow tab for every custom macro on their canvas.  

Thank you for attending my TED talk on the upsides of providing warnings at startup of duplicate macros in different folder locations.  

I would love to be able to see the actual curl statement that is executed as part of the download tool. Maybe something like a debug switch can be added which would produce 1 extra output field which is the curl statement itself? This would greatly enhance the ability to debug when things aren't working as expected from the download tool.

Hi Team,  

I am starting to utilize alteryx as our platform to run our daily data load process.  A bunch of the data are sent via SFTP and it would be a lot simpler if the following features are directly available instead of utilizing the run command and/or scripting.

1. Ability to use wildcard in the download instead of specifically defining the filenames. (can be done indirectly but have to use multiple tools --> 2 downloads, parse, etc.)

2. Ability to delete files after the files have been downloaded successfully.

 - I have seen a couple of posts in the community trying to do this but haven't found one that worked for me; again this was utilizing run command and scripts and other utility programs)

Appreciate if you can look into this request !

Many a times, we come across scenarios when the formula tool fails due to the change in the data type of the input fields.
For instance, a numerical calculation would fail or would not give correct result if the data type of a field was changed due to some reason(from double to string for example).
In such cases, we might have to change the change the data type in Select tool or add Tonumber() to the fields expression of the formula tool to make it work.

My proposal is to have a formula tool that should be dynamic to identify the purpose of expression and either add the Tonumber() expression while execution or convert the data type of the fields as per the requirements of the expressions in the formula.

Hello,

My idea is that the current Download tool does not handle errors and continues its path even if it does not find for example a file in the transmitted URL or if it does not find the hostname it crashes.

In the case of a user with several URLs in a row, this is penalizing.

In the case of downloading files with recording, it still writes a file (thus overwriting the existing file) but which is not openable and is not in the correct format. (BLOCKED file!) Which then causes problems in workflows reading these files.

The idea would be to put a second output to this tool for all the URLs where there was a problem (non-existent hostname, file not found, HTTP KO) and one where it received the expected elements so as not to prejudice the processing. and allow better management of error cases.

Regards,

Bruno

It would be really great to have Dynamic Detour tool where you could specify the detour direction as an input to the tool rather than an imbedded control.

This would allow workflow branching.

Using a filter for this passes a dataset with no rows in it which causes dynamic in-db or dynamic input tools to error.

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.

Hi,

I didn't find this mentioned before, but apologies if it has. I and a few clients have found that the Download tool 'Query String/Body' is quite difficult to use from a UX perspective. If you have a long query (or anything over 3 short rows in fact), it's almost impossible to navigate to the part you want with ease, as you're required to highlight and move the cursor manually or use up and down arrows, still only ever seeing a few lines of the query. 

My suggestion(s) would be to:

1: include a scroll bar as a minimum

and ideally in addition, either:

2a: give the box itself more real estate (fixed) in the Payload tab, or

2b: allow the user to resize this box in the tool config (probably more complicated?) 

Specific problem below, including my (terrible!) drawings on it:

I appreciate there are other methods, including taking the query from a field etc., but for many users - particularly newer ones - it's preferred to copy a query into this String/Body and edit as needed, but right now this is an almost unmanageable approach.

Thanks,

Andy 

When I proceed with this command in a python tool:

from ayx import Package

Package.installPackages(package='pandas',install_type='install --upgrade')

in Alteryx it only updates to 0.25, but the Latest version is 1.1.2.

When I would like to upgrade from the Python side i get the following:

ERROR: ayx 1.0.54 has requirement pandas<0.25.0,>=0.24.2, but you'll have pandas 1.1.2 which is incompatible.

Can you please make sure we can upgrade to the latest version of pandas without any compatibility issue?

This is important because of json_normalize. Really useful tool, available from pandas 1.0.3!

The Dynamic Input tool fails when attempting input a set of Excel files with the following error:

Error: Dynamic Input (1): The file "Test2.xlsx|||<List of Sheet Names>" has a different schema than the 1st file in the set.

Each spreadsheet contains two tabs and all tabs contain the same columns.

The root cause of the schema error is that maximum sheet name length in the two spreadsheets is different.  The first spreadsheet uses "East" and "West" for sheet names.  The second spreadsheet uses "North" and "South" for sheet names.  The Dynamic Input tool uses the longest sheet name when defining the effective Schema.

Excel limits sheet name length to 31 characters. It would be helpful if the Dynamic Input tool used 31 as the minimum string length when defining a schema from Excel sheet names.

The Input Data tool exhibits similar behavior when using a wildcard in the filename and the "Import only the list of sheet names" option.

A batch macro can be used as a workaround.

More and more people are making use of Plotly and Plotly Express to develop really great graphics.  However it is extremely difficult to extract either interactive charts (HTML format) or static images (PNG or JPEG).

The main issue for Plotly to save static images is the ability to install and use Orca (application) for R and kaleido (library) for Python.  Despite my best efforts I have had no luck getting either approach to work with the respective Alteryx environments

It will be really great if we add Single sign-on (SSO) in download tool. Many users are facing this issue when they're trying to download data from weburl. In some case the url will verfiy the sign-on and then redirect to link from where we can download data. Currently download tool fails to verfiy SSO or siteminder authentication.

Hello Dev Gurus - 

The message tool is nice, but anything you want to learn about what is happening is problematic because the messages you are writing to try to understand your workflow are lost in a sea of other messages.  This is especially problematic when you are trying to understand what is happening within a macro and you enable 'show all macro messages' in the runtime options.  

That being said, what would really help is for messages created with the message tool to have a tag as a user created message.  Then, at message evaluation time, you get all errors / all conversion warnings / all warnings / all user defined messages.  In this way, when you write an iterative macro and are giving yourself the state of the data on a run by run basis, you can just goto a panel that shows you just your messages, and not the entire syslog which is like drinking out of a fire hose. 

Thank you for attending my ted talk regarding Message Tool Improvements.

Using the Download Tool, when doing a PUT operation, the tool adds a header "Transfer-Encoding: chunked".  The tool adds this silently in the background.

This caused me a huge headaches, as the PUT was a file transfer to Azure Blob Storage, which was not chunked.  At time of writing Azure BS does not support chunked transfer.  Effectively, my file transfer was erroring, but it appeared that I had configured the request correctly.  I only found the problem by downloading Fiddler and sniffing the HTTPS traffic.

Azure can use SharedKey authorization.  This is similar to OAuth1, in that the client (Alteryx) has to encrypt the message and the headers sent, so that the Server can perform the same encryption on receipt, and confirm that the message was not tampered with.  Alteryx is effectively "tampering with the message" (benignly) by adding headers.  To my mind, the Download tool should not add any headers unless it is clear it is doing so.

If the tool adds any headers automatically, I would suggest that they are declared somewhere.  They could either be included in the headers tab, so that they could be over-written, or they could have an "auto-headers" tab to themselves.  I think showing them in the Headers tab would be preferable, from the users viewpoint, as the user could immediately see it with other headers, and over-ride it by blanking it if they need to.

It would be great to have the below functionality in Alteryx.

A workflow is built in Alteryx and button click in Alteryx can be used to generate SQL code that can be ran on a specific database platform, such as SQL Server to run external editors such as SQL Server Management Studio. Thanks.