Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Problem:

Dynamic Input tool depends on a template file to co-relate the input data before processing it. Mismatch in the schema throws an error, causing a delay in troubleshooting.  

Solution:

It would be great if the users got an enhancement in this Tool, wherein they could Input Text or Edit Text without any template file. (Similar to a Text Editor in Macro Input Tool)

This has probably been mentioned before, but in case it hasn't....

Right now, if the dynamic input tool skips a file (which it often does!) it just appears as a warning and continues processing. Whilst this is still useful to continue processing, could it be built as an option in the tool to select a 'error if files are skipped'? 

Right now it is either easy to miss this is happening, or in production / on server you may want this process to be stopped.

Thanks,

Andy 

This has probably been mentioned before, but in case it hasn't....

The dynamic input tool is useful for bringing in multiple files / tabs, but quickly stops being fit for purpose if schemas / fields differ even slightly. The common solution is to then use a dynamic input tool inside a batch macro and set this macro to 'Auto Configure by Name', so that it waits for all files to be run and then can output knowing what it has received. 

It's a pain to create these batch macros for relatively straightforward and regular processes - would it be possible to have this 'Auto Configure by Name' as an option directly in the dynamic input tool, relieving the need for a batch macro? 

Thanks,

Andy 

With the new intelligence suite there is a much higher use of blob files and we would like to be able to input them as a regular input instead of having to use non- standard tools like Image, report text or a combination of directory/blob or input/download to pull in images, etc. I would like to see the standard input tool capable of bringing in blob files as well.

Blob InputImage InputText Input

The R tool has AlteryxProgress() and AlteryxMessage() functions for generating notifications in the Results window https://help.alteryx.com/current/designer/r-tool, however the Python tool does not. Since I'm writing more Python code than R code I'd like to have similar functionality available in the Python tool, e.g. an Alteryx.Progress() function and an Alteryx.Message() function.

Jonathan

Please upgrade the "curl.exe" that are packaged with Designer from 7.15 to 7.55 or greater to allow for -k flags. Also please allow the -k functionality for the Atleryx Download tool.  

-k, --insecure

(TLS) By default, every SSL connection curl makes is verified to be secure. This option allows curl to proceed and operate even for server connections otherwise considered insecure.

The server connection is verified by making sure the server's certificate contains the right name and verifies successfully using the cert store.

Regards,

John Colgan

Figuring out who is using custom macros and/or governing the macroverse is not an easy task currently.  

I have started shipping Alteryx logs to Splunk to see what could be learned.  One thing that I would love to be able to do is understand which workflows are using a particular macro, or any custom macros for that matter.  As it stands right now, I do not believe there is a simple way to do this by parsing the log entries.  If, instead of just saying 'Tool Id 420', it said 'Tool Id 420 [Macro Name]' that would be very helpful.  And it would be even *better* if the logging could flag out of the box macros vs custom macros.  You could have a system level setting to include/exclude macro names.  

Thanks for listening.

brian 

When we try to call external web site from Alteryx Designer Download tool, our company proxy server failed the authentication because Alteryx uses the basic login/password authentication.  This has happened to multiple applications that need to interact with external partners.  Will like to request an enhancement to enable Alteryx to authenticate using Kerberos or NTLM.

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,

Please enhance the dynamic select to allow for dynamic change data type too.  The use case can be by formula or update in an action for a macro.  If you've ever wanted to mass change or take precision action in a macro, you're forced to use a multi-field formula.  It would be rather helpful and appreciated.

Cheers,

Mark

While Alteryx allows for a proxy username and password in the settings, these are not passed properly to an NTLM proxy. Support for NTLM authentication would be incredibly useful for a number of corporations who utilize this firewall setup.

We currently have to either download via Python or cURL through batch commands called by Alteryx. Since Alteryx uses a cURL back-end, this should be a fairly simple addition to the existing download tool by allowing a selection of proxy server, port, and authentication method in addition to the proxy username and password. This could be done either in the tool itself or in User Settings.

Using the download tool is great and easy to use. However, if there was a connection problem with a request the workflow errors out. Having an option to not error out, ability to skip failed records, and retrying records that failed would be A LIFE CHANGER. Currently I have been using a Python tool to create multi-threaded requests and is proven to be time consuming.

Passing Access and Secret Keys to connect to AWS S3 poses a security risk. It would be great if the Amazon Redshift Bulk Connection tool was enhanced to include an authentication option to use a Native IM group instead of keys.

The Alteryx.Flexnetoperations.com  license management site needs major work.

On the View Licenses page it shows all licenses going back several years. A basic need is to show only licenses which haven't expired, but that is not an option.You cannot even sort on the expiration column while you can sort on most others columns.

The most simple need is to see a list of my current active license users - but I do't see a way to do that.

I tried an "Advanced Search" and chose  expiration date after 2019-10-29 and none of my licenses which expire in 2020 appear - I get a blank list.

Similarly on the administer machines page you cannot filter to hide expired licenses or even on the licenses column (which doesn't sort either).

The help link on the page doesn't bring you to help specific to that page but the general activation help front page. After several clicks I found this page:

https://help.alteryx.com/licensing/current/Administer/AdministerMachines.htm?tocpath=Administer%7C__...

But  the help is incomplete (doesn't list Machine types or the difference between Active and Inactive)

Also, there is no export capability - copy and pasting into Excel is a formatting headache as it brings in check-boxes.

Lots of room for improvement here.

Cheers,

Bob

P.S. I understand that work is being done on this, but an ETA would be greatly appreciated.

I still see that companies are expecting BI professionals to write SQL queries manually despite Alteryx giving complete solution. Idea is to spread value add of Alteryx in Indian market and global companies

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.

If we have similar workflows within the gallery saved and we need to make slight changes in the process to all of them, it would be helpful if we could open all workflows from the gallery by either mutliselect or using a checkbox next to those workflows that we wish to open all at once.  

When the Python Tool operates, it seems to always ingest all the data before processing any of it (i.e. no batch processing). Python can handle this type of functionality with generators, can we update the tool so that it may do some preprocessing (like imports and data prep) and allow a defined generator function to be called repeatedly from a separate input handle and provide batch data frames on output for more parallel-like processing of data?

The Python Tool could be updated as such:

• Multi-Input - Same functionality as now, and also allow this data to be used for preprocessing and setting up the Python functions and a single batch function.
• Data Input - Ingests data in batches (as most other tools operate) where each batch passes in a dataframe (in this case, a subset of processed entries) into an existing Python function (with a name that is in globals()), and returns another dataframe with that desired output. This can give the option of adding/removing rows as necessary to a subset of the data.
• Data Output - Partial set of data after data processing to allow tools further in the chain to process in parallel.
• "On Complete" Multi-Outputs - Same functionality as now, to pass process-complete data to the next tool once all data ingested has been processed. Perhaps give the option to pass the complete set from Data Output.

A simple use-case, if a user wanted to use only the Python Tool:

Let's say a user wants to get all URLs from every post in a thread (containing millions of posts) that are in blacklisted domains.

1. Data prep that sends the list of blacklisted domains into the Python Tool's Multi-Input handle, and that data is transformed and stored in a set within the Python tool once.
2. A series of posts (strings) are sent in batches (let's say ~10000) to the Data Input of the Python Tool. The tool calls a defined Python function that extracts all the URLs, and filters those in the blacklist.
3. That data is then transformed into a DataFrame which is then sent to the Data Output of the Python Tool, and only contains results corresponding to the small batch of posts that were ingested. Alteryx can also use this to track progress during execution.
4. Once all posts have been processed, one of the Python Tool's Multi-Outputs can return a total count of URLs found that were NOT in the blacklist (sure this can be a part of the Data Output, but just for the sake of this example). Could also be used to trigger "on-complete events."

I know I used the term "generators" above, and the design could probably be simplified to instead call an Alteryx Python function that yields from a function to await input from the next batch to use actual Python generators. However, I feel my initial approach could be thought of as a simpler process since generators are more of an intermediate functionality.

I hope this makes sense and is elaborate enough to pursue. Thanks for the consideration!

It would be incredible helpful if Alteryx canvases auto-populated some metadata about each canvas to track its origination and updates.

The metadata fields I'm specifically thinking about are:

-Author

-Date Created

-Date Last Updated