Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Support for Markdown in Comment Tool

Allows for better formatting of comment and possibly include images and hyperlinks.

This will be great for workflow documentation.

Currently, the comment box can only be formatted as a whole and not on individual text.

When looking at a complex canvas - my first instinct is to group this into sub-modules (e.g. "/load Data"; "clean data") to make this simpler to understand.

We mostly do this through the use of Containers.

However - it would be more useful if you could then take an entire container and convert this to a macro.    This would be very similar to the way that Visual Studio allows you to take a block of code and convert it to a sub-procedure.

This would be a super-quick way to allow people to make canvasses more maintainable and easier to understand and test!

Thank you 

Sean

When I'm organizing my workflow, sometimes I want to move a whole tool container on the canvas. Currently, the only way to do this is to first find the header then select and drag this. When the ends of the container is off screen, it can be hard to know how much I wanted to move my container to get it where I wanted relative to the other tools around it. I feel like it would be nice to be able to select anywhere on the tool container and drag it around (possibly holding right click and dragging so that current tool selection capabilities aren't hindered).

In the (simplified) images below, you'll see that I want my tool container to vertically align just above the browse tool:

I can't currently see the top of the tool container to move it, though, so I must first navigate to that part of the workflow to select the header.

One major improvement in version 11 is that you can now schedule workflows directly in the Gallery. One thing I miss though is the ability to see the whole log from the workflow (messages, warnings and conversion errors).

I have made a workaround by using the list runner (Crew Macros), but I think this should be a functionality on the server itself.

To see the workaround and the expected output, you can watch this video:

https://vimeo.com/214995668

Add ability to lock comment boxes size, shape, position (send to back), location on the canvas. This would allow a developer to use a template when creating workflow without accidently selecting and/or adjusting these attributes. It will also allow a user to put a tool over the top of the comment box without fear of messing up the visual display of the workflow or it getting hidden underneath the comment box.

When building a workflow with testing tools, you tend to want to be able to put these in container and then minimise this to improve readability of the workflow.

For example instead of this:

You might want to minimise the error checks like this:

However when running apart from reading through the results window, there is no immediate indicator that there is a tool inside the container that has errored:

So the feature enhancement request is to add in an exclamation marker to show the user that a tool inside has an error and you can then easily open it up and investigate further.

I would like to see a "tool" that you can use as an off-screen connection (pair) between data anchors.  Currently, you can create "wireless" connections between anchors.  This essentially helps, but isn't friendly if you add/modify contents between points A & B.  It also doesn't aid in documentation of the workflow.

If by comparison, I put a connection tool on at point A it would be great to see it annotate itself with the incoming Tool ID and when I connect it to the paired point B, it would similarly explain the incoming tool id onto that point too.

I currently use a SELECT tool to explain visually that this data is being used elsewhere.  I create a wireless connection to the receiving data (could be multiple) and document the source.  The performance of the workflow may be slowed by these select tools.

I'm very open to other ideas or reformats of this proposal.  I don't think that it is going to change the world, but it would help me with my OCD.

Cheers,

Mark

Hi, I'm becoming a heavy user of the Documentation Tools known as containers and comments. However, I am currently finding it tedious that I have to alter their settings individually or alternatively have to copy and paste a container or comment that has the formatting I want to replicate the formatting of.

I would like to be able to document the containers and comments quickly and then assess how each of them will be assigned colour and fonts to make the readability of the End to End workflow easier. I find in the Microsoft Office products the copy formatting paint brush is really good for this, it would be great if Alteryx could offer a similar function. 

It's not a world changer in terms of functionality but it would improve the user experience and the speed at which I could produce a tidy ETL workflow using Alteryx. 

Today I have some workflows which have certain steps that occur after files are output.  I have these set up inside of Tool Containers so that I can easily enable/disable them as I am working if I do not want to produce output for this particular run.  However, sometimes if I need to troubleshoot on a workflow that I haven't worked on for awhile, I can neglect to disable these, which can cause errors.  This is usually harmless, but annoying.

Having two more options on Tool Containers could really help to improve this!

Disable When Browse Tools Disabled would be useful for any analysis/debugging steps that I only want to run when I am browsing to find data, but should not run otherwise.

Disable When Output Disabled would be really useful to ensure that these tools are turned off alongside the "Disable all tools that write output" option in Workflow-Configuration-Runtime.

This would save me a lot of unnecessary error messages and moments of panic, and would make these types of workflows easier for other users to debug without extensive notes.

While I was trying to integrate Alteryx workflows into modern data catalogues got me thinking about the transformation lineage. To integrate the transformations into those applications, an understanding of what transformations are happening and in what order is needed. Why not take this one step further for documentation use?

So my suggestion is:

Create a natural language description of the transformations and sequencing of a workflow. This could be used as the default descriptions and exported as a readme file for reviewing (e.g. during workflow handover activities), adding workflows to version control or project plans. 

Often times when I'm building a workflow I categorize and bucket my tools into different containers.

It would be awesome if I could copy and paste the format of one container tool to another - that is the color, the size (e.g. none, small, large, etc.). I don't think the title needs to be copied, but if that was included in the feature, well that would be great!

Thanks for the awesomeness you provide!

J

Maybe they get bigger when you hover, so its easier to grab? Thanks 🙂

*This is an idea from @sayuri from the Portuguese Community*

• Create a tool to document the workflow process, including exporting a file/table that shows the connections from all tools and their main configurations in the order the workflow is run

Ideas:

1. In the workspace (i.e. the white space) the perimeter is not fixed so when working with tool containers near a border and you place a tool inside the container the container expands outside the workspace, which makes the container useless since you can't select it
2. The ability to disable multiple tool containers at once

 R

I think it would be a nice feature if a user were able to export the list of tools and annotations in a way to use as the foundation of a process memo (or simply listed sequentially in an appendix). We're using Alteryx for tax data prep processes and documentation of the process is important.  So I believe getting the workflow into words would be a great addition.

It would be nice to have the ability to double click the top area of a container to either show or hide the container's objects. Only being able to show or hide containers using the arrow icon in the top right is quite cumbersome for large containers because it requires a lot of horizontal scrolling in order to change the desired view of the modules workflow.

The COMMENT tool has a number of default settings.  It would save me a lot of time if the Designer could remember the last settings used.  

This is the panel I am referring to:

Problem: The visual nature of Alteryx is one of its key selling points. The idea is to make work flows understandable. But when you're building something complicated, the lines cease being a helpful visualization and become a confusing mess instead. Lines cross each other. Lines cross out annotations. I know that there's wireless connections, but using too many of those makes the data flow hard to trace. So I spend time moving tools and boxes around, trying to get lines to cooperate, instead of chasing that thrill of solving. 

Solution: Users should be able to click the line and place an anchor which affects the line just like a tool would, but without doing anything to the data. It would just be a little point, not a full tool.  That way I could make the lines dodge my annotations without placing needless select tools or moving everything around. It could be located in the Documentation tab. 

Thanks for reading,

BG

At first I was going to suggest a new tool, but I think this works better as a configuration item.  Some users, myself included, develop workflows with several containers intended to allow portions of the workflow to be turned on and off for the purpose of debug, more efficient development, etc.  Managing which containers are enabled and disabled can become cumbersome and time-consuming.

I propose a new tab in the Workflow Configuration to allow the user to easily enable/disable containers.  The Container configuration tab would list all containers by their tool number and caption. Each container would also have a state slider (Enabled/Disabled) that would show the current state of the container.    The user could click any container's state slider to enable/disable as desired.  An "all" slider that enabled/disabled all containers would also be helpful. 

This enhancement would centralize container management and save developers a lot of time.

Thanks for your consideration.