Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

When manually configuring a Union tool within a module/app, once it's saved, if you go in at any point in the future, and change anything upstream from the Union Tool, it causes an error "[some field name] has been changed and the Union Tool needs to be reconfigured".

This happens even if you do not reconfigure any upstream tools, but mearely access them, physically move them, say, an inch to the left or something like that, etc.  Basically if you just "touch" any tool upstream, the Union Tool thinks that the manual config needs to be done over.  But even if you do reconfig the Union Tool (either delete it and bring a new one in, or change the current one to Auto and then back to manual), it STILL does not recognize the tool as being correct.

The only way I have found to correct this issue is to click Play, and let it throw the error.  Add Select Tools before the Union Tool to change the names to be common, then click on the Union Tool, and switch it to auto.  Then click Play again.  This can be very inconvenient if you have a module that takes hours (although you can limit your input records).

My suggestion would be to either disable the manual configuration, or add notes to the Help Files stating to use the manual configuration at your own risk, because once it's set and works at the time of creation, you cannot modify any upstream tools thereafter or else it will break the Union Tool and it cannot be repaired -- only choice is to use the Select Tool as I described above

On the UNION tool, allow for deselecting columns that aren't relevant.  Leave the union exactly as it is, and you could go into the manual configuration. Align the columns just as you would in the manual configuration.  The addition would be that you have the behavior like you see in a join tool where you could deselect C1, C2, C3.... Cx. 

 

Too many times I have a union and there are fields I simply don't even want to bring in, but then have to add a select tool right after in order to remove them. 

Hi,

 

This idea is to suggest we add additional comparison capability to the Designer Join tool to more closely mirror what is possible in SQL. Usually, teams work around this limitation by adding tools after the Join tool (or using SQL queries at the start of a workflow), but it would be great to do this in the Join Tool itself.

 

The current Join Tool in Alteryx only allows for exact field comparisons, but not for more flexible joins, such as the example below

 

LOAD * FROM Table A

LEFT Join Table B

ON A.Firstname=B.FirstName

And A.Country <> B.Country

AND A.Lastname LIKE (B.Lastname)

OR A.Nationality = B.Nationality

 

I've drawn a mock-up of what I think could be enhancements to the existing tool. In simple terms, I think there are these options for improvement:

 

1. When joining on specific fields, allow the user to specify operators for how the fields should join, e.g. Field A=Field B and Field C  !Contains  Field D (almost like the Filter Tool does this). This could be enabled by permitting operators in the menu between the 2 fields, as illustrated below

 

2. Have the option to say that if either field matches, you'd like to join (i.e. option to choose if this is an AND or OR join condition). A new field would need to be made to the left of the field selection, as illustrated below

 

3. Perhaps there could be the option to write the expression as you would a formula for the Error message tool (but in a positive context), e.g. Field A != Field B

 

4. How about enabling the Left Join/Right Join/Full Outer Join options from within the Join tool? E.g. if you select the Venn Diagram buttons, you will return your selection? If you don't want to compromise existing capability, you can automatically add a pre-configured Union tool (with the correct left/right/join inputs) after the Join tool based on the user's selection?

 

 

Regards,

Tom

The US Address/Company Name/Zip Code Fuzzy Match template options are great. If there isn't already, it would be great if there was a UK version of these too!

Hi team,

 

I have a set of data that contains functional mapping of cost centers of the organisation. Such mapping is maintained by an administrator in the system and he manages and modifies/add changes.

 

Administrator does not consider the case sensitivity and sometime may write the same function name in UPPER and Proper case say for example "OPERATIONS" and "Operations"

 

I need to use such mapping in a workflow where I need to extract unique function names from the mapping.

 

Since a function has more than one cost centers so there are multiple lines for a function name in the mapping. 

 

I used Unique tool to do this. But this tool has a limitation that it considers the case sensitivity and reads the same word written in different case type as two unique values.

 

So in my case the i got two lines for the same function - one in UPPER case i.e. "OPERATIONS" and other with Proper case i.e. "Operations"

 

In order to tackle this problem, I used formula tool to convert entire text in uniform case type and then applied Unique tool.

 

Suggestion : I suggest enhancing the Unique tool to give user an option to configure it to consider case sensitivity while selecting unique values from the data.

As an international organization we deal with clients in multiple-countries.

 

Name matches for names including Chinese characters generate a unicode conversation warning and are excluded from the fuzzy match.

 

It would be good if fuzzy match could be enhanced to handle Chinese characters.

To add the capability to hard rename the columns in all modes 

One of the common issues when you build macros is the error "the schema of macro output XXX has changed between iterations"

 

So the next step that we commonly follow is to put a select tool into the flow just before the macro output - and convert all the fields to a specific type; untick the "unknown" field; and then sometimes have to go into the XML to add the "Forced = true" flag into the XML so that it doesn't change over time:

 

Please could you add an option under the "Options" tab to force / lock down the type of every field with one click?     That would eliminate dozens of clicks on every creation of a macro.

 

Thank you 

Sean

 

 

I am using Union Tool to effectively append two datasets that share about 30 columns, but the field names are slightly different so I had to manually configure fields. The primary dataset has 300+ columns and none of these can be dropped... The process of clicking the arrows to align the fields is driving me nuts lol

 

Can we have the 'drag and order' feature in Append Fields Tool? That would be much appreciated!

I haven't been able to find a similar idea, but I have a scenario were I'm fully joining a dataset but I get a mismatch of column names.

 

When using the column renaming functionality in the Join tool, data sent through the Left or Right connector is not renamed. When I'm performing a Full Join the Union tool is adding these columns to the resulting table.

 

The renaming column functionality of the Join Tool should apply to all join types for consistency. My workaround has been to avoid renaming columns in the Join tool if aiming to perform a multi-join.

 

I would like Alteryx to offer a native Fuzzy Join tool that allows two datasets with completely different schemas to be joined using Fuzzy matching logic (Dice coefficient algorithm, Levenshtein distance algorithm, etc.). Any matches would be output to a new table with either exactly matched or fuzzy matched primary and secondary records. I want this tool be supported by Server as well.

I don't know if this has been implemented or talked about, but it would be a pretty nice QoL change to add a select all button when appending fields to record via the find and replace tool. 

For example, I  have a dataset where I will end up with 1000+ fields needed to be appended. Going through and clicking 1000 times is not ideal. If this is already a feature or has a hotkey, please let me know.

Hello,

In cases where more than one field is being used in a join, the "Join (Tool ID) String fields can only be joined to other string fields" error message could be improved by indicating which field has a mismatch.

 

For example, if I'm joining Fields A, B, C, D... to fields Z, Y, X, W... in Join tool 24, and for some reason Field Z gets changed from String to Double, it'd be nice to see a message like:

"Join (24) (Field 1) String Fields can only be joined to other String fields"

or

"Join (24) String Fields can only be joined to other String fields (A)"

 

So that I know I need to go to a select tool and change the type of either A or Z.

 

Otherwise I look at the Join tool output and try to figure out which pair no longer has matching types, which can take a minute when dealing with a multiple-point join.

 

Thank you!

Hi Folks

 

So have been using the fuzzy match function quite a bit of recently. Love the tool, however it could benefit form being able to wire in a list of 'Don't generate' keywords. 

At the moment we can enter them manually, however where for example i might want to exclude city or area names etc... from the do not generate list this becomes quite a tedious manual entry task, so being able to load in keyword data from pre-existing lists etc.. would be a time saver. 

 

Cheers

 

Gavin

 

 

Hi, when using the Join tool, I sometimes wish there are separate "*Unknown" fields for each of the left and right input.

I have occasions where the left input can be dynamic(modified upstream), but the right input fixed.

 

It's annoying to fix all join tool's selection when there are modifications in the upstream part.

 

 

I am aware there are posts on this in the community and that there is a macro available to do this on the public gallery, however I think this is such important functionality that it should be incorporated into the main product.  I want to be able to join 2 data sources by a date range.  In SQL the code would look like this:

 

select ric.*,map.*
from
Staging.TicksHourlySummary ric
LEFT OUTER JOIN Reference.ReutersInstrumentCodeMap map
on (
ric.#RIC = map.ReutersInstrumentCode
and ric.[Datetime] >= map.EffectiveFromDate
and ric.[Datetime] < map.EffectiveToDate

)

 

 

I would like to see a pre-built visual flag or message/warning that shows if the join I made was cartesian or not.

 

To avoid cartesian joins I sometimes add a unique or summarize tool before the L or R inputs or add a message tool after the join.

 

If I don't do that then I sometimes calculate if the number of records in the L + C and L + R joins don't match up to the L and R input records.

 

It would be nice for Alteryx to be able to show some indication of if a cartesian join happened or not without having to add the extra tools or manual calculations

 

Something akin to Canvas>Connection Progress>Show Only When Running to be updated with the added functionality of Show with Cartesian Join Flags

Hi All,

I think this suggestion would be be ideal for the Join tool and it's related cousins (Join Multiple etc.) and would improve the experience of data blending for all users.

I am going to rely on Qlik Sense for this explanation as this functionality is native to that product.

 

When we bring in two data sources and use the join tool to blend we are required to select the field or fields upon which we want to base our join.

In Qlik Sense we can see our two data sources:

 

 

We can then drag them together and it will form suggestions based on data association density:

 

 

This helps with identifying how tables should be joined, and at the very least shows commonalities between data streams, based on the data within the tables and not any naming conventions.

It would be nice to have the functionality to generate suggestions based on association density between two data streams, and then to apply the join from a selection.

 

 Thoughts?

Sometimes I find myself having to union too many tools together and get bothered with the drag-and-drop repetition. It'd be nice to be able to select multiple tools and have a "Union All" in the right-click menu that creates a union tool that is connected to the output of all the selected tools. 

 

It's kind of like a smarter "Insert After"