Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

In Powerpoint, you can right-click on a picture and replace it with a different picture without losing formatting.

Similar functionality would be useful for replacing custom macros.

• I would like to be able to switch an old version of a custom macro with a new version in situ, without losing the connections to other tools, interface tools, or location in a container. 

Currently, the only option is to insert the new custom macro and then reset all incoming and outgoing connections. Some downstream tools (e.g., crosstab) lose their existing settings and that has to be reset too. On complicated workflows, this can introduce silent errors.

This capability would be especially helpful for team coding, where different team members are revising different modules for a parent workflow.

Currently:

Right-clicking on the canvas shows Insert > Macro > (choose from list of open macros)

Right-clicking on an existing macro shows Open Macro

New functionality:

Right-clicking on an existing macro shows Replace/Change Macro > (choose from list of open macros)

Can we get the input tool to automatically convert long filenames to the 8.3 convention inside of a macro?

I've written a batch macro that individually opens files in order to trap files that fail to open. However, when I pass in really long file names it bombs because beyond some length the Input tool converts the path to 8.3 but that logic doesn't fire inside of my macro.

Example of filename:
\\ccogisgc1sat\d$\Dropbox (Clear Channel Outdoor)\Mapping\BWI MapInfo\Workspaces\Local\AEs\Archives\Cara\Sunrise Senior Living\Washington+DC_Adults+55++With+HHI+Of+$75,000++Who+Are+Caregiver+Of+Aging+Parent_Relative+Or+Planning+To+Shop+For+Nursing+Care_Assisted+Living_Retirem.TAB

I have reviewed a number of batch macros that work well for mirroring the "NetworkingDays" excel calculation but it would be great to add an interval type for "weekdays" to the DateTimeDiff formula ie

 DateTimeDiff ( [Date01],[Date02], "WorkDays")  where any Saturday or Sunday between the dates would be discounted.

If an organisation wants many Designer users to have the same macros available to them, they have to set up their own network drive to save the macros to and share that drive to all users and ensure each user has read access to it and then maps that drive to their macros. 

Instead of relying on this shared drive architecture, macro builders should be able to publish their macros to a collection in Gallery and then end users should be able to map that collection to their Macros in Designer.

It would keep the sharing of macros within the Alteryx platform and make sharing macros much more intuitive and frictionless.

Adding "Lightning Bolt" connectors to the standard workflow tools to allow dynamic automation of the settings would be a game changer. I believe that this would enable us to create universally dynamic and adaptive workflows which could be used as drop in solutions for most datasets. This would turn the standard tools into a dynamic ones and dramatically reduce the tool count to accomplish dynamic tasks, and make complex workflows much easier to internalize. Making standard workflow tools more dynamic would allow us to easily dynamically incorporate conditional tests / values / fieldname selections / bypass / etc into tools like detour / filter / formula / unique / transpose / crosstab / summarize / Outputs / etc. I would also like to see the ability to utilize a bool field to bypass any given tool in a workflow. That way we could do things like conditionally bypass an entire formula tool which would dramatically simplify complex formula construction, turn on and off inputs / outputs, simplify error avoidance, etc.

In order to build complex dynamic conditional workflows with the current tool capabilities, most of us are forced to use custom macros (often a multitude of workflow specific ones as well), constantly add and remove formula created fields for message relay, and create complex multi-routings / tests / unions in a standard workflow with large numbers of tools and containers. This hides many of our tasks within short-term use fields / custom macros and it makes the rest of our workflows voluminous and less intuitive.

On the User Interface side, I recommend a simple approach. Next to the standard tool setting there should be a dynamic input option which allows you to select the source field in the lightning bolt connector. Next to that, there should be an icon that can be clicked on to pop up a short text description and a basic screen shot of data in the correct format for dynamic input. I would also like to see a check box at the bottom for manual tool "bypass" which can also be dynamically controlled. (This would especially be helpful on outputs, but it would also be helpful to allow formulas and filters to be kept in place for future use even when they should not currently be used) Turned off tools could be highlighted in a red background or something.

This would be useful for anyone creating dynamic and adaptive workflows, but it would especially expand Alteryx Designer's capability to attract more custom software developers like me.  It would dramatically reduce the need for a large number of complex workflow specific macros that clutter our systems. Users that find the traditional workflow tool approach easier for them could easily use the tools as normal by simply using the standard manual settings. Advanced users could simplify the creation of universally dynamic and self adaptive workflows.

So - given the importance of Macros - it would be valuable to have the ability within Alteryx to generate a test harness with test data that ships with the macro (this way you can maintain and enforce regression testing)

For example:

- Macro that takes in 2 numbers and adds them

- Alteryx would look at the Macro to determine the input types, output types (in this case - two integers; with an integer output)

- Based on this, it could walk you through creating a fairly robust test harness that allowed the user to specify a set of inputs, and prompt you to also include things like blanks; negatives; etc (boundary values; deliberately destructive values like % or ' signs in strings; etc)

With the Action Tool, if you use the "Update Value" action type, you have the ability to check the "Replace a specific string" option

If you use the "Update Value with Formula" action type, you no longer have the option to Replace a specific string.

Can't think of any reason why we should not have the ability to replace a specific string while using "Update value with formula"

Please can you add this in next release?

I would love to have a User Setting Default where it allows the "Show All Macro Messages" to be on for all workflows instead of having to turn it on for each workflow.

Advanced User Settings

In the previous tools the information lab had build for publishing to Tableau server, they had the incremental TDE refresh option available. I would like to see that included in the Publish to Tableau Server Macro. We often just want to add previous day data to a YTD data extract without running the full data set from our Datawarehouse. The full set takes long and a daily increment / add only would take a couple minutes.

There is an irony in asking for what is essentially the Alteryx version of 'Formula Wizard' from Excel

As great as the guides have been in the community, the Batch Macro is one of most difficult to repeat and explain.

It would be great for users to have a prompt that recognises a Directory input of excel files and at the point of adding a Macro, having a series of prompts at each stage help build out the desired result (whether that be returning all sheets or specific sheets).

It would further highlight one the great features & key enablers of Alteryx 

Currently, when multiple tabs are created in the Interface Designer, Alteryx will require the user to click through all tabs before running the app.  Many times, extra tabs are there for advanced settings that may confuse the average user.

I propose a check box in the Tab Configuration to allow the tab to be a "background, or silent" tab, that is not clicked through in the process of running the app.

Currently I am running two version of Alteryx and some of the macros were created/updated in the newer version of Alteryx. I would like to see only one error message displayed for all of the macros created in a newer version rather than having a dialog box pop up a dozen plus times (one for each macro) every time I open an instance.

Macro Error Message

Hi All,

Did you all experience when building a iterate macro this situation?

When you have no idea why the output is different from what you want,

hence, you remove the rows/ data to force the data run only 2 iterate, review the result.

then, you add back the rows/ data to force the data run only 3 iterate, review the result 

then 4, 5 and etc... until we found the issue.

so it was important that we can view how the result of each iterate to enable us to identify the issue quicker and more efficient.

Example output

The output may like below: (with a option to let user to choose of cause)

if input data is 3 and the macro is to multiply 2 and power of 2 every iterate. (1st iterate=3*2^2, 2nd iterate=12*2^2)

just add one column in front to show the iterate and rest is the result.

Hi all,

When testing a macro with interface tools in use - the value that is used if running in normal execution (hit the big play button) is 0 or blank, irrespective of the value set for default on the component.

e.g.

• put an up-down component on a canvas with a default value of 200
• Then hook it up to a formula box
• Then output the value 
• The value which is output is 0

Please can you change this so that the value passed through the interface tools in testing mode is the specified & configured default value?

Thank you

Sean 

Recursion is a common task that we perform while creating ETL process. There should be some way in the macro to allow recursion process, i.e. taking value from the output in macro and providing it as input to the control parameter. 

Adding this feature could improve ETL capabilities within Alteryx

When you right click on a Macro tool (e.g. Google Analytics) within a workflow, you can choose the version of the tool to use. However, it does not indicate which version of the tool is already in use. 

Why is this an issue for me?

I have a workflow with 15 instances of the Google Analytics tool.  (I needed to use the API for each month fo GA data and then use a join. I built it this way due to the restriction on the number of records.)

So when I update the Google Analytics tool I have to do it 15 times. I'd like to be sure the update is needed before I start. 

Alteryx Support confirm that there is no way to tell which version of the macro is in use. 

When output is disabled, Alteryx's output tools are helpfully grayed out and include the message 'output has been disabled by the workflow properties.'

However, if a macro has an output, there is no visual indicator that output is disabled, even though the macro's output will also be suppressed by this workflow configuration.

Obviously, macros can be very complex, and could have both a file and a macro output, or have an optional file output, so these cannot be entirely locked out just because there is an output.

To that end, I suggest some other kind of color-coding/shading be applied visually to these tools, and that a message be added to the interface for these macros that says something like "output has been disabled, this macro may not perform all of its functions".

I just spent about 10 minutes debugging why a macro wasn't working properly in one workflow but was working in another, and it was because I had disabled output, which I wasn't thinking of because this particular macro uses the Render tool to produce a hyperlink.  I wouldn't have spent more than 30 seconds on this if there was some kind of visual indicator showing me what I was doing wrong!

I often receive .xlsb files from clients that have different sheetnames that I'd like to incorporate in input batch macros.

I think it would be awesome if I could read in the list of sheetnames from .xlsb files as well in order to be able to build such batch macros to input data from multiple .xlsb files.

J

Up to version 10.0 I could open pretty much all analytics tools as a macro, to tweak things in R or in the macro workflow to get the results in a way most useful to us.

But apparently with Alteryx 11.0 the newer tools does not have that option, Although we can still access the older versions of those tools and still open them as macro but I don't understand (may be because they have interactive report option) why that is being killed in the newer versions? 

Most of the newer versions have new features, like Linear Regression now support elastic net and cross validation etc.. but I still want to be able to go in to them to tweak them.