Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I'd like to see the DateTimeLastOfMonth and DateTimeFirstOfMonth functions be more flexible then just getting the first or last date of the current month. It would be great if you could point to a date field and have it give the first or last date of that month. i.e  DateTimeLastOfMonth([randomdate]) and if the [randomdate] = December 3rd, 1981, the result would bring back 1981-12-31

Hello, 

 

It was be nice if we could see the Regex Tool be a little more interactive. I am thinking a little more similar to the Formula tool where you can have expression display. I often use this site first https://regex101.com/  to practice a Regex formula before applying it. I love how this site highlights the data as you build the expression and also provide a comprehensive quick reference. Just an idea to make it easier for those non Regex experts. 

 

Thanks, 

 

Derek 

Please extend the DateTime tool to parse ISO 8601 / RFC 3339 type timestamps as well.

 

These are quite commonly used in APIs nowadays and currently require manual RegEx parsing and DateTime calculations.

Hey Community,

 

How many times do you need to follow a Text to Columns tool with a data cleanse tool? For me it seems almost every time

 

Wouldn't it be great if Alteryx could incorporate some of the data cleanse functionality into the the Text to Columns?

 

If you agree VOTE NOW!

 

@LordNeilLord

Part time Tableau, Part Time Alteryx. Full Time Awesome

To navigate through XML document you need several parse tools to drill down to an element because you can only use element names

 

It would be nice if you case use an xml path (xpath) because of the rich syntax.

 

With xpath, we could specify ship_to/address/city or bill_to/address/city

Currently the only encoding method supported by Alteryx Avro format is deflate.  Please consider improving this to include google snappy approach.

 

This codec method is referenced in the Avro documentation for supported codex.

 

https://avro.apache.org/docs/1.7.6/spec.html#Required+Codecs

 

The XML Parse tool has a checkbox to ignore errors and continue.  This idea works for all options that allow you to ignore errors.  It would be great if XML Parse had 2 outputs, 1 for successful records and another for the errored records.  This would make it much easier to identify and update (if necessary) errored records.

In my view this would make it more similar to other tools like Filter or Spatial Match where records that don't fit your criteria follow a different flow.

 

Thanks for considering

With the increase number of JSON feeds and the need to properly define the data type for date and date/time fields. It would be useful to have the Auto Field tool detect common date and date/time formats from Strings and assign the Date, Date Time, or Time data type.

 

Given the following input data:

 

 

The select tool confirms is a String

 

 

If we use the Auto Field as:

 

The result is still a String data type (2nd Select Tool)

 

 

I would expect this to be Date Time.

 

One solution would be to create a formula and parse it, but this is not suitable for situations that the field names are unknown.

 

It would be much easier to have the work done by Auto Field.

 

I'm wondering about migrating from SAS DATA STEP to Alteryx tools and R...

 

Idea is to parse DATA STEP, replace data loading, preperation, filetring, formula and iterative flows with native Altryx tools and

for the rest, PROC's etc will be replaced by R packages... Wouldn't that be like magic?

 

 

 

 

You should at least have the option to output datetime in a datetime datatype from the DateTimeNow component.  Currently it outputs a string so you have to use another component to parse the datetime to datetime datatype.

So in my line of business we get .txt or .dat files that we consider are dump files with customer data in it. The prior record keeper would then provide their layout that determines where certain participant data lives within those files. So currently we have multiple INPUT DATA tools that all parse for different records using the 'Read it as fixed width text file' radio button in the Resolve File Type window and then 'Use Field Settings from File' that we've created from .flat files.

 

FILE FIELD PARSE 01FILE FIELD PARSE 02FILE FIELD PARSE 03

As you can see above each 'RECORD' has a different field setting within the same file. This is fine when it's a few records but we have some prior record keepers that have 15-40 different records within the same dump file. Because of this, our workflows are being bogged down by having to continually open the same file over and over and apply a different file field setting. So I am suggesting we pull Field settings into a separate tool, sort of like a text to column tool but instead of parsing by a specific delimiter it parses by a specific .flat file that contains Field Settings. so instead of our workflow looking like it does above, it would look something like this:

I suggest to add the functionality to parse date strings containing non-English month/day names into Date format

Maybe by detecting the display language of Windows or the language of the DateTime format in Windows settings.

 

For example, right now in Alteryx, DateTimeParse('July 2008','%B %Y') works fine, but for French month name, DateTimeParse('Juillet 2008','%B %Y') returns null !

and when calling DateTimeFormat(DateTimeNow(), '%B') we would like to have "Juillet" instead of "July" for French version of Windows/DateTime settings.

 

Right now, we need to use workaround solutions like SWITCH to solve this issue!

I have many monthly financial reports in MS Word that is build up on the same structure (same headings, tables etc.). I would like to import those reports into Alteryx in order to structured and analyse the data in Alteryx and presenting later in Power BI. 

 

A good solution might be a tool that read the word document and input one row for each paragraph, including some paragraph information like style (e.g. Heading 1, Heading 2, Normal, Punctuation etc.). Where there are tables in the document; several fields should be added and separated in Field 1, Field 2... in order to extract and analyse the content of each table. 

 

Ref. also the discussion Input Data from Word document (.docx) and the idea Natively Support PDF as Input.

This might be an edge case, but it would be nice to be able to parse a file using a Regex in the Text to Columns Tool, or specifying a delimiter as a Regex:

Consider the following pandas code where one can easily pull in a file with a bad delimiter

In Alteryx, you would be forced to read in the file with no delimiter, and set the field length to be extremely long, and parse out the contents manually.

 

filename = "http://daniels-pull.universityofdenv.netdna-cdn.com/assets/GeneralOccurrencesAll.csv"

df = pd.read_csv(filename, sep=r',(?!\s)')

 

I'm working on loading some public data available as an .xls doc on the web. I can use the download tool to fetch the file, but then have to save it, and reopen it in a separate input data tool. It would be so much easier if I could just flow the download result into an excel parser tool, but I don't see that as an option unless the download file is XML or CSV.

For the split to rows function on text to columns, can we have an option in the configuration to warn/error on too many records being generated just like the append fields tool but replace the words appends with splits?

 

 

Hello,

 

when parsing XML data, Alteryx does not recognise <![CDATA as being data. This type of XML file is not very common yet is still used today (by me anyway!). Their role is similar to commenting your code in some regards (for those who code).

 

Could it be possible to add a functionality to alteryx so that we can have it consider the data between these "tags" to be data? 

 

Regards,

 

Julien

 

 

I would be great to have a json-stat parser. There are probably ways of doing it with the JSON parser but it is appears to be a little bit tricky.
Also, it would be nice to be able to use a json-file as input in a simple manner.

It would be good if in the date format option for the Parse tools etc, if there was an option for the 1900 date format used sometimes in Excel/SQL. This is where the date is represented as the number of days from 1/1/1900. If this support was added then the same support for time be represented as a decimal {0,1} would be good as well. Besides this being a nice addition to the software, it would also help with any workarounds stemming from an excel file being open when imported causing the format to come through differently. (Currently if the Excel input file is open in the background which can happen on network available files, the time comes in to Alteryx asa decimal and the date appears as 1900 format).