Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

 

Example Data:
MJE Text	Ref Fld 1	Ref Fld 2	Ref Fld 3	Date	NTID
Accrual	MJE Load			11/1/2019	DAVET
Fx Reval	Accrual			12/2/2019	MOLLYI
		Acc		3/4/2019	BOBH
Forex Fx			CCRUAL	7/9/2019	GREGA
FASB				8/5/2019	BOT7
Tax				10/6/2019	BOT88

 

I want to use contains to search multiple strings and "IN" for multiple targets within the same formula. 

 

IF Contains(([MJE Text]+[Ref Fld 1]+[Ref Fld 2]+[Ref Fld 3) IN("Accrual","Acc","CCRUAL")) THEN "Accrual" ELSE "" ENDIF

 

Result would be:
MJE Text	Ref Fld 1	Ref Fld 2	Ref Fld 3	Date	NTID	Group
Accrual	MJE Load			11/1/2019	DAVET	Accrual
Fx Reval	Accrual			12/2/2019	MOLLYI	Accrual
		Acc		3/4/2019	BOBH	Accrual
Forex Fx			CCRUAL	7/9/2019	GREGA	Accrual

 

Can this be developed?

It'd be nice if there was a way to add an autofill function.  Say I was using a text tool and got tired of always typing the full name in (lazy, I know) or just didn't know the correct spelling.  It'd be nice if there was a check box where the app creator could allow for autofill or autoselect.  As the user typed in the text a drop down list would show changing as he user typed until the user saw what they were going to fully type.  They would then select that text from the drop down list.  Be a nice little feature.

I am having large denormalized tables as input, and each time I need to scroll down approx 700+ fields to get an exhaustive view of fields that are selected (even if I have selected 10 out of 700 fields).

 

It would be helpful if along with having a sort on field name and field type, I can have an additional sort on selected/deselected fields. Additionally if I can get sort by more than one options i.e sort within an already sorted list that will help too - i.e. sorted selected first and inside that selected by field name.

 

I can get an idea of selected fields from any tool down the line (following the source transformation), but I would like to have an exhaustive view of both selected and unselected fields so that I can pick/remove necessary fields as per business need.

The Record ID tool can take a custom starting value other than the default of 1. I sometimes have a case in which I want the starting value to begin with 1 + the max of another field. I can either do this with a macro or with Append and Formula tools. This is just one example. If I have the ability to use an expression as the Starting Value, then I can do the 1 + max or something else cool and useful.

When building out a large workflow, I'd say one of the bigger challenges I come across is being able to quickly navigate the canvas to a certain spot. In these types of workflows, my personal way of keeping things organized is creating sections of my workflow in different Tool Containers and naming them with a short description.

 

Here is what I picture helping out a great deal in navigation. Create a drowdown somewhere in the ribbon on top (would not want another sidebar or floating window that takes up needed space) that simply lists out every tool container in my workflow by name. When a tool container name is selected, the view jumps to that tool container in the window pane. Another option in terms of the interface might be to add a keyboard short that gives a popup "tool container search" window. Begin typing a tool container name, and it would jump to the first result it sees as a match. Then just hit escape or click outside the popup to continue your work. 

 

I think this would help immensely in being able to jump to a particular spot in the workflow without having to drag the overview or scroll around until you are able to find it. I included mock-ups for each version I mentioned.

 

 

 

 

 

User Story:  As a data analyst, I want to be able to easily edit my data's meta-data, so that down-stream actions can easily consume and export my data. 

 

Currently, you can do a bulk edit of your data's metadata, however, this has to be done using the Multi-Field formula. However, this solution is non-intuitive, and seems to run counter to the solution design of Alteryx, where each and every step is it's own module. 

 

A single module handling bulk and single column/attribute metadata transformations and editing would be (a) much more intuitive and (b) save analysts time of hand editing meta-data. 

 

cheers! 

A multifilter tool would match excel capabilities and make users more comfortable making leap to Alteryx from excel/.

 

I pull alot of excel and text files through Alteryx; the files always have empty rows that make viewing the files through Alteryx unwieldy.  It is easy to filter one at a time but that is laborious,.  I put a post out to the community and others encountered same issue.  There was a macro built to bring this capability to Alteryx; it really should be a native feature.  I would rather not have to use a macro

 

Users in excel do sumifs, countifs where multiple fields are pulled into the formula.  The current filter tool in Alteryx only considers one column.  To match excel, the ability to bring multiple columns into the filter tool at once would match this capability.

 

Thanks,

 

Stan Grabish

(404) 925-3013

 

 

 

 

@RachelW 

 

I wanted to suggest unhiding select/deselect all in the Options menu for the "select tool".
There is enough space in the header right of "Options" to include select all/deselect checkboxes. or remove the Tip.

Select all/deselect is suppose to reduce clicks. By hiding in Options, it adds clicks. 

 

There are currently two different types of select tools. The dynamic select tool and the normal select tool. In my opinion there should only be 1 tool and it should be a mix of these two tools.

 

First the select tool is great because I can select the exact fields that I want, and I can pass new fields through using the "unknown" field. The dynamic select tool is also great because I can write formulas that dynamically select fields. Why not have one tool that does both?

 

In my mind, it would just look like the select tool, but then on the "unknown" field, I can click on it and configure it. It would basically just open the dynamic select tool interface where I can write formula's etc that select the unknown fields that I am willing to pass through.

 

For example.. clients add new fields to our data integrations all the time. A lot of the time I dont want these new fields to pass through automatically. But we also do reporting, and reporting could include column headers that are dates (ie sales may 18, sales june 18, etc). As new months appear in our sales data, new columns are added to our reports. I should have the capability to hardcode the fields I want to pass through and then write a formula for the remaining "unknown" fields. In this example I would check mark the fields I know I want, then write a formula that says if the unknown field starts with "sales" then pass it through.

 

Yes there are workarounds for this type of functionality (such as I could do a dynamic select tool and use the formula function to type in the name of EVERY field that I want to "hardcode"), but that would take a long time if I am trying to pass 10+ fields through.

Posting this idea after searching the community postings and then submitting a question to confirm:

 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Function-to-convert-to-from-HEX-encode...

 

I could invest the time into creating a macro to do what I need, or per @MichaelF suggestion a custom formula. However, the functionality already exists in the Blob Convert tool, so I'm suggesting that Alteryx provides that existing functionality to customers in a Formula.

 

I checked the Conversion formulas:

 

https://help.alteryx.com/2019.1/Reference/Functions.htm

 

And found other users talking about making a macro to do this:

 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Hex-to-ASCII-Conversion/m-p/344126

 

 

Could Alteryx add a new Conversion formula to convert a field to/from HEX/Base64 formats similar to the current Code Page conversion functions?

 

Thanks,

 

Cameron

It is nice that there is a sample node option for In-DB, however it isn't a random sample.  It isn't always feasible for me to stream out and use the random sample % option.  In fact on numerous occasions when I use the Data Stream Out option in DB I often times have workflows crash because it can't handle the number of records I am trying to stream out.

Alteryx has different behaviours for conversion errors depending on the type of conversion desired. When converting from string to date data type, a conversion error will generate a NULL value. When converting from a string to a numeric data type, a conversion error will generate 0. Why the different behaviours? There is a lack of harmony here. 0 is a valid value and should not be the generated value for a failed string to numeric conversion. It should be NULL.

 

When I perform data type conversions, i do not apply them directly to the source field and then cast it. If there is a conversion error, then I have lost or corrupted the source information. Rather, I create a target field with the desired data type and use a formula to apply a conversion, such as datetimeparse or tonumber. Finally, I do a comparison of the source and target values. If the datetimeparse generated a NULL then I can PROGRAMMATICALLY address it in the workflow by flagging or doing some other logic. This isn't so easy to do with numerics because of the generated 0 value. If I compare a string "arbitrary" to the generated 0 value as a string then clearly these do not match. However, if I compare a scientific value in a string to the converted numeric as a string, then these do not match though they should. My test of the conversion shows a false positive.

 

I want a unified and harmonised conversion behaviour. If the conversion fails, generate a NULL across the board please. If I am missing something here and people actually like conversion errors to generate 0 please let me know.

When I perform data type conversions I sometimes receive conversion errors. There is not a slick way to programmatically handle these that I am aware of. Instead, I have to manage them with half a dozen tools or really unsightly expressions in formula tools. As an example, I have a string field with a value "two" and I want to convert to a decimal or int. I receive a conversion error and the value is either "0.000" or "0". This is clearly wrong and I want to have a NULL value instead. I want to use a function to attempt the conversion in the formula tool so i can nest it inside conditionals in a cleaner fashion.

Here is a reference to the try_cast doc:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/try-cast-transact-sql?view=sql-server-2017

 

 

I love the new Basic Filter option and it makes writing filters easy/self-expanatory for new users and helps with functions like isnull(). However, I'm almost always writing what are now called 'Custom Filters' and it takes two clicks to do this.

From a User Experience perspective it would be great if you could click in the expression box to write the filter rather than having to check the customer filter check box, or start by creating a basic filter and then make it more complex using the custom filter box without having to check the tick box.

Following on from this and something that is probably a lot harder to implement - But with the new basic filter, it would be great to have a list of available fields populate the options to filter by - Similar to the option that you get in Calgary. E.g Country == and then the drop down list would contain whatever is available in the data (e.g. Spain, UK, USA, Etc...)

I would love to see a multi-output filter for cases where I want to route records to different places for processing based on the value of a single field. 

 

For example I want to filter each letter to a different destination:

Letter	Number
A	1
B	1
C	1
D	1
E	1
F	1
A	2
B	2
C	2
D	2
E	2
F	2

 

I would love to see a single tool that can send each letter to a different destination. See the attached screenshot for a concept of what this could look like. 

When using the 'Select' tool, often many columns are deselected, making it difficult to locate the remaining selected columns.  It would save time to move deselected columns to the bottom of the ‘Select’ tool configuration after leaving the tool.  Both selected and de-selected columns should retain their incoming field order within the group.

Create the ability to randomly sample X number of records. For example, randomly select 16 samples from a data set.

I think it will be useful if I have an option to add field description when new fields are being created (eg. formula tool, transformation tools etc.)

 

The case for this is I tend to create a lot of calculated fields by combining fields and applying transformations for exploration predictive possibilities, I want to capture description of the fields while they are being created (its not always possible to set the names descriptive enough)

 

As of now I think I can add description using select tool but that's not optimal

 

 

Thanks,

Option to add a description for each newly created filed in all data preparation and transformation steps. Although a description can be added in the select tool but that's an additional tool in already cluttered (most workflows).

My use case for this is I tend to create a lot of fields (dummy, interaction and transformation) for predictive modelling to come up with a best model. I can not always name the same filed in such a way that is descriptive enough but I want to capture my thought on why I created a particular field right when I am creating it.

 

Thanks,

Ashish Singhal