Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Currently when a unique tool is used, and a field is removed upstream then the workflow fails to move forward. If you have one or two unique fields being used then it is no big deal, but when you have a very complex workflow then you have to click into each one of those tools in order to update. This can be very problematic and creates a lot of time following all the branches that is connected after the 1st unique tool is used. My suggestion is to make this a warning instead of a fail or have an option to select fail or warning like the union tool is setup. This way people can decide how they want this tool to react when fields are removed. 

Include a tool specific configuration to allow for the ability to turn off annotations on that specific tool instead of the global setting to turn them all off.

This would especially be useful for the SORT tool.

I find myself wasting multiple clicks in order to eliminate the annotations every time I insert a sort tool into my process flow, since it is rare when I actually need to include an annotation.

Is it possible to add sort functionality to the Sample tool in Designer, similar to the 'Sample Based on Order' functionality in the Sample tool in Designer Cloud? This would cut down on the Sort + Sample tool combo in Designer!

Thanks!

The basic premise is this: 

Phantom spacing. Basically something that looks like it has spaces on Excel but is actually formatted as an indentation. 

Unfortunately, to read the indentation we will need either a VBA prep or read the XML inside. The latter of which is difficult. 

As to VBA, the general steps are to create an indentation formula in order to see the numbers, then go from there. The idea is credited to @clmc9601 as we discussed privately.

As of now, I do not see anyway to do this on Alteryx as a function or even expression. It would be very helpful especially reading trial balances or even Bloomberg outputs as they are formatted with indentation. 

Reading indentation from Excel or any other file within Alteryx will be much appreciated, especially in actuarial and finance spaces. 

In conjunction with the "First N% of Rows" and "Group by column (optional)" features, an additional option that would be great to have would be to tell the tool to take at least 1 record per group. If I am telling the tool to take the first 3% of records and grouping by a field, but one of the groups only has 5 records, it won't return any records for that group, as 3% of 5 is .15, so the tool rounds that down to 0. If I could also choose an option for the tool to always round up, that would also be sufficient.

In the formula tool, you can generate uniform random values using the RAND() function.

I would like to have similar functionality to get normal random values by calling RANDN().

As a workaround, the values can be produced from a Python tool using 

numpy.random.randn()

Python documentation on numpy.random.randn.

The full script below produces 100 random normal values in a column called 'Normal_Rand'.

The zip file has both a direct workflow and macro solution to produce the random normal values.

Hello all,

My idea is very simple, and this is most likely I'm used to do. After highlighting the fields in the select tool, the next action is to click Options and to apply what to do. My idea is just after highlighting, right click on mouse button to go exactly on Options menu. Just a simple right click. I think this behavior is most likely comes from Microsoft, I'm used to select multiple lines or cells and with right click to do the next action. It's a simple, but powerful. What do you think?

Albert

The Directory tool should also retrieve the author/creator name of a file along with an audit trail of anyone that made changes to the file. The audit trail option may need to be a different preparation tool but the information would be useful.

Hello All,

I believe there needs to be a new tool added to Alteryx. I am frequently encountering cases where I will have 0 data point feeding a workflow stream that causes my workflows to fail. Because of this, I am having to put in fail safes to keep this from happening.

There should be a tool that if there is no records that are passing into it, anything after that tool will not fail.

For an example, within a workflow I am using a dynamic input that will pull a dynamic file. The file is not always there and the workflow should be able to run if that file is there or not. If the dynamic tool and other tools would process 0 records without failing this would also solve the issue. 

I would be nice to have a tool that will  block off the work stream if there are 0 records passing through the tool. 

Hello all,

We all know for sure that != is the Alteryx operator for inequality. However, I suggest the implementation of <> as an other operator for inequality. Why ?

<> is a very common operator in most languages/tools such as SQL, Qlik or Tableau. It's by far more intuitive than != and it will help interoperability and copy/paste of expression between tools or from/to in-database mode to/from in-memory mode.

Best regards,

Simon

Formula Tool --> Functions --> Operators list

The operator titles for the two comment functions are too similar, the difference cannot be determined unless checking the hover text.

Can the title for /* Comment */ be adjusted to make it more clear that it is for block or multi-line usage?

I didn't understand the difference until I saw this post on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7165816592063266817/

/* Comment */ --> /* Block Comment */   |   /* Multi-line Comment */

I received a "string variable switched type" error on the filter tool performing a basic filter on the value column of "is not empty" after a transpose tool.  The value column is datatype of  V_String 255.  So even though the values are null, blank, number, text, it is all string as per the data type column flowing in.  When switching from basic to custom with formula: IsEmpty([value]) same error.   BUT, when using the Formula Tool to generate a new column for true/false there is no error. Also the Fitler Tool works as expected with IsNull on this dataset.

Please look into the isEmpty code in the Filter tool so that it behaves correctly.

Please note that pre-splitting the data with the isEmpty flag column using the formula tool, applying IsEmpty Basic Filter  to the True and To the False both worked without incident.  

What would be nice is if there is an error in the filter tool that it would output those to it's own stream.  Something like - True (T), False (F), Error (E).

Add Unicode category to the cleansing tool

Good morning!

This may be a very simple thing, but would it be possible to add a DateTimeQuarter() function? We have DateTime Second, Minute, Day, Month, and Year, and being able to have an easy formula for the quarter as well would be incredibly convenient. 

Thanks,

Kat

Please consider implementing a consistent case-sensitive option for all tools and functions.

To compare string values, including case-sensitivity:   This post had a good description of the challenge, but the post has been archived:

   https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/IF-equation-ignoring-case-BUG/m-p/4170...

   For all the time I've used Alteryx, I thought that IF "test" = "TEST" would evaluate to false. Today I realised that isn't the case and I was surprised. I'm very surprised that "equals" performs like it does.

A few existing Ideas request case-sensitivity for individual tools:

   Case insensitive option while joining two data sets
   https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Ideas/Case-insensitive-option-while-joinin...

   Unique tool enhancement - deal with case sensitive data
   https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Ideas/Unique-tool-enhancement-deal-with-ca...

This new Idea requests system-wide consideration for case-sensitivity, for all tools and functions.

Current state:

These tools and functions are case-sensitive:

• Tool: Join
• Tool: Tile
• Function: FindString
• Functions: MD5_ASCII, MD5_UNICODE, MD5_UTF8

These tools and functions are NOT case-sensitive:

• Tool: Unique
• Function: CompareDictionary

These tools and functions can be either case-sensitive or NOT case-sensitive, depending on the options used:

• Function: Contains
• Function: EndsWith
• Function: StartsWith
• Functions: REGEX_Match, REGEX_Replace, REGEX_CountMatches

Current Challenges:

   How do we easily identify Lower Case, Upper Case, Mixed Case?

   How do we easily compare strings for equality, using case sensitivity?

Request:

   Ensure all tools and functions include an option to ignore or consider Case

   Create new functions for IsUpperCase, IsLowerCase, IsMixedCase

   Create a new function for IsEqual, with an option to ignore or consider Case

See attached workflow, which

• uses REGEX_Match to create 3 new fields: IsUpperCase, IsLowerCase, IsMixedCase
• creates a field [Flag: Original value IsEqual, case-sensitive], to compare strings for equality, using case sensitivity

The function isnumber(<arg>) (in formula-like tools) does not do what I would expect from it:

It returns whether the data format of the argument is numeric. It does not return whether the argument actually represents a number (even though it might be a string).

Currently, you would have to help yourself by something like

REGEX_Match(<arg>, "^[+-±]?\d*([.,]+\d*)?([eE][+-]?\d+)?$")

which is quite clumpsy.

From my perspective, the right setup would have been:

• isnumber(<arg>) returns whether the argument is a number (even if it might be of type string)
• isnumeric(<arg>) returns whether the argument is of a numeric data type

I understand if the functionality of isnumber(<arg>) needs to be preserved. Then, a new function could be called isfloat(<arg>): "Is the argument something which could be converted to a float?" That would still be misleading but better than nothing.

This should be for all tools where formulas can be written and should work for all formulas as well, but I will give you my specific pain point as a easy to understand example.

When I write any formula where I am using CONTAINS, i am always thinking through the issue and writing the formula at the same time so I think [Name] contains "Test"

and I write [Name] and have to go back and add the CONTAINS before it, but when you do that instead of automatically wrapping itself around the field it does this:

Contains(String, Target)[Name] 

Can we get an enhancement that sees if you are writing a formula up against a FieldName it will automatically "ingest" the field name into the syntax and leave you with something like this:

Contains([Name] , Target)

That will leave all the other variables which still need to be completed, but it will save time of having to clean up the text of the formula itself.

****Hopefully this makes sense.  If you need me to expand on this, let me know.  Otherwise hopefully other folks feel my pain and can add their commentary in here as well.

Thanks

The default variable size is a V_WSTRING of size 1073741823.  If no one catches this, it uses up the memory on the server.  Could the default be smaller?

Problem: In certain workflows, it becomes necessary to arrange columns in a specific order for the output. While achieving the desired order for a fixed number of columns is feasible using the select tool, difficulties arise when dealing with dynamic outputs that introduce new columns during each workflow run.

Example: Consider the following scenario: the INPUT data for the select tool includes a set of Question/Answer columns. However, with every run of the workflow, new columns of this type are introduced. The challenge is to ensure that Question N and Answer N columns are grouped together in the OUTPUT dynamically. Unfortunately, this task is not easily accomplished using the current capabilities of Alteryx.

INPUT:

DESIRED OUTPUT:

With Python/Pandas, this problem can be easily resolved by assigning index values to each column and then sorting the columns based on the assigned index:

So, based on the Python solution, if Alteryx could do the same, it would be great. I personally think that if the Dynamic Rename tool could held the Index Info, and the select tool could also held the Sort option, this would work.

Dynamic Rename: Already can hold Description info, could hold Index Info.

Select tool: Could sort by index and hold this info when the workflow is saved.

Hope this all make sense.

Thanks.