Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

In the 'Select' tool, you have the ability to output the select configuration.  At this time that configuration file doesn't include the information (which you do in the check box of the select tool) on if it is a field that is output. Not a big deal if there are only a couple fields, but quickly becomes an inconvenience if there are a lot of fields and you have to compare going down the list to make sure you're accurately identifying which fields from the original select tool, are actually output.  That info should be part of the .yxft file that's output for the config file. 

Actually not sure if to flag it as feature request or bug.

As per Conditional Functions | Alteryx Help the Switch function only works with "=" cases.

Trouble is, a typical case function might be a variant of different if [x]<[y] then "a" in a similar way to the "manual" setting of the tile tool.

If used in that way, the switch function will happily run but return wrong results, as it happened to me in a recent customer training session.

IMHO either the switch function should support everything an IF does or throw an error when it doesn't and the documentation should be updated.

What do you think?

In the current expression editor, XOR(exclusive logical sum) is not supported as an operator while AND & OR already exist, so I'd like to request to add XOR to an operator in expression editor.

Without XOR operator, when we want to use XOR conditional expression, it is like below expression; it looks a bit complicated so it's hard to tell condition is XOR at once.

As a workaround, I defined custom function XOR by myself, but this should not be permanent solution since when sharing workflow to others it doesn't make sense unless they also have custom function XML file in their computers as well.

I believe addition of XOR would help to have much readable code for tools with expression editor(e.g. formula, filter, etc).

There is 'skip N first rows', but no 'skip N last rows', we should have this option under sample tool.

Need a tool that can remove nulls in 2 ways:

1. Remove rows with null values

2. Remove columns with null values

When typing a function (often the formula tool), you can use autocomplete to get the syntax to display, however if you are editing a previously written expression, you have remember or try to guess at the syntax.  This often leads to having to consult the documentation or adding an extra duplicate function below your code just to see the syntax (that you then have to remember to remove).  This process could be improved by showing a window that shows the function syntax while you are typing within the parentheses of the function.  This would be even more useful with nested functions to see which function you are within.

Save/Load Unique Key Tool Configuration – similar to saving/loading other tools configs  (ie: select, join, append, etc)

Imagine the scenario where you have an input that has new columns everyday, like the one that can be seem above. But with millions of rows. And you need to build the Total column. This cannot be achieved with the formula tool, because the columns of the input are dynamic. 

...

The default way that i use and see people using to solve this type of problem is transposing the data/summarizing/joining back the data. I tested this with the Enable Performance Profiling for 10 million rows (workflow attached), and as expected, when you transpose/summarize/join back a large volume of rows, you spend too much computing power. For this test, at least 5x more time than by just using the formula tool (workflow attached):

So, what i propose here is:

1) That the Multi-Field formula could be able to evaluate a set of columns dynamically and generate just one new column (the sum of the evaluated columns, the concatenation of it...).

Example of Designer Discussion that would be benefit from it: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Transposing-Filtering-and-Summarizing-...

2) That the Multi-Field formula could be able to reference column-1, column-2, column+1, column+2, like the Multi-Row formula is.

Example of Designer Discussion that would benefit from it: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Copy-Field-and-create-two-mor-fields-w...

Thanks.

Shouldn't have to stick a sort after every Multi-Row formula to reorder the records back to the same way they entered the tool.  Simple

Currently there is a function in Alteryx called FindString() that finds the first occurrence of your target in a string. However, sometimes we want to find the nth occurrence of our target in a string. 

FindString("Hello World", "o")  returns 4 as the 0-indexed count of characters until the first "o" in the string. But what if we want to find the location of the second "o" in the text? This gets messy with nested find statements and unworkable beyond looking for the second or third instance of something. 

I would like a function added such that 

FindNth("Hello World", "o", 2) Would return 7 as the 0-indexed count of characters until the second instance of "o" in my string. 

Hey gang, just another QoL suggestion from me!

Currently, when applying changes to an existing field that will take the outcome beyond the current field size, we have to use an additional Select tool to get around truncation:

The usual route here is to either a) use a Select tool beforehand to increase the field size:

Or b) create a new field and then remove the 'old' one in a Select tool afterwards, also renaming the replacement here:

Given that we could just do this in one using the Multi-Field Formula tool:

My request is pretty simple here - can the 'Change Output Type to' configuration also be added to the standard Formula tool? The ability to also update the name of the output would be brilliant as well if possible. Cheers!

Auto Field tools help optimally size and assign data types to your data for better performance but this conversion process can be memory intensive with large datasets. What if you could right-click an Auto Field tool to convert it to a standard select tool with the new data types and sizes much like the existing ability to right-click convert inputs into macro inputs or browse tools into outputs? This would eliminate the need to manually transfer the results of the Auto Field tool into a select tool for production workflows!

Two very useful functions

According to https://www.w3schools.com/sql/func_mysql_least.asp

The LEAST() function returns the smallest value of the list of arguments.

example : SELECT LEAST("w3Schools.com", "microsoft.com", "apple.com");

returns "apple.com"

GREATEST works exactly the same but returns the greatest value of the list of argument

As of today, Alteryx proposes max and min to deal with that, but it only works with number and , I think, it's an ambiguous syntax : Max and Min works both as an aggregation function and as a row function. I love to separate these two notions.

Having a more standard means also more interoperability.

On a related topic, the coalesce function is proposed here : https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Coalesce-function/idi-p/841014

Best regards,

Simon

Hello all,

I suggest a new string function Repeat()

Repeat() forms a string consisting of the input string repeated the number of times defined by the second argument.

Repeat(text[, repeat_count])

Repeat('to',3) gives tototo

It's also a standard SQL function
https://www.w3schools.com/sql/func_mysql_repeat.asp

Best regards,

Simon

Highlighted in this post: Solved: DateDiff question - Alteryx Community The DateDiff function under certain conditions does not work as you would expect and I suspect most people would not notice the inaccuracy.

Here is the formula for the Results Column below:

DateTimeDiff("2022-11-30",[Date],"months")

Hello all, just another little QoL suggestion!

There have been a few occasions recently where I've been adding some Report Text to a Rendered output and have needed to reference the current date. However, when building a quick formula to do this, I've first needed to add a dummy field within a Text Input tool so that the Formula tool doesn't error due to no incoming connection.

I know I can create a branch off from the main dataset and just use that, but for something simple like this, I find it cleaner to isolate and generate it in this way and so it'd be great if - for situations like this - the Formula tool's input anchor was optional (obviously only when using it to create new fields).

There are likely many other examples where you may want to build a simple workflow (or branch of one), starting with a quick field generated within the Formula tool itself. However, just thought I'd raise this with a scenario I've encountered a couple of times recently.

Cheers!

For years, Alteryx would gracefully rename conflicting field names. It would issue a warning and that's it.

We recently upgraded from 2019.4 to 2022.1.1.30961 and now an error is produced:

Oops!

The field X was renamed conflicting with an existing field name

I searched for "rename" in every release notes version applicable and I do not see this. Is it a bug? Is it a feature?

We have an Alteryx server with thousands of workflows built by dozens of users with varying skill levels. This is a tremendous amount of work to go through and fix all the failing workflows.

Please help me understand this change because there was seemingly no warning and now we are scrambling.

I find the myself often needing to create unique IDs for a given category. Currently I end up using the multi row tool and leveraging the "group by" option. Enabling the record ID tool to create a unique count by grouping on distinct categories in an underlying data set would unlock an new level of grouping that would consolidate record keeping functionality in a single tool.

Functionality or Tool allowing to automatically interpret and change data into date type without using DateTime tool. This interpreter would be a little bit faster and more reliable solution than manually setting in DateTime tool.