Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

It would be great to have a spatial function that could be used to evaluate whether two spatial objects are equal/identical. I see this being available in at least three places:

 

1. An "ST_Equal" Formula function
2. A SpatialMatch "Where Target Equals Universe"
3. An "Equals" Action in the Spatial Process tool

Currently I am unable to use Alteryx's spatial calculations in completing required reporting for CMS.  Its unfortunate, because in my mind Alteryx is a superior approach allowing for customization and seamless integration with varied data sources used within our company.

 

You might ask, why don't you just use actual driving distance?  The datasets that we are measuring are enormous. +60M member files are being compared to 70K providers.  Alteryx is missing a huge opportunity to get into this market.

 

Reference

https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Prescription-Drug-Coverage/PrescriptionDrugCovContra/downloads/hsd_meth...

Travel Distance to Providers and Facilities

The second component of the review process tests the percentage of beneficiaries resident in a given county with access to a particular specialty type within the maximum travel distance. For a given county and specialty type, CMS uses the geographic coordinates for the associated providers or facilities and the geographic coordinates for the beneficiaries resident in the county and calculates the travel distance between them. The travel distance is calculated using a formula to determine the estimated driving distance (miles) between the latitude and longitude coordinates and provides an average for the total beneficiaries in the given county

I have found a post where the grid size in the Grid Tool can be update using an interface tool -- which is really wonderful.

What I would love to see is the grid size text entry box being able to accept a field name/variable, so that this can be modified without needing the interface.

 

This would be useful because I have users uploading shapes to be analyzed -- they don't necessarily know the size of the shape so I would rather the grid size be automatically calculated based on the square mileage of the shape.

 

Hello all,

 

It would be awesome if Alteryx was able to accept Lat/Long and be able to tell you what timezone that location was in and be able to do time analysis from there.

 

Thoughts?

 

Thanks,

Nick

It would be nice to have the option to overlay multiple addresses to find  marketing opportunities within the heatmap. Currently I have to map the addresses elsewhere and click back and forth between tabs to see where they lay within the chosen variables.

It might be useful to have an option in the drivetime setup to have an option to exclude toll roads.

Correct me if I am wrong, when I use the trade area tool, the only non-spatial data appended to my input dataset is the RadiusSize field. Can this be expanded to include the Units selected (km, miles or minutes) and the dataset used for drive time, plus AreaSqMi, etc? Values like 10 in my RadiusSize field are useful but I would like to have all Trade Area details.

Actually, could you incorporate trade area tool into the spatial match tool since these tools are usually used one after the other?

Bedankt!

Hi,

I would like to see an option within the 'Find Nearest Tool' (and maybe other Tools like it) to exclude from results when a particular Target field equals a particular Universe field.  This could be added right under the 'Ignore 0 Distance Matches' in config window.  You could have drop-downs (like a filter tool) to pick the fields etc.  Example of what I'm doing:  One Address may have multiple accounts and it's in Target and Universe.  Ignoring 0 Distance would drop all the other Accounts at the same address.  I only want it to ignore the Universe Address if it has the same Account Number and the Target Account Number.  That is a little deeper drill than just ignore 0 Distance but not too hard to add.

 

As it stands, I don't ignore 0 Distance.  I have a formula after the 'Find Nearest' to drop  Target Acct Nbr = Universe Acct Nbr.   Then a 'Multi-Row Formula' tool to fix the find nearest order.  This works, but I thought it might be nice to have it in the tool.

The Find Nearest tool allows setting a distance in units of miles and kilometers. It would be incredibly convenient to specify units of feet or meters also. I find that in most instances, 1 mile is vastly large for the analysis I am working on and I have to include additional logic to confirm incorrect matching is not occurring.

Variations of this concept have been discussed in community since 2016.  Alteryx is awesome right up to the point where we need to see our files in ArcGis Pro or ArcGis Online.  The shapefile is painful.  We have to rename every field in ArcGis Pro with over about 10 characters because all of the field names are truncated.  Yes- you can make a shapefile and a text file from Alteryx, then join in ArcGis Pro, but its a million clicks and its not a good solution.  Shapefiles are limited to 2GB, which is not great either, but the field truncation is super frustrating.

 

In fact- rather than making an output file, I bet it would be easier to make a tool that connects to the ESRI API.  Everyone gets stuck on passing the spatial field because its like a giant text field with all of the instructions to create a point, line, or polygon.

 

Does anyone have the software engineering chops to make this happen? :)

If i draw a line that crosses the pacific ocean, the path is split in half, and connected by a line that goes over the Atlantic..

 

This isn't just cosmetic.. if i intersect this object with another polygon, it will show that the two objects interact even though they should not.. The only way i can fix this is to manually divide my polyline into two objects where they cross the pacific ocean.

 

Please fix this.

 

 

 

 

The 'Make Grid' tool appears to occasionally scramble the order as shown by the 'Grid Names' I have highlighted. As its almost in order it gave a false sense of looking as though it was designed to be in 'GridName' order, so it was not obvious that it needed to be sorted. To make the tool more intuitive it may make sense to give the option to sort by 'GridName' or just do it by default.

Thanks,

Ira 

 

 

I am working with another program that can only output .MIF (MapInfo Exchange Format) spatial files with spatial type "Rectangle". I need to read these .MIF files into Alteryx, but apparently Alteryx doesn't support "rectangle" objects when reading .MIF files.

Hi, I would like the ability to hover over a point/polygon on a Browse tool that displays geospatial data and be provided with some information on the data that isn’t currently offered.  Namely, I would like the ability to hover over a point/centroid and have a bubble (a.k.a. tool tip) pop up displaying the exact coordinates of that datum, the row ID and some other unique identifying information (e.g. name, store number, etc).  Other geospatial tools provide this functionality.  See below:

 

Google Maps:

 

 

Alteryx:

 

 

And by the way, I realize Alteryx is not Google Maps, but as a data “consumer” or “interactor”, I think it’s just human nature for people to want them to “feel” the same.  Something to strive for, at least.

 

I would also like the ability to click a datum displayed on the browse tool and have it highlight the row on the Results pane.  The clicking functionality works going from the Results pane to the Browse tool, but not the other way.

 

Thanks!  Kurt

When building an analytic app which uses a Map Input, please enable Interface tool functionality which would allow the app user to change the base map (roads, imagery, etc.) within the app map interface.  Currently I believe the only way to accommodate different base maps in an app is to configure multiple Map Inputs – one for each base map.  The resulting map interface duplication clutters up the app and opens the door for configuration errors.

 

Enable app user control of base map

 

I think it would be really useful to add bearing in degrees to the Find Nearest Tool. While the cardinal direction is helpful for context, it would be great to have finer detail than just the 8 options.

Please add the "Don't Output Input Objects" option. 

 

It would be nice to eliminate the input objects when the processed output object is all that is desired.  When processing spatial data, keeping the input objects can lead to massive amounts of unnecessary data in the output data stream.

Many tab files lately (I am finding when they are created in mapinfo 16) Alteryx cannot read.  I have posted about this in other forums but wanted to bring it up on the product ideas section as well.

Loading large grd files takes a long time, I see they load as polygons.  I find the data crunches much faster as centroids.  Please add "load as centroid" as input option (same as mapinfo "tab" files). 

 

Also, would be great to load as integer (or select data type), since there are often too many decimals.

 

Last, but not least, the ability to export as grd or grc would be great since there are other platforms that use these files.

 

Thanks!

Gary