Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I have encountered problem with Oracle Direct Connection tool. I have the correct host, port, service name, user name and password (the same configuration works with Toad), but Alteryx still complaints the service name is not found on tnsnames.ora (ORA-12154). Well, the reason to use Direct Connection is that I do not have admin rights on my computer to edit the file, so it seems this kind of problem can only be resolved by reaching out to our IT service to edit tnsnames.ora for me.

I would like to able to limit the data being read from the source based on the volume , such as 10GB or 5 GB etc. This will help in case of POC's where we can process portion of the dataset and not the entire dataset. This will have many different used cases as well.

Just ran into this today.  I was editing a local file that is referenced in a workflow for input.

When I tried to open the workflow, Alteryx hangs.

When I closed the input file, Alteryx finished loading the workflow.

If the workflow is trying to run, I can understand this behavior but it seems odd when opening the workflow.

Dear Team

If we are having a heavy Workflow in development phase, consider that we are in the last section of development. Every time when we run the workflow it starts running from the Input Tool. Rather we can have a checkpoint tool where in the data flow will be fixed until the check point and running my work flow will start from that specific check point input.

This reduces my Development time a lot. Please advice on the same.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Gowtham Raja S

+91 9787585961 

We are big fans of the In-Database Tools and use them A LOT to speed up workflows that are dealing with large record counts, joins etc.

This is all fine, within the constraints of the database language, but an annoyance is that the workflow is harder to read, and looks messy and complicated.

A potential solution would be to have the bottom half of the icon all blue as is, but the top half to show the originaling palette for that tool.

ie  Connect In-DB - Green/Dark Blue

Filter In-DB - Light Blue/Dark Blue

Join In-DB - Purple/Dark Blue

etc.

in-DB workflows would then look as cool as they are !

Thanks

dan

I've run into an issue where I'm using an Input (or dynamic input) tool inside a macro (attached) which is being updated via a File Browse tool. Being that I work at a large company with several data sources; so we use a lot of Shared (Gallery) Connections. The issue is that whenever I try to enter any sort of aliased connection (Gallery or otherwise), it reverts to the default connection I have in the Input or Dynamic Input tool. It does not act this way if I use a manually typed connection string.

Initially, I thought this was a bug; so I brought it to Support's attention. They told me that this was the default action of the tool. So I'm suggesting that the default action of Input and Dynamic Input tools be changed to allow being overridden by Aliased connections with File Browse and Action tools. The simplest way to implement this would probably be to translate the alias before pushing it to the macro.

I was exploring how to make the Outlook 365 tool run faster, and I noticed in my Action tool that there are Start and End Date parameters. However, they come across as these large numbers. I learned today from Alteryx Support that "The numbers you provided for StartDate (1725163200000) and EndDate (1726751052709) represent Unix timestamps in milliseconds. Unix timestamps indicate the number of milliseconds that have passed since January 1, 1970, at 00:00:00 UTC."

While I am attempting to build a custom macro myself, it feels like this enhancement could just be included in the tool itself! Relatively simply conversion using DateTimeDiff([#1],"1970-01-01 00:00:00",'milliseconds') 😊

Edit: it's there for the Calendar option, but ideally it could be included for the Email option too! And while you can you the search parameters, we could make it easier for the user.

The management of connections, especially in a collaborative environment is not cohesive or intuitive.

1. When configuring an input tool for a server / gallery connection, hunting for the correct connection in a long list is quite frustrating.  There is no search, no sort and the list of connections does not sort in any logical order by default.
   SUGGEST:
   
   • List of Server Connections is sorted Alphabetically by default
   • Give the ability to search and sort
2. Add additional connection metadata
   • Primary Owner (add metadata element to Curator screen & surface in the connection list)
   • Secondary Owner (add metadata element to Curator screen & surface in the connection list)
   • Connection String (surface the server name and login name to the connections list, omitting the password)
3. Rethink the concepts of RCM, Gallery Connections and the external file method of storing credentials for In-DB connections.
   • Make one overarching, cohesive method of storing and sharing credentials across the platform.
   • Enable Artisans to create
   • Enable Artisans to share
   • Retire concept of external files to store credentials, as is used with In-DB connections

Hi all 

Currently when you set your workflow to don't write outputs (disable all tools that write output) under runtime of the configuration of workflow- the render and green output tools become greyed out and do not write an output (as expected). 

However, this is not the case for connectors - for example, if you use the SharePoint output tool and click disable all tools that write output, it will not be greyed out and still write an output. Is it possible for these connectors to also not run when this is selected in the configuration? As otherwise currently, you have to add it to a container and disable it.

I know y'all are working on data lineage for some future offering and it is very much needed. For highest quality results, please make logs a primary source of lineage information. Being able to use dynamic naming with some tools and macros makes the names in the workflows simple foobar placeholders and do not reflect what actually happened. Today Connect doesn't use logs and leaves many lineage gaps because of this

Please move this to a more appropriate category if needed. This future feature work is not part of Connect.

It would be neat to add a feature to the Output tool to allow grouping by rows, with all the data related to the group column viewable under a drop-down of the selected field. 

I've heard that this is possible with a power pivot but would be a nice feature in Alteryx.

Ex. A listing of all customers in a specific city -> Group by the "Neighborhood" column, the output should be a list of all neighborhoods in the city, with an option to drop down on each neighborhood to see its residents and their relevant data. 

Thanks!

Hi,

Today I pressed F1 in the Output Tool to find out what the setting Transaction Size does. It turned out that this is not documented.

It would be a great idea to make a documentation that covers the options of a tool.

Regards,

Frank 

The current SharePoint connector works fine until you encounter SharePoint lists hosted in MS Groups which appears to use Azure Active directory much different from how the original SharePoint domain works. An easy way to determine this is if your SharePoint lists have a domain with https://groups.companyname.com instead of https://companyname.sharepoint.com.

Currently the work around is having go through the MS Groups API which is complicated and requires extra IT support for access and other credentials.

I've used tools like BRIO/Hyperion with a wide-range of control over the output to MS Excel. The Jooleobject allowed me to control MS Outlook, Excel, Word, etc..  The goal is to run a scheduler within Alteryx every week to blend data, insert the data into pre-formatted and renamed excel templates, copy those files to a network shared drive and finally send a formatted email to my users. If I can get past copy/paste routines, my job would be much more efficient. Thx

HI, 

Not sure if this Idea was already posted (I was not able to find an answer), but let me try to explain.

When I am using Mongo DB Input tool to query AlteryxService Mongo DB (in order to identify issues on the Gallery) I have to extract all data from Collection AS_Result.

The problem is that here we have huge amount of data and extracting and then parsing _ServiceData_ (blob) consume time and system resources.

This solution I am proposing is to add Sorting option to Mongo input tool. Simple choice ASC or DESC order. 

Thanks to that I can extract in example last 200 records and do my investigation instead of extracting everything 

In addition it will be much easier to estimate daily workload and extract (via scheduler) only this amount of data we need to analyze every day ad load results to external BD.

Thanks,

Sebastian 

I was working on the file and there are multiple sheets need to be pulled from one excel file. I was not sure how we can give one source of information and pull multiple sheet from one source as per the requirement. So wanted to submit this idea to create a toll which can pull any sheet(s) from one input tool as per requirement.

When you import a csv file,  I sometimes use a "TAB" as delimiter. In section 5 Delimiters I want that as an option.

I have learned that it is possible to wright "\t" but a normal choice would bed nice.

Very beneficial will be adding extra row in Input tool (while we importing CSV) where we can define escape character. This functionality will help to avoid errors that currently occur when importing such files.

Right now, you can highlight 1 output tool, right click, convert to input tool.  Im doing that to each of 30 outputs in 1 workflow as part of splitting a workflow that has too much spatial processing. Would be cool to highlight all of the outputs and convert all at once to save the clicker finger.  Keep it rocking Alteryx!