Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

So while first and last make sense concat will crash the system. Here's a screen grab... Designer really doesn't like crosstab reporting tools set (accidentally) to concatenate 3 macros deep in a workflow. Just crashed 3 times before I tracked down the error on my system.

As a change to Designer UI in 2021.2, when in the filter box, I used to be able to use my mouse to Paste in the value and then hit enter/apply to apply the filter.  It's not working as of 2021.2.  Now, if I hit paste from my mouse, it just closes the Filter box and applies nothing.  It forces me to have to change between mouse and keyboard as that is the only way to paste a value into the filter value box (CTRL-V). 

This feels like another very tiny move in the wrong direction. These small UI changes cause 2 or 3 additional steps and slow the diagnostic/navigation process in moving around the Results Grid in the Browse Tool or at any point in the flow where the Results Grid is used.

Can mouse functionality be restored in 2021.2?

Related to submission: 

from  patrick_digan

Can we please have a Group By option added to Random % Sample tool? It would ease a lot of things!

My request is to allow tool containers to be enabled or disabled through an action on a Batch macro, just as they are with a Standard macro. This issue was originally raised in Jan-2013. 

At that time @MargaritaW  of Alteryx responded "the tool containers can’t be enabled or disabled through an action on a batch macro, this works fine on a standard macro (this issue has bee added to our log for a fix as high priority)."

It is 8+ years later and I can't find the fix. Using the Detour tool was offered as a workaround, but that is not useful in many cases. Looking at Alteryx own tools developed with macros, Tool Container activation/de-activation is used much more frequently than the Detour tool.

For my particular use case, we receive sets of four files from multiple customers each week. Each file in the set has a different structure.

Requirement:

1. Process each file in a directory, one at a time.

2. Activate/utilize one Input tool based on the file type

3. Execute a file specific workflow 

Here is a link to the original issue that was marked as "solved". The Detour tool workaround does not constitute a solution.

Solved: Enable tool container in batch macro - Alteryx Community

Alteryx please follow through on this 8-year old high priority issue.

Thanks,
Ken

Dear Community,

could you please change the path processing of the alteryx app interface so that we can paste path links with quotation marks without getting an error by the alteryx app?

this would enhance workflow speed because one cannot save folder location for the interface to search for first when browsing files. it always begins at the pc level or something. 

so the workaround would be to just paste the file location path in the browser window of the interface, then pressing browse again to just scroll through the wished folder. 

this idea is not only for the purpose of the workaround but also for itself worth it. 

in windows one can easily copy file paths by holding down shift and right mouse click and the clicking on "copy path" . the copy is in the clipboard which i would like to pass to the alteryx app just like this without the necessity to remove the quotation marks as this costs time and is difficult when paths are long. 

thank you

Upper management do not get to be part of the workflow build. When presenting the final product to them as the current solution in pdf print, they complain about the size and the legibility of the workflow. I propose that Alteryx Team could do some enhancement about this feature where large workflows can be automatically printed  with minimal effort where the containers would not break in halves or at ends. It does look confusing for someone who has never seen the workflow before or know what it does. Currently, if we change the settings to any format and any settings, you do see some containers that break and continues on the following page. However, best practice would be to print any workflow without doing a lot of manipulation in the settings and all have few or every container(s) printed on different page(s).

I hope my explanation above made sense to what the ultimate solution should look like. Thanks!

Hello --

Not sure if this is possible right now, but here is my use case. I have a file with sensitive data that is not saved in a share drive, but in a personal home drive so only I have access to it.

At this point, I can run a workflow that requires the file -- but I have access to my home drive -- which other uses would not. I want others to be able to run the workflow -- so, you know, when I win the lottery workflows can go on.

I know I can lock a macro. However, if there is an input file in that macro, the user there is still a dependency on having access to where that file is stored.

What would be nice is if there were an option to embed the entire file within the workflow (macro) which could then be locked. The data could be prepared from within the macro only outputting the desired pieces of information and another user could run the workflow only have access to what comes into the workflow from the output.

The owner of the file has a little auditability as they still have an unencrypted version should then need to see what the source data provided looked like.

Please let me know if you would like to discuss further.

Thanks,

Seth 

I would like to share my idea that would be definitely useful for fast automation of the process with reading and correctly recognizing the text from PDF input. I wrote about that, hoping somebody has already thought about that here.

The idea is the tools "PDF Input" and "Image to Text" from "Text Mining" category to be improved, so as the text from PDF document to be read properly, no matter the text position on each page. 

It could be also considered the performance of the combined tools of "PDF Input" and "Image to Text" to be improved as they work slower than the customized tool PDF Input does.

The idea also can be expanded to an entirely new tool that works out all the actions, needed for correctly reading of a PDF document without manual intervention.

Hi Team,

As the formula design that able to stack multiple formula in once. There should have more things there.

1. Error Icon for formula have Error

Can you find which row have error in seconds?

We had to count to find which formula had error!!!!

and how about now?

At least, do have an icon or anything significant thing that let us found it in second and WITHOUT COUNT!!!

2. buttons to expand all/ collapse all.

It was normal that we need to review formula in again in future.

So, you need to click one by by to view all the formulas?

For any tool that uses the IF, THEN, ELSE or IIF statements, let the ELSE statement be optional (like in Python)

For example, notice in the proposed idea there is no ELSE statement, or a third parameter in IIF:

In Interactive Charts, the only way to get user-defined input (other than automatic axis names etc.) into the chart is to add an additional column to the data which has the same content in each row and to use a batch chart.

I have two suggestions to this point:

1. I would like to allow access to global Alteryx variables in any Chart text, such as "The path is [Engine.TempFilePath]". This should also work for non-batched charts.
2. The current way of referring to columns in batch data is a bit odd and inconsistent to other tools. You have to type in "$" and get a list of available columns. After selecting, the dynamic test appears like static text in the configuration: If you type in "The column name is $column", you see "The column name is column" afterwards. That's quite confusing. My suggestion is to use the same nomenclature as elsewhere in Alteryx: Type in the text in brackets: "The column name is [column]". That way it would be as usual.

I'd like to see the size of the data processing through each tool, in say GB. This would be helpful in understanding the volume of data being written to connected systems and would also be useful when cleansing data to determine if a meaningful impact was made to the data cleanliness.

Please enhance the Join Multiple tool to include an option of:

"left outer join all on input 1".

Such a tool would be massively advantageous when data granularity is defined by one dataset (input 1) and many subsequent tables just need to be joined onto that input.

As-is, I have had to manually perform dozens of join + union sequences which seems both untidy and inefficient.

Such a feature would likely be more useful than existing options of full outer joins / inner joins which currently the tool allows.

I love the new (relatively) ConsumerView Decoder Tool! I used to do it the hard way, and it was fragile.

However, one thing is still missing: the Mosaic fields (MOSAIC HOUSEHOLD and MOSAIC ZIP4) - these are output from the tool as nulls. So, not only do you not get it decoded, you have to join back to the input to get the fields back as they were.

First, at least please pass them through as they were.

But preferably, decode them to the Mosaic Segment/Group names.

I realize (or couldn't find) the source for the Mosaic segment definitions is not currently in a Calgary database, but the tool is in the Calgary group.

I was able to add the following lines of R script to get the importance of the variables used in the cluster analysis. This will allow the user to see what variables are important in determining the clusters they have. 

The script I added is below. It is pretty basic and could used spruced up by an Alteryx engineer as far as column naming,  accounting for contingencies, and making it a reporting function.  I think this would be a valuable feature for future versions of this tool. 

library(FeatureImpCluster)#load library
FeatureImp_res <- FeatureImpCluster(clus.sol,as.data.table(the.matrix)) #Use FeatureImpCluster to take the cluster model (clus.sol) and data (the.matrix) to get variable imp.
FeatureImp_df <- as.data.frame(FeatureImp_res$featureImp) #turns features from a list to dataframe
FeatureImp_df_rn <- tibble::rownames_to_column(FeatureImp_df, "Variable") #Adds the variable name to the importance scores
write.Alteryx(FeatureImp_df_rn, 3) #outputs dataframe in output #3

Hello

I have searched the community but haven't found any obvious solutions to this.

When using a cross tab I often find that there shouldn't be any aggregated values and if there is it means there is an issue with my data or workflow.

Therefore I think a useful feature would be an option for the cross tab tool to be able to return an error if it trying to aggregate any values.

I have a work around by using a summarize tool to count the non unique records and then a test to see if there are any duplicates but I think this could be a useful addition to the tool.

Thanks

The macro input tool asks for a template input that is either a text or file input. A perfect template can be hard to come by and so I wonder if the macro input could just ask how many columns are expected and the type and size that this column should be. I feel this would be more intuitive and easier to debug. 

In the next product version, can the parameter options for the topic modelling be changed to allow the output of both word relevance summary and interactive chart? It's a bit strange to run the tool twice to get this output.  

I think this was brought up a few years back but why doesn't the Union config by name  option have a field map? It would stop that feeling you get when you browse your workflow after a union tool and find a column which is 5% blank and 95% full sitting next to one with a slightly different name which is 95% blank and 5% full.