Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

It would be extremely helpful to add in a "Count Distinct" function into the summarize tool.  This would help tremendously when working with hierarchical data.

It would be useful to have the count of rows show up under Browse icons once a module was run.  While debugging, I often have a number of Browse icons scattered about.  It would be nice if I didn't have to click on each to see how many records made it that far.

Thanks!

To keep from being too specific, the "Idea" is that Alteryx Designer should do better at recognizing and handling Date/Times on input. Thoughts include:
 
1) Offer more choices in the Parse: DateTime tool, including am/pm.
2) Allow users to add new formats to the Parse: DateTime lists.
3) Include user-added formats in the Preparation: Auto Field tool's library.
4) Don't require zero-padding of days and hours in the DateTimeParse() function.  (1/1/2014 1:23:45 AM looks enough like a date that DateTimeParse() should be able to figure it out, but it stumbles on day and hour.)
 
My particular difficulty is that I have incoming date/times with AM/PM components.  I've gone ahead and created a macro to take care of that for now, but it certainly seems like that sort of thing would be handled automatically.
 
Thanks!

Please include a function to support the conversion of data into this secure format.

I have an app that contains 4 check boxes.  Each check box is independent, and when checked, two other prompts open up to the user (in this case, text boxes which are also independent of the other check boxes).

I would like to be able to "Check All", so that with one click, ALL four check boxes are checked, and their prompts all open up.

Can you put a check box on the container title bar to make it easier to enable/disable containers in the process window? And can you make the minimize/maximize option for a conatiner a separate option from enable/disable?

We need the ability to pre-populate App questions with a default value. This not only gives the user an example of what type of data string the App is looking for, but also may avoid the user from having to do anything if the default folder or file is already correct.

This would also allow for quick App testing since we can just accept the defaults and not have to load up a yxwv file every single time.

ArcPy/Python, ESRI Modelbuilder, PyQGIS can all do this (heck, even MapBasic can do it!) - there's no doubt it's more convenient for the designer and end user.

The field selection pane in Multi-Field Formula is very small and not resizeable. It is difficult to select anything other than all variables when only 4 1/2 fields are displayed at a time. Making this pane resizeable would be very useful.

In the ‘Report – Table’ tool I would like to be able to force headings to multiple lines. For example If I have a heading such as “Catchment (%)” or “Spend (£)”, I would like there to be an easy way to make the (%) / (£) move to the second line when I have fixed width columns.
 

 

If we rename a field ‘X’ to ‘Y’  in the alteryx module, the renaming is not inherited by all the tools using that field in that module. The tools which are still using the old field name ‘X’ will fail until they are configured to use the new field name ‘Y’. Most of the tools I have worked will inherit the field renaming.
 
It would be very helpful if the renaming is propagated to all the tools in the module using that field name. 

Dear Alteryx,

Alteryx 9 new Macro configuration module, is great
One thing that could be improved :

For Iterative macros, it's very frustrated to set a Maximum of Iterations manually :
when the number is too high it keeps going unnecessarily
when it's too low, we are missing iterations

Ideally this parameters should be calculated automatically by Alteryx
It would just implie to have the possibility to declare the numeric field that must be used for Iteration ... then Alteryx could calculate before launching the job, the Min/Max to set automatically the iteration band.

Is this idea stupid?

Thanks

Arno

When workig on a module with many tools, and one of those tools is the Allocate Input tool (Experian US), whenever you try to access or configure that other tools, there is a delayed reponse.  I'm assuming because the Allocate data set is so large.  But, it would be nice, if possible, that when accessing/configuring other tools you did not get that delay.  My workaround is to Container the Allocate tool and disable it.  

In my environment, creating tables with fields in a particular order is a requirement.

The Select tool (and others) let me manually change sort orders. The Select tool will also allow me to sort on Field Name in Ascending or Descending order.

I can add a sort order prefix to my input data with the Dynamic Rename tool, connect a Select tool and then go into the Select tool properties to sort by Field Name. But this requires that I first run the module so that the Select tool knows what the incoming fields are called, then set up the Select tool properties, and then rerun the module. If I change the prefixes or the list of incoming variables, the Select tool has to be reconfigured.

It would be really nice if there was a Field Sort tool that only had Ascending or Descending as properties that would 'dynamically' do what the Sort on Field Name option in the Select tool does.

Our team works with a lot of in-house transaction data sets that have been put into a calgary database.  It would be much easier to build apps that use the calgary input tool without having to configure html code.

Currently when I open and run an app in designer mode im unable to access any other modules while it runs.  It would be nice to be able to work on other modules while an app runs without opening a debug.

It would be nice to have the ability to double click the top area of a container to either show or hide the container's objects. Only being able to show or hide containers using the arrow icon in the top right is quite cumbersome for large containers because it requires a lot of horizontal scrolling in order to change the desired view of the modules workflow.

I think a great functionality addon would be a tool that could allow one to impute dates.  While the formula tool and multi-row tool can in many cases assist, it is not useful when dealing with batch macros where a date imputation would need to change.

Seeing how we use browse to tools to help build out modules, but they slow down the modules because they write out temp files, it would be awesome to have a "record count" option similar to the input tool. This would allow us to see the data as it's flowing through the module without slowing it down.  Adding a sample tool before every browse would be fairly cumbersome. 

When building an expression (e.g. [Store Type] in ("Supermarket", "C-Store", "Gas Station") ) when the user selects the field variable, provide all the unique values in that field so user can double-click and add them to the expression, without having to look and see what values are in the table, what data type (shows quotes if string) and manually type the values, which can lead to errors.

This functionality is currently available in GIS programs such as ArcGIS and Quantum GIS (QGIS).