Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

It would be nice if Alteryx was able to directly output data and the workflow into an Excel PowerPivot data model for people without Alteryx access to pivot the data.

 Hi there,

When working through a question with our team on how Excel & MS SQL represent dates, we did a quick test and confirmed that SQL and Excel are both storing dates & date-times as a number (technically the offset from a fixed date) which really helps for things like BI applications where a fact table may store a very large number of dates on each record (entered date/time; updated date/time; transaction date/time; etc)

However, when we look at the same in Alteryx, it seems to be storing these dates as plain text (see screenshot below) - meaning that instead of an 8 byte field for every date and datetime; which can be compressed using offset logic like in Parquet, these appear to be represented as a 19 byte field for date-time.

Would it make sense to change the internal representation to a number to make date-offsetting and processing easier (all date-logic then becomes simple addition / subtraction instead of string manipulation)?

Note: You can see this in the screenshot below.   the date field has 10 bytes; and the date-time has 19 bytes (where both of these are stored and represented in MSSQL in 8 bytes in total)

There are three places that provides the log information:

1) Regular results window:

Pro: In the process sequence so the user can understand the order of the process.

Con: Doesn't have info on how long each tool takes to process.

2) Workflow -> Runtime -> Enable Performance Profiling

Pro: Processes are sorted in the processing duration descending order which helps to identify the ones that took long to run.

Con: Doesn't show the process sequence.

3) Actual Alteryx log file:

Pro: There are timestamps for each process so the duration can be calculated.

Con: Not ready accessible and not user friendly to be seen from the interface. Not clickable to see more details in the workflow.

I think it will be SUPER HELPFUL to integrate all three together to show in the process order along with the running time.

Currently if a user has multiple connections in a workflow that connect to a password-protected source, and that password changes, the user will be locked out of their account by login attempts as Alteryx attempts to validate the connection.

Today I had to manually edit the XML of another user's workflow in order to remove references to their server, so they could correct their password without locking the account for a third time today.

While I understand that aliases are a good workaround to this problem, the issue still has potential to occur.

Having an option to load a workflow in a "SECURE" or "SAFE" mode, where it would not validate a query until runtime, or refreshing the metadata manually, would help to significantly reduce lockouts which would improve the usability of the tool.

As per this discussion, I'd like to create constants that stay with me as I create new workflows rather than creating a user constant across multiple workflows.

This could perhaps be done by editing an xml file in the bin.

Alteryx is very quick already but it world be useful to know the computational cost of different approaches to building a workflow using a lot of data. This would make it easier to know if your optimization to the workflow is working as expected and also which tools in particular are doing the work best. Other software such as Power BI has a performance analysis section which breaks down how each action impacted performance. 

It would be great to get a similar breakdown of how long each tool is taking to run in the results window. 

Please evaluate the option to add 2 new containers:

1. parallel - execute tasks inside in parallel
2. serial - execute tasks in strict  order, imposed at design time. In the future the oder of operations could be enforced by parameters or other input conditions at runtime.

Please Give us the capacity to mix and match these 2 containers.

Thank you

Regards,
Cristian.

With the onset of Workflow Comparisons in V2021.3, it only seems natural to me that the next step would be a method of handling those changes. Maybe have some clickable dropdowns on the changed tools that have a few options as to what you'd like to do about them. I think the options to start off with would be "Apply this change to that workflow" and "Apply the other workflow's change to this one" along with the "Apply all of this workflow's changes to that one" and "Apply all of that workflow's changes to this one" somewhere in the header.

I know that I will occasionally get a request to change a workflow while I'm already in the middle of making a change to it or am waiting on approval for a change I've made and am hoping to implement. The current version control system on Server does not make it easy to implement multiple changes that may need to be implemented in an order other than the one in which they were started. The current process seems to be to merge them later by going through the whole process of selectively copying the changed tools and pasting/replacing them or otherwise manually modifying the tools to make them match.

Likewise, implementing the version merging proposed here will allow versioning strategies more akin to branches in git. One could more-or-less maintain two streams of changes until they were both complete and merge or productionize them as they're complete and ready.

Hi all,

I was wondering if any of you have achieved "Transaction rollback" type of feature in alteryx.

Following is the usecase:

If a workflow that writes data into multiple outputs (could be relational tables / files) is failed half way through in writing to one of the outputs, is there an option to rollback the partially loaded data & reset the process to the original state (i.e., before the execution of the workflow)? (OR) does this needs to be done programatically?

There is a workflow level property - "Cancel Running Workflow on Error". This stops the execution but doesn't perform rollback.

Thanks,

Sandeep.

It's often challenging to estimate run time of various workflows AND a run time of over 3+ hours can often be indicative of errors in the workflow. Could we have an estimated runtime calculator? This would also help when pushing against deadlines for timing. 

Fingers crossed and thanks! 

Hi All,

This is a fairly straightforward request. I'd like to be able to pass through interface tool values to the workflow events the same way I would pass it through to a tool in the workflow (%Question.<tool name>%). One use-case for this is that we are calling a workflow and passing in an ID, and if this workflow fails, I'd like to trigger an event that will call back to the application and say this specific workflow for this ID failed.

The temporary solution is to have the workflow write to a temp file and have the event reference that temp file, but this is clunky and risky if there are parallel runs occurring. 

Best,

devKev

Countless times I've been asked by management how long a process will take to run and I really can't say beyond an educated guess (using input file size and complexity of workflow). Yet, when downloading files off the internet or moving files around in a network, Microsoft will give an estimated time of completion (e.g. 10 minutes remaining till files are downloaded). It would be so great if Alteryx would show something similar with regard to how long a workflow will take to finish running. Not sure if you can create an algoithm based on the nubmer of tools, import file size, network connection etc. to give a ETA on when a workflow may finish running but it would be super helpful for me when working on high priortity project so I can communicate with the business side.

Thanks!

See this community link for context:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/There-is-no-option-to-clear-the-In-...

tl;dr: 

An option to clear the In-DB File History is not available in the Designer's GUI. If this feature is required, it's recommended to open an Idea on the Alteryx Community to submit an enhancement request.

Please implement this as an idea; I need to clear some In-DB connections that are no longer valid and in a managed environment, accessing the registry is laughable.

Thank you!

In the Overview pane - can you please show which tools have completed the current run, when viewing this pane during a canvas run?   That would allow for a progress check at a glance.

Like many of you, I have a lot of modules and macros ... and growing. I keep them fairly organized in different folders and subfolders but sometimes I can't find that particular module I was working on weeks ago.... and I need to get it now. Now I end up doing an advanced search in windows explorer by date and maybe looking for certain keywords.
It would be nice to keep track of them in alteryx - add tags, customer names. depts to modules (meta info tab)?
Maybe a special container/gui with time line would read the meta info tab so you can more easily find that one module/macro

Also, another gui containing tool name tags so you can easily find all module that use that one tool you're looking for

Ability to run. Workflow from failed tool onwards .

If a workflow has 10 tools , if some tools failed with error(at tool5) , in an etl world we don’t want to run it again from beginning, instead we fix the tool (tool5)that had error and run from that tool and finish workflow .tool 5 to tool10.

To measure the computational complexity of an Alteryx workflow, you need a unit of measure. Because the execution time depends on hardware performance, execution time is not suitable for comparison on different PC's. I temporarily named this to Alteryx Calculation Score (ACS).

ACS is useful for:
1. For troubleshooting purposes, I want to compare my workflow ACS and execution time between my PC and another PC. If the workflow overflow PC's memory, ACS is same but execution time goes worse.
2. I would like to compare the workflow ACS for Weekly Challenge with other people's workflows.
3. When you want to choose the suitable Alteryx tool for your purpose, ACS will be good guide.

ACS is roughly proportional to execution time without DISK and network I / O. Each Alteryx tool has a fixed ACS value because its computational cost depends on the data and settings.

I believe ACS will improve the performance of Alteryx and its workflow.

I just noticed in a workflow I'm looking at, that I derived a column but after a bit of developing, forgot about it, so there it sat, unused.  It doesn't hurt anything, but it would be useful if that sort of thing would automatically generate a soft warning on the tool in question: e.g. any item not referenced downstream automatically generates an "Unused variable" warning.

Problem:

Currently, the scheduling via designer controller is independent of the gallery. So, even after a canvas is deleted, the scheduler still continues to execute the cached version of the canvas, as long as the scheduler exists.

Note, this issue does not occur when the canvas is directly scheduled in the gallery, and only occurs when you schedule via the Designer on the controller directly.

Steps to replicate issue:

1) Publish a canvas into gallery

2)Schedule the canvas to run daily via the Designer --> Options --> View Schedules --> Select Controller --> Create new workflow and schedule

3) Delete the canvas from gallery

4) You will notice that the canvas is still getting run on the defined schedule, even though you have deleted the canvas

Observed in Alteryx 11.5.1

Idea Recommendation:

Golden copy of a canvas should be the version existing in the gallery. Once the gallery instance of the canvas is deleted/replaced with a new version,

• All related artifacts to the old version should be marked as "Deleted"
• All existing schedules should be stopped from being executed
• We should continue to retain all meta data attributes and execution history related to the old version (should not be wiped out) but clearly marked as archived/deleted

@SeanAdams @LizaNemchynova