Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

It would be great to dynamic update the next Analytic App based on an interface input. This mean I have a chained app. In Step 1 I ask a Yes/No Question. The Answer to this question will determine to open in Step 2 Analytic App A (with it's own interface Inputs) or Analytic App B (with other interface inputs).

Many users are facing this issue when they want to create an tool (e.g. for mapping purposes) that contains two datastreams/flows with different interface input requirements.

Adding this feature would allow us to create different dataflows with different input requirements. This helps us to differentiate between different mappingsschemes and increases userexperience (currently they have to fill a lot of unnecessary interface inputs). Thanks.

H.

The current version of the Publish to Tableau macro retrieves an API key at the start of the workflow run.  Often times the workflow may take several hours to run before it's ready to write to Tableau by which time the API may have expired.  (I think the default tableau server setting times out in 2 hrs)  It's one of those soul crushing "I should've forked the output!"

Sample Log Error - 

•         Tool #46: TableauServer.UploadChunks (238): Iteration #1: Tool #19: Tool #4: Tableau Server API Request (Upload file) Error Code 401002: Unauthorized Access -- Invalid authentication credentials were provided. 
•          Tool #46: Tool #252: Tool #4: Tableau Server API Request (Publish file) Error Code 401002: Unauthorized Access -- Invalid authentication credentials were provided.

The idea would be to change when the macro obtains the API from when the workflow is initiated to just before the workflow is ready to write to the Tableau avoiding these timeouts.

(If you're having this issue in the meantime you can have your Tableau server admin up the timeout)

Can we have an option to save a workflow in a prior version for backward compatibility? I think Tableau offers this functionality.

Example:

If I have 2019.4.8 and a colleague has 2019.1.x, I cannot share my workflows because my colleague will receive a notice that the workflow was built in a newer version. I want to be able to save my workflow in 2019.1.x and send to my colleague.

This is predicated on the workflow not containing any tools/features not present in the older version. In that case, give me a warning about the specific tools/features that are not backward compatible. Thank you.

Today when we install custom tools that use DLLs, the DLLs must be placed in the Plugins folder inside the Alteryx installation directory.  This requires a second step after the YXI installer runs.  I would like to be able to package the DLL with the YXI installer and Alteryx will search for the DLL inside the tool's directory, just the same as what happens with custom Python tools.  This will allow custom tools that use DLLs to be installed just as easily as the 1-step installation process for Python tools.

For example, this today does not work, but I want it to:

When I have AMP enabled, I can no longer performance profile my workflows. I get that there may be issues with calculating this across multiple threads but it'd be great to have Performance profiling available for the new engine. 

Hello Alteryx, Please fix Salesforce Input and Output tools. 

The input tool has a lot of issues with Login , , Custom SQL, Json issues, Machine Encryption, and saving to the gallery , . 

Unable to use Crew macros with Salesforce input Workflows etc.... there is a lot of post's with all the issues with Salesforce V.1 Versions. 

Please add official support for newer versions of Microsoft SQL Server and the related drivers.

According to the data sources article for Microsoft SQL Server (https://help.alteryx.com/current/DataSources/SQLServer.htm), and validation via a support ticket, only the following products have been tested and validated with Alteryx Designer/Server:

Microsoft SQL Server

Validated On: 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2016.

• No R versions are mentioned (2008 R2, for instance)
• SQL Server 2017, which was released in October of 2017, is notably missing from the list.
• SQL Server 2019, while fairly new (~6 months old), is also missing

This is one of the most popular data sources, and the lack of support for newer versions (especially a 2+ year old product like Sql Server 2017) is hard to fathom.

ODBC Driver for SQL Server/SQL Server Native Client

Validated on ODBC Driver: 11, 13, 13.1

Validated on SQL Server Native Client: 10,11

• ODBC Driver 17+ is not mentioned, even though it was released in February of 2018. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/connect/odbc/windows/release-notes-odbc-sql-server-windows?view...
• SQL Server Native Client is deprecated. It is being replaced by Microsoft OLE DB Driver for SQL Server. However, there is not a mention of Microsoft OLE DB Driver for SQL Server. The latest version of this is 18.3.0. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/connect/oledb/release-notes-for-oledb-driver-for-sql-server?vie...

The Alteryx Python tool currently throws an error if the inbound record set has zero rows (screenshot 1).

In order to manage that - you need to create try-except block around the Alteryx.read that instead creates an empty record set data frame. (screenshot 2).   This is inefficient because every time you change the canvas before the python tool, you need to re-code a static field list into the try-except block (i.e. you can no-longer deal with variable fields)

Please could you change the Alteryx.read method to create a zero-record dataframe with the correct column names if the input is zero-length?

Thank you

Sean

Screenshot 1:

Screenshot 2:

It would be cool to have annotations that dynamically update.  E.g. a record count would be displayed in the annotation and update after a run if changes occurred.

Hey @apolly 

You and the team have been doing a lot of innovative changes to the results window for data.

Could I ask for an uplift to the results window for Workflow Messages?

Summary: Error messages in the workflow results window cannot be fully viewed - have to be copied into Notepad and then reformatted before you can read.

Request: Allow user to double-click to see full readable version of a workflow result message

Detail:

If you have an error message in a workflow result - it gives you a message that is often longer than the window allows and there is no cell-viewer option

As a result, there is really no way to get to the important part of the error message to understand what's going on, other than to use Notepad

Step 1: Copy into Notepad

(you can see the end of line characters being misunderstood)

Step 2: Manually clean this up by breaking on the line breaks

And now you can see the important part of the result message..

Could we rather add the ability to double-click on a result message in the result window and bring up a modal window that formats the error message for you (similar to the modal window used for XML editing of a tool).   That would eliminate this entire wasteful effort of trying to read an error message and having to use Notepad?

Bring up a modal window, similar to this one; so that I can see the error without having to go to Notepad

The performance profile option outputs a list into the results window. It is difficult to check the tools and continuously scan back to the profile. Make it easy! Put the times and percentages in the connection progress tooltips of all the tools.

Environment variables act as a shortcut so that different computers can be configured in different ways, but a particular path will still point to the right place.

For example if you open up explorer and go to %TEMP%\  - you will open up whichever folder is set up as Temp on this machine.    This is super useful so that you can use a particular logical folder without knowing the actual placement on every machine (for example the Windows Directory)

This works partially in the Directory / input - when you put in the environment variable, it is able to search possible subdirectories (screenshot 1) but it does not work once you run the workflow (screenshot 2).

It seems as if the designer hits the Windows API directly, but it does not work within the engine.

Please could you alter the engine to be able to make full use of the environment variables on the machine in question in the directory path or input tool path?

Screenshot 1 - works in designer

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.

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.

When developing and/or troubleshooting workflows, I frequently disable the outputs using the checkbox in the Runtime configuration settings to speed up the workflow and prevent sending emails and/or overwriting data in the output sources... however, 9/10 times I forget to turn off this checkbox when I save my workflow back up to the Gallery. This results in countless emails from users to the tune of "I ran the workflow successfully, but there was no output?" 🙂

Would love love love to see some sort of warning notification (similar to the ones that already shown for data sources etc.) when saving to the Gallery if the "Disable All Tools that Write Output" option is selected in the Runtime settings.

Thank you!!

NJ

Transfer of records from Python SDK RecordRef seems to be slow sending large amounts of data to the Alteryx Engine (e.g. discussion here). Although unclear of the exact specifics, it seems that there's a copy and convert process in play.

Apache Arrow appears to be addressing this issue, and the roadmap and specs are impressive! It seems like (again I have no understanding of the Alteryx Engine specifics) that something like this would be excellent for expanding SDK use cases as well as for other connectors such as the Apache Spark connector.

And it looks like it'd be fun to build into Alteryx! 🙂

I would like to know the run time user for workflows in Gallery. Possibly changing the run time username in the gallery. I know we could include the credentials at workflow save to gallery but that means I have to open the workflow and change the credentials.Also, we could change the worker process to be run with certain credentials I will have to be admin to be able to do edit worker process setup.

Thanks

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