Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi UX interested parties,

Here are some ideas for you to consider:

1.  These lines are BORING and UNINFORMATIVE.  I'd like to understand (pic = 1,000 words) more when looking at a workflow.  

• A line could communicate:
  • Qty of Records
  • Size of Data
  • Is the data SORTED
    • What sort order
  • Quality of Data 

If you look at lines A, B, C in the picture above.  Nothing is communicated.  Weight of line, color of line, type of line, beginning line marker/ending line marker, these are all potential ways that we could see a picture of the data without having to get into browse everywhere to see the information.  If we hover over the data connection, even more information could appear (e.g. # of records, size of file) without having to toggle the configuration parameters.

2.  Wouldn't it be nice to not have to RUN a workflow to know last SAVED metadata (run) of  a workflow?  I'd like to open a "saved" workflow and know what to expect when I run the workflow.  Heck, how long does it take the beast to run is something that we've never seen unless we run it.

3.  I'd like to set the metadata to display SORT keys, order.  Sort1 Asc, Sort 2 Desc ....   This sort information is very helpful for the engine and I'll likely post about that thought.  As a preview, when a JOIN tool has sorted data and one of the anchors is at EOF, then why do we need to keep reading from the other anchor?  There won't be another matched record (J) anchor.  In my example above, we don't ask for the L/R outputs, so why worry about the rest of the join?

4.  Have you ever seen a map (online) that didn't display watermark information?  I think that the canvas experience should allow for a default logo (like mine above, but transparent) in the lower right corner of the canvas that is visible at all times.  Having the workflow name at the top in a tab is nice, but having it display as a watermark is handy.

5.  Once the workflow has RUN, all anchors are the same color.  How about providing GREY/White or something else on EMPTY anchors instead of the same color?  This might help newbies find issues in JOIN configuration too.

6.  If the tool has ERRORs you put a RED exclamation mark.  I despise warnings, but how about a puke colored question mark?  With conversion errors, the lines could be marked to let you know the relative quantity of conversion errors (system messages have a limit)

Just a few top of mind things to consider ....

Cheers,

Mark

Current:

Currently in Result window we have datacleanse, fileter and sort functionality which makes life easier.

We dont have column Rename and Data type change functionality. In order to do that we need to drag a tool for the same for Rename of column.

Expectaion:

Result Tool should be capable enough to Rename column and Data type.

It will save a lot of time ,

Hello,

More and more databases have complex data types such as array, struct or map. This would be nice if we could use it on Alteryx as input, as internal and as output, with calculations available on it.

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/hive/languagemanual+types#LanguageManualTypes-ComplexTyp...

Best regards,

Simon

Hi 

I'm really missing a search in the medata phane?

If I am on data phane:

If im browsing though metadata:

When opening an Alteryx workflow that has been saved in a newer version, a warning message is shown, but you are still able to open the workflow, provided that it doesn't contain tools that don't exist in your current Alteryx version.

This does not work for packaged workflows that contain macros, for instance. You have to manually edit the xml of the extracted package file.

It would be great if we could have the same ability with packaged workflows that exists for normal workflows, i.e. the ability to extract and execute them with a warning.

CI / CD is critical to any production level process, especially when multiple authors are contributing new features to the same workflow. Currently, multi-author editing of workflows is extremely difficult, and something that would be aided greatly by using git to control different branches of ongoing work. Luckily, that's something we can already do today! However, the ability to test before merging a pull request is critical to modern CI / CD pipelines. For this, it we need to be able to run a headless workflow from a CI / CD environment. Also, having the ability to pass in parameters to the workflow would allow for robust integration testing - something that isn't straightforward today without running on production environments. 

Hello all,

EDIT : stupid me : it's an excel limitation in output, not an alteryx limitation :( Can you please delete this idea ?
I had to convert some string into dates and I get this error message (both with select tool and DateTime tool) :

ConvError: Output Data (10): Invalid date value encountered - earliest date supported is 12/31/1899  error in field: DateMatch  record number: 37399

This is way too early. Just think to birthdate or  geological/archeological data !

Also : other products such as Tableau supports earlier dates!

Hope to see that changed that soon.

Best regards,

Simon

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. 

I learnt Alteryx for the first time nearly 5 years ago, and I guess I've been spoilt with implicit sorts after tools like joins, where if I want to find the top 10 after joining two datasets, I know that data coming out of the join will be sorted. However with how AMP works this implicit sort cannot be relied upon. The solution to this at the moment is to turn on compatibility mode, however...

1) It's a hidden option in the runtime settings, and it can't be turned on default as it's set only at the workflow level

2) I imagine that compatibility mode runs a bit slower, but I don't need implicit sort after every join, cross-tab etc.

So could the effected tools (Engine Compatibility Mode | Alteryx Help) have a tick box within the tool to allow the user to decide at the tool level instead of the canvas level what behaviour they want, and maybe change the name from compatibility mode to "sort my data"?

I often have to cache my workflow at certain points to do further development/analysis since the run time is so long. I can't express how frustrating it is when i need to edit a formula tool that's like 2 tools behind the cache but the whole entire cache is lost when i have to edit it. why can't the cache be kept up until the tool that was edited??

Performance profiles work at the tool level. When I want to evaluate the performance of a group of tools, I have to click on them one at a time, log the performance, and calculate manually. I want to be able to click on a container full of tools or lasso some myself and view the granular and subtotaled performance profile.

Don't know if someone else already flagged this... however if you click on a tool link in the result window, while the workflow is running, the window doesn't go back to the "main view" until the workflow stops.

It's fine if the workflow takes a few minutes to run, but if you are trying to debug a heavy workflow and you click by mistake on a tool link halfway through... it's a bit annoying that you can't see the output messages until the end

I am working with client to modernize the way to provide data to core systems - in this case, Prophet.  

The data volume is huge, and the logic is complex, also some files are in legacy format, so AMP engine not able to deliver a satisfactory result.  

Appreciate if the team can work on AMP engine enhancement to help handling Flat files, or other tools so to make the workflow truly automated.  This will definitely help to justify the investment on server to clients with similar need.  

Under the Runtime setting, there is an existing option to "Disable All Tools that Write Output". This is incredibly useful when developing workflows when you don't want to overwrite existing files.

But this option doesn't disable all outputs, like Publishing to Tableau! 

I suggest adding the option to disable ALL kinds of outputs, uploads, and publishing (except possibly logging and caching).

In order to run a canvas using either AMP or E1 - the user has to perform at least 5 operations which are not obvious to the user.

a) click on whitespace for the canvas to get to the workflow configuration.   If this configuration pane is not docked - then you have to first enable this

b) set focus in this window

c) change to the runtime tab

d) scroll down past all the confusing and technical things that most end users are nervous to touch like "Memory limits" and temporary file location and code page settings - to click on the last option for the AMP engine.

e) and then hit the run button

A better way!

Could we instead simplify this and just put a drop-down on the run button so that you can run with the old engine, or run with the new engine?        Or even better, have 2 run buttons - run with old engine, and run with super-fast cool new engine?

• This puts the choice where the user is looking at the time they are looking to run  (If I want to run a canvas - I'm thinking about the run button, not a setting at the bottom of the third tab of a workflow configuration)
• It also makes it super easy for users to run with E1 and AMP without having to do 10 clicks to compare - this way they can very easily see the benefit of AMP
• It makes it less scary since you are not wading through configuration changes like Memory or Codepages
• and finally - it exposes the new engine to people who may not even know it exists 'cause it's buried on the bottom of the third tab of a workflow configuration panel, under a bunch of scary-sounding config options.

cc: @TonyaS 

As we begin to adopt the AMP engine - one of the key questions in every user's mind will be "How do I know I'm going to get the same outcome"

One of the easiest ways to build confidence in AMP - and also to get some examples back to Alteryx where there are differences is to allow users to run both in parallel and compare the differences - and then have an easy process that allows users to submit issues to the team.

For example:

• Instead of the option being run in AMP or run in E1 - instead can we have a 3rd option called "Run in comparison mode"
• This runs the process in both AMP and E1; and checks for differences and points them out to the user in a differences repot that comes up after the run.
• Where there's a difference that seems like a bug (not just a sorting difference but something more material) - the user then has a button that they can use to "Submit to Alteryx for further investigation".    This will make it much simpler for Alteryx to identify any new issues; and much simpler for users to report these issues (meaning that more people will be likely to do it since it's easier).

The benefit of this is that not only will it make users more comfortable with AMP (since they will see that in most cases there are no difference); it will also give them training on the differences in AMP vs. E1 to make the transition easier; and finally where there are real differences - this will make the process of getting this critical info to Alteryx much easier and more streamlined since the "Submit to Alteryx" process can capture all the info that Alteryx need like your machine; version number etc; and do this automatically without taxing the user.

In cases where there are dynamic tools - you often get a situation where there are zero rows returned - which means that the output of something like a transpose or a JSON parse or a regex may not have the field names expected.

However - any downstream filter tools (or other similar tools) fail even though there are no rows (see screenshot below).

The only way to get around this is to insert fake rows using a union or use the CReW macro for Ensure Fields.    However, this is all waste since there are no rows so there's no point in even evaluating the predicate in the filter tool.     Rather than making users work around this - can we please change the engine so that a tool can avoid evaluation if there are zero rows - this will significantly reduce the amount of these kind of workaround that need to be used with any dynamic tools (including any API calls).

thank you

Sean

In workflow Constants, it would be really useful to be able to populate a new field associated with each user created constant. 

E.g. Type, Name, Value, "Description"

The description could be left blank but also populated by workflow designers to attach commentary / business logic to the constant. 

E.g. Type = User, Name = MyUserConstant, Value = 0.25, Description = "This describes the weighting factor used in Product Calculations"

We see canvasses every day where dozens fields are brought into a canvas or a macro, but never used - and this just creates slowness for no good benefit.

Given that one of the selling features of Alteryx is the speed of processing  - could we look at three improvements to the Alteryx engine & designer:

• easiest: Keep track of every field brought in / created - and if they are not used in an output, then throw a warning at the end of the execution process
  • For example - you bring in fields a,b,c - you create field d and e during the flow in formula tools
  • Field d is never used as an input to any filters or formulae - and it doesn't appear on any output - so it's just waste
  • Field a and b are part of the output, so they are fine
  • Field c is never used at all - so that's just waste.
  • Field e is used to filter the records before output - so this one is fine.
  • So we've immediately found 2 fields that we can eliminate and make this canvas faster
• Medium: Ignore the unused fields in the execution engine
• Hardest: Tell the users that their field is unused in Alteryx Designer by doing a lineage analysis of the tools, just like software environments like Visual Studio do.    This may require a change to the engine & to designer 'cause we would need to make each tool capture the full detail of the fields that they know in their configuration in order to do this trace.