Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi, as a person with a mapping background, I love that Alteryx added zoom & pan abilities. The hold ctrl + mouse wheel zoom is great! Also, the hold space to pan is great as well. My only issue is this function should still work if the process is running, can you implement?

One of things I like to do is select a bunch of tools and to see the collective performance of particular part of a workflow. It would be super cool if these stats were aggregated. 

I could imagine then you could run alternative solutions side by side and then just select the tools involved to compare.

Currently, Control Containers only report in case they are activated:

Info: Control Container (3): Control Container Activated.
...
Info: Control Container (3): Control Container Completed.

It would be very helpful to also get information on disabled Control Containers:

Info: Control Container (3): Control Container Deactivated.

Currently, Cache and Run Workflow cannot be used if there's a second branch of data which goes around the tool which you want to cache. This slows down intermediate runs especially in complex workflows with a lot of inter-dependencies.

For example:

If you want to cache at the formula "Do something", Alteryx will not allow this because a single temporary cache file at this tool will not be sufficient:

My suggestion is that Alteryx allows multiple cache files for one single cache event. In this case:

Proposed process:

1. Run the cache run from the initial source(s) of data (here the Text Input tool) via all tools needed to produce the output of the selected tool (here Formula "Do something"). In this case: Text Input, left Select, Formula.
2. Produce a cache file for every tool which has a connection towards outside of the direct tool chain. In this case: Cache file 2 (as Alteryx does it today), Cache file 1 (new behaviour)

This way, I could use Cache and Run Workflow much more often which would save me a lot of time. 

When the user has no internet connection or when the Help > Source setting is set to "Offline", clicking on a custom tool's help icon will always navigate to

• [AlteryxInstallDirectory]/bin/RuntimeData/HtmlAssets/help.alteryx.com/AlteryxCurrent/en/[helpURL]

which is practically never desirable for custom tools.

Specifying an offline help URL

Developers should have a way to (optionally) specify an offline help URL. This configuration could behave the same as `help_url` which already supports specifying both URLs and local files. If the offline help URL is not set, it would fallback to the `help_url` configuration.

{
  "tools": {
    "MyCustomTool": {
      "configuration": {
        "help_url": "https://mywebsite.com/help/my-custom-tool",
        "offline_help_url": "file://help/my-custom-tool.html"
      }
    }
  }
}

All built-in tools have their names, descriptions, help URLs, etc. localized to the currently selected locale. Custom tools should also be able to do this.

Specify localized configuration values

Developers should have a way to specify localized values for any locales they choose to support. Similar to the deprecated .yxlang files, this can be done with supplementary `ayx_workspace.[locale].json` files that redefine a subset of configurations which support internationalization.

/* ayx_workspace.jp.json */
{
  "tools": {
    "MyCustomTool": {
      "configuration": {
        "long_name": "カスタムツール",
        "description": "これは日本語です",
        "help_url": "https://mywebsite.com/help/jp/my-custom-tool"
      }
    }
  }
}

All built-in Designer tools have an associated example workflow that can be opened by right-clicking a tool and selecting Open Example. This feature is invaluable in helping users familiarize themselves with a tool and explore all of its features. Custom tools should be able to specify example workflows of their own.

It is currently possible to specify an example workflow, but

1. The workflow must be specified by modifying a tool's `Config.xml` file, where changes may be overwritten by the SDK.
2. All paths are relative to `[AlteryxInstallDirectory]\Samples\[locale]\02 Learn_one_tool_at_a_time`, and there is no easy way to install workflows into this directory.

Specifying an example workflow

Developers should have a way to specify the example workflow associated with any custom tool. This would likely be done in the `ayx_workspace.json` file.

{
  "tools": {
    "MyCustomTool": {
      "configuration": {
        "example_path": "configuration\\MyCustomTool_1_0\\example.yxmd"
      }
    }
  }
}

Note that a workflow may depend on some external files as well. It would be ideal if an `assets_path` could be defined to easily allow any arbitrary assets to be included with your tool. (This is currently possible, but must be done by manually modifying the .yxi archive; it isn't handled by the SDK). This would easily allow for example workflows to be specified as a path relative to `assets_path`, and if the workflow contains any relative paths to files within the assets folder, they can be resolved.

{
  "tools": {
    "MyCustomTool": {
      "configuration": {
        "assets_path": "configuration\\MyCustomTool_1_0\\assets",
        "example_path": "example\\example.yxmd"
      }
    }
  }
}

Localization of the example workflow would also be supported when localization of the plugin configuration is supported.

When a plugin is created, it can be labelled with any tool category, existent or non-existent. If the category does not exist, Designer will create it and give it a default icon. It would be nice if a category icon could also be specified, specifically for this case.

Specifying a tool category icon

Developers would have a way to (optionally) specify the tool category icon for their plugin. This would likely be part of `ayx_workspace.json`.

{
  "name": "My Plugin",
  "tool_category": "Custom Category",
  "tool_category_icon_path": "configuration\\tool_category_icon.png",
  "package_icon_path": "configuration\\package_icon.png",
  ...
}

Behavior when installing a plugin

If a plugin has a tool category icon specified, Designer should do the following when installing the plugin:

• If the tool category already exists and has an icon, no changes are made
• If the tool category already exists and does not have an icon set, the category is updated with the specified icon
• If the tool category does not exist, the category is made and its icon is set to the specified icon

This prevents changing the icons of existing categories (including built-in categories), but would prevent subsequent plugin versions from updating their tool category icons.

Use case

The company Acme Corporation develops a plugin for interfacing with Acme-related products, and would like all its tools to be grouped in a new category called "Acme" whose icon is the Acme icon.

It would be nice to create our own custom categories to be able to organize tools. It would be similar to how the Favorites category works, but any number of additional categories can be created.

Creating a new category

The user would have a way to create a new category and enter the following information:

• The category's name
• The category's icon
  • There could be a number of premade icons to select from

Adding and removing tools from custom categories

The user would have a way to add tools to or remove tools from the custom categories.

In many programming languages, errors can be thrown and caught so that the final program does not fail even if a procedure or function produces an error.

I would like to propose something similar for Alteryx, using the Control Containers. Already now, a Control Container outputs the log in the container to its output stream on the upper right corner:

Still, the workflow produces an error:

My idea is to optionally avoid the error output to the log but only report the error through the control container's output log. The error message in the output log should be "degraded" to a warning. The output log of the control container should stay unchanged. The configuration of the Control Container could look like this (addition in red):

This would help a lot if stuff produced by others is used (e.g., third party macros) which might fail while this might be normal behaviour for the workflow.

It would be very helpful to have a find and replace work in duplicated formula.  especially if it is long.

Hi,

I was thinking that this might be nice addition - while Joining two inputs at the bottom there is always possibility to check if we want to include Unknown columns. Maybe we could specify if we want to join Unknown columns only from Right Input or Unknown only from Left Input. I know I would use this in my workflows. 

Thanks

Alicja

Hello, I believe this feature will be useful for many people.
The idea is to select multiple instances of the same tool and the configuration that we set will be applied to all the selected tools. Furthermore, it will be useful to be an easy way to select all instances of the same tool across a workflow with a shortcut in order to edit them more easily.

I am suggesting an addition to the Auto Field Tool.  Create an option that allows only auto sizing of the fields and does not change the field type.  A check box that says Auto Size Only.  The tool would recognize any fields that can be resized based on their incoming data field type and will not change the data type.  The resizing function is very helpful to maximize workflow performance, but I currently do not use it much because it guesses wrong on the data types.  This causes problems also when data inputs change.  Whereas setting to auto size only, it can streamline the data but let the user be confident the data types would not change. 

Thank You

As of version 2023.1 once a workflow is locked, it cannot be unlocked. If Alteryx can unlock it, can it be made into a user option?

My idea has two parts. See the images for examples.

1. Add an option on the lock screen so the user can get an unlock passkey.

Passkey is either generated by Alteryx or set by user

2. Change the behavior when trying to open a locked file by giving the user an option to enter the unlock passkey.

Same behavior if there is no passkey

Dialog box with passkey input and cancel button if a passkey exists

This would be useful as a way to revise or edit a workflow or update the expiration date on the existing workflow without having to reload or resave a new file.

After closing the Table or Query option on an Input Data tool, the table layout in the Visual Query Builder view gets reset to stacking the tables/views on top of each other. It would be great if the layout stayed the way I left it the last time I closed it.

Idea

Currently

Using File Browse on Excel files first of all is inconsistent between running the Analytical App in the Designer and in the Gallery:

• In the Designer, the user is not being asked which Excel workflow shall be selected.
• In the Gallery, the user is always asked which Excel workflow shall be selected.

Depending on the use case, both behaviours can be the right one:

• To load a specific Excel file worksheet, the dialog for workflow selection is appropriate.
• When working with the entire Excel file (copying, getting the list of worksheets, etc.), the dialog is not helpful.

Thus, my idea is as follows:

• Add a checkbox to the File Browse tool which determines whether the worksheet selection dialog shall be opened (and the output will be <filename>.<ext>|<worksheet>) or not (and the output will be <filename>.<ext>) in case of Excel file selected.
• Make behaviour consistent in Alteryx Designer and Gallery.

This is a general request for uniform methods of connecting to data sources. The management of data connections is currently varied, and configurations/updates are completely different across connections. 

Enhancement request for the option to Encrypt ODBC credentials instead of just hashing them