Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Please consider implementing a consistent case-sensitive option for all tools and functions.

To compare string values, including case-sensitivity:   This post had a good description of the challenge, but the post has been archived:

   https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/IF-equation-ignoring-case-BUG/m-p/4170...

   For all the time I've used Alteryx, I thought that IF "test" = "TEST" would evaluate to false. Today I realised that isn't the case and I was surprised. I'm very surprised that "equals" performs like it does.

A few existing Ideas request case-sensitivity for individual tools:

   Case insensitive option while joining two data sets
   https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Ideas/Case-insensitive-option-while-joinin...

   Unique tool enhancement - deal with case sensitive data
   https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Ideas/Unique-tool-enhancement-deal-with-ca...

This new Idea requests system-wide consideration for case-sensitivity, for all tools and functions.

Current state:

These tools and functions are case-sensitive:

• Tool: Join
• Tool: Tile
• Function: FindString
• Functions: MD5_ASCII, MD5_UNICODE, MD5_UTF8

These tools and functions are NOT case-sensitive:

• Tool: Unique
• Function: CompareDictionary

These tools and functions can be either case-sensitive or NOT case-sensitive, depending on the options used:

• Function: Contains
• Function: EndsWith
• Function: StartsWith
• Functions: REGEX_Match, REGEX_Replace, REGEX_CountMatches

Current Challenges:

   How do we easily identify Lower Case, Upper Case, Mixed Case?

   How do we easily compare strings for equality, using case sensitivity?

Request:

   Ensure all tools and functions include an option to ignore or consider Case

   Create new functions for IsUpperCase, IsLowerCase, IsMixedCase

   Create a new function for IsEqual, with an option to ignore or consider Case

See attached workflow, which

• uses REGEX_Match to create 3 new fields: IsUpperCase, IsLowerCase, IsMixedCase
• creates a field [Flag: Original value IsEqual, case-sensitive], to compare strings for equality, using case sensitivity

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?

Hey all,

I don't know about you, but I have always had trouble hovering the mouse over the Results window pane trying to get the resize icon to appear. It seems like you need surgeon level precision to find the icon! 😷

I love Designer and want to see it be the best it can possibly be. I feel like increasing the clickable/hovering area for this resize would be amazingly helpful! 

Just wanted to see if we could get some community momentum going in order to get some developer eyes on this issue. 🙂

 Please help by bumping/upvoting this thread!

 -K

Migrated this from another thread. Some folks tagged from the original post :)
@cpatrickwk @caltang @afellows @MRod @alexnajm @ericsmalley @MilindG @Prometheus @innovate20 

We will not be enabling DCM for the time being (see https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Ideas/Enable-auto-complete-predictive-typi...).  

But, when you do not enable DCM, you get an annoying pop up every time you open Designer that says "DCM toggle is not enabled". 

Please give us the ability to turn this pop up off.

For all Alteryx versions I can remember, when entering a connection string into an input tool (e.g., "C:\Users\mbarone\Desktop\ . . . "), you could just start typing and it would auto-complete.  This is no longer the case when DCM is enabled.  This is a huge efficiency hit we're taking, and is enough for us not to enable DCM (optional or otherwise), given the fact that current workflow connection manager works just fine (meaning the "akas").

Please bring back auto-complete/predictive text when DCM is enabled.

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.

Maybe this pointless but my guess is that memory usage could be as important as processing time and is probably a simple addition to the performance profiling feature.

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.

When working in the Designer, I sometimes have to undo changes. And this experience is quite often very confusing and annoying.

For every change in the workflow, you have to press undo once. However, quite often, one user interaction results in other actions such as automatic move of the donwstream tool, change of size of a tool container etc. In such cases, you have inserted a single tool but need to press undo a couple of times to get back to the original situation. It is, however, often not clear how often. In most cases, I fail using undo at the end and revert my changes by hand.

Please change undo towards undoing one user-action in one undo step.

In case there might be users who like the current behaviour, you might make this a user setting how to deal with the undo history.

One of the most frequent issues I have with my workflow is when the Join Tool reorders columns for no reason. There is an option in the configuration to have the columns revert to the incoming order. It would be nice if the workflow automatically had this set as a default, or provide a toggle option in the settings for this to happen. In many of my flows I've had to create macros to keep the integrity of the column order or remember to go into the settings of this tool and re order the columns before a workflow run. 

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.

I would like a way to disable all containers within a workflow with a single click.  It could be simply disable / enable all or a series of check boxes, one for each container, where you can choose to disable / enable all or a chosen selection. 

In large workflows, with many containers, if you want to run a single container while testing it can take a while to scroll up and down the workflow disabling each container in turn.  

When I run a Standard Workflow in the Designer, I can continue to work on other workflows, I can even run two workflows in parallel.

In contrast, when running an Analytical App in the Designer, the entire program is blocked and neither another workflow can be edited or run.

I propose to allow access to the Designer GUI also when running Analytical Apps.