Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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"

It would be helpful if we could open 2 or more workflows at the same time from a gallery connection. Sometimes they are related or part of an overall update process, so opening all of them at the same time would save many clicks and a lot of time. 

So I discovered this neat little tip today where if you have a browse tool in your workflow and click on the hyperlink (2 in the picture below) whilst the workflow is running, it will open a pop-out browse rather than show the data in the results window, meaning you can still see all of the messages). However, If you click on the Tool name/ID (1 in the image) is locks the results window to that tool. Idea for a fix here

And this lead me to think that Alteryx must be populating the temporary browse anywhere in memory as it's running, so it would be great if it was possible to either click on the tool anchors or the tool names in the results window whilst the workflow is running to see the browse anywhere data.

It'll be great to have different icons whether Designer is executed Elevated or not, so it's easy to identify the instance you need to work with.

The interactive results pane is great, but wouldn't it be cool if you could interact directly with the result pane to do things like filtering.

There are a few too many steps with the method at the moment, where you need to either copy the value or type it into the filter pop up. A simple right click and filter on selected value would be a big ux improvement.

When creating annotations in the new image template tool as part of intelligence suite, a feature improvement would be the ability to modify the annotation, to change the dimensions of it.

Currently the only option is to cancel and redraw but being able to edit and drag the existing annotation would be a great addition. This is because the sizing and position of the annotation is important in the OCR process, and when there are many annotations on a page a user is likely to only need to make minor adjustments instead of deleting and redrawing. A mock up is below.

With the new keyboard shortcuts in 2021.1, I would love to see this same functionality added to the global search. I would like for

1) The global search bar to be accessible via a keyboard shortcut

2) You can navigate through the results with the arrow keys and

3) I can click enter on a tool and it will add it to the canvas just like the tool palette now functions in 21.1.

cc: @A11yKyle 

Hello,

In cases where more than one field is being used in a join, the "Join (Tool ID) String fields can only be joined to other string fields" error message could be improved by indicating which field has a mismatch.

For example, if I'm joining Fields A, B, C, D... to fields Z, Y, X, W... in Join tool 24, and for some reason Field Z gets changed from String to Double, it'd be nice to see a message like:

"Join (24) (Field 1) String Fields can only be joined to other String fields"

or

"Join (24) String Fields can only be joined to other String fields (A)"

So that I know I need to go to a select tool and change the type of either A or Z.

Otherwise I look at the Join tool output and try to figure out which pair no longer has matching types, which can take a minute when dealing with a multiple-point join.

Thank you!

I'm Left handed and use my mouse in my left hand.  As such I use the following right-hand keyboard operations in the programs like Excel etc; CTRL-INS (Copy), Shift-INS (Paste), and Shift-DEL (Cut).

In Alteryx Designer these don't work for me in the Workflow window (but do in say the meta Info window) - is there a setting so I can enable them for the Workflow Window, or can the feature be added.

Hi 

I think its super frustrating not beeing able to search for dates, or date ranges in the result window.

Lets say I have a dataset with 2 dates, date picked up and date delivered.

Then I need to search broad in the result window, for a given date. With search in both coloumns.

Could we please have a simple specific date search, and maybe a from-to date? Like in the filter?


Or go all the way and look at excel date filter?

Kind regards

So there's a shortcut for running a workflow but for the life of me I can't seem to find a shortcut for running a workflow as an analytic app.  Surely there should be one? 

Ctrl + Shift + R seems like an obvious choice.

Shifty

Dynamic macros that fetch the current version at every run time vs storing a static copy of the macro with the workflow at publish time are challenging to pull off using shared drives. 

This suggestion is to store dynamic macros in the gallery and secure their use with collections.

Right click + "Insert After" and Right click + "Paste After" should behave the same. In the picture below I show the two cases. Currently, the "Insert After" option inserts a tool between the selected tool and the tools after it. The "Paste After" creates a new branch with the pasted tool. I think the "Paste After" should behave the same as the "Insert After": paste the tool on the existing branches. In case we want to create a new branch, we will paste the tool and connect a new branch to it.

The Dynamic Input tool fails when attempting input a set of Excel files with the following error:

Error: Dynamic Input (1): The file "Test2.xlsx|||<List of Sheet Names>" has a different schema than the 1st file in the set.

Each spreadsheet contains two tabs and all tabs contain the same columns.

The root cause of the schema error is that maximum sheet name length in the two spreadsheets is different.  The first spreadsheet uses "East" and "West" for sheet names.  The second spreadsheet uses "North" and "South" for sheet names.  The Dynamic Input tool uses the longest sheet name when defining the effective Schema.

Excel limits sheet name length to 31 characters. It would be helpful if the Dynamic Input tool used 31 as the minimum string length when defining a schema from Excel sheet names.

The Input Data tool exhibits similar behavior when using a wildcard in the filename and the "Import only the list of sheet names" option.

A batch macro can be used as a workaround.

Quite often, I would love to be able to use Browse tools already while the workflow is still running, if that specific Browse tool has completed (green box around). This would help to debug and save a lot of time.

In this case, the lower Browse tool would be enabled already now.

Sometimes, when you change the system settings on Alteryx Designer, you get this annoying message :

Error: "Settings Validation Error" Alteryx Service failed to initialize, likely due to inconsistent RuntimeSettings.xml file: Unable to start Queue service, insufficient license

well, well, well...

I found the solution to this page https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/Settings-Validation-Error-when-usin...

"Under Environment Setup Type, you must select "Designer Only" if only Designer is licensed"


Maybe instead of the current message, Alteryx can check the licence and help with a "you must choose Designer only option ath the beginning because only Designer is licensed".

Best regards,

Simon

When I select multiple containers using control. I can see the configuration pane still on the left. If I adjust anything there it will only adjust the last selected container. I would like it to adjust all selected containers.

We would like some enhancements to the Salesforce connectors (input and output) to allow:

- Either the Batch or the Bulk API to be used. Batch API is much better for smaller jobs while the Bulk is better for larger jobs (larger numbers of records). It would be very useful to allow the selection of which API was used by the tool to use the most efficient API.

- The number of records per batch to be defined in the tool. I know this can be achieved using a batch macro but it would be far easier (from a user point of view) to be able to enter this value in the Salesforce connector and have it manage the batch size. We frequently have issues with the batch size being too large and Salesforce having errors (and records not updating).

Hello!
I have recently come across something within Alteryx that caught me by surprise. Currently when you are within the configuration window of a tool (in this example, the browse tool) and use ctrl + backspace (shortcut for deleting a previous full word), a blank character is instead added.

Please see example:

Currently in the Browse tool configuration

Go to change the Name of the tool - and naturally to clear it, use ctrl + backspace:

[] is added to the end. From what i can gather, this is a 'control character' , used when an application does not support ctrl+backspace.

Ctrl + Delete however, is supported.

I am proposing for this character/functionality to be supported. I believe the configuration window is the main - and potentially only, i couldn't find any other examples - place this is not supported.

Hope this makes sense!
TheOC