Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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.

The look of the canvas is important. Being able to toggle between viewing classic icons (as seen throughout this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJwgYYP_xlA), to the extent available, and current icons would provide users with more variety. As a secondary benefit (when toggled to show the classic icons), users would be able to differentiate between the tools that are not classic (i.e., the newer tools that don't have an older design) and the classic tools.

Thank you very much.

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, 

This is one thing that my OCD cannot cope with. 

Some tools, like the Union tool, allow you to 'Ignore warnings', like when fields are missing. 

Some other tools however don't give the option. Date time tool for instance. Sometimes I feel like yelling at Alteryx that "I know that field already exists! I want to change it!". Or the join tool, when you join on a double. 

I know that these warnings don't really affect anything, and they may be useful to highlight something that may be best to be changed, but pleeeeaaassee give us a tick box or something like the union tool where we can ignore warnings. It makes my workflow messy. 

(I'm on designer v 2021.1 btw, so if this has already been done, then please ignore my rant. 😁 )

Thanks

Edit: What I'm talking about 

I am facing an issue regarding the result window. The tabbed document function is disable for the result window. I did not see the entire result window. Kindly find the below mentioned screenshot for your reference.

Request to reverse the feature.

While the result window allows sorting and filtering, every time the user switches to another tool within the same run, the configuration is lost. It would be good if there was a 'Retain" button so that the user does not have to keep setting this each time the tool is switched or when the canvas is retriggered.

The current Export Workflow user experience is extremely frustrating and it sometimes takes me several attempts to export the workflow with all of the correct assets. Some ideas for improving the UX:

• Allow the width of the window to be expanded or maximized. I often have many assets that start with the same folder structure name and I have to scroll to the right for each one to decide whether to check or uncheck it. 

•  Have a display option for "Group asset by Type" (e.g., Input, Output, Macro). I typically only package up my workflows with the embedded macros, not the Inputs or Outputs. (This is especially important during development and testing, when interim yxdb's are saved to facilitate QC and trouble-shooting.) I would like an easy way to "Check all Macros" without having to go through the list one-by-one. I may have over 100 assets; with the current UX, it's really hard to get all the right assets checked.

• Add an option to filter the display to see only the assets that have been checked. 
• Add a way to copy the asset list (checked and/or unchecked) to the clipboard. This would allow us to confirm that all of the assets needed are included BEFORE EXPORTING. 
• Add an option Select All or Deselect All 

I was just responding to a post about the Make Columns tool, and I noticed that there is not an example workflow for this tool built into Designer. It is also missing from the Transform category, so I never think of it.

@peyton-louden @binuacs @Luke_C 

It'd be great to have all DCM connections available in the Data connections window.

And when Use Data connection Manager (DCM) is ticked, The screen defaults to DCM Connection list. 

Today, I am able to take an excel file from a folder and drag it onto the canvas, which automatically creates an Input Data tool.

I would like to be able to drag an excel file right from outlook to do the same! 

The Interactive Chart configure window cannot be resized.  I'm using a single, large monitor, and this window occupies the entire monitor so that I am forced to switch between windows to see other applications.  Most of the space used by the configure window is wasted white space.  Please update this to allow this window to be resized.

I'm using a 32:9 monitor running at 5120x1440, and the attached screenshot shows the size of the configure window on this monitor - 4986x1286.

Cross tab automatically alphabetizes the column headers this can be a little awkward when unioning on column position later on. Would be nice to have this as an optional feature through a tick box on the tool.

Adding a up and down arrow on each column would make it easier and quicker to sort columns then the drop down menu or sort tool

At the moment, at least for Postgres and ODBC connections, the DCM only supports a names DSN that must be installed on each machine running Designer or Server. However, the ODBC admin function is admin only within my company, which makes DCM more trouble than it is worth to use.

Connection strings work well in the workflows, have been implemented on the gallery before, and do not require access to the ODBC admin to implement. Could DCM please be improved to support native connection strings?

The order of the join fields effects the ordering output

For more complex joins it would be nice to have up and down arrows much like the summarise tool:

Often I need to add filters or other tools early on after the workflow is already been mostly built. If a tool connects to one tool I can drag the filter over the connecting line and add the filter seamlessly. However in large workflows there is often this situation:    

The Filter will only connect to one of the lines I'm hovering over. If I could connect to all lines simultaneously and drop in the connection to achieve this (would be awesome):

Hello!

I had found this quirk whilst working on a fairly large workflow, where i had multiple tools cached to keep things quick. I had moved one of the tools on the canvas to a pre-existing container, and it removed the caching on my whole workflow.

Steps to reproduce:

1) setup a super basic workflow (or any workflow):

2) Cache part of the workflow:

3) drag one of the tools (in this case the formula) into the container:

As you can see, the workflow is no longer cached and i have to re-cache it.

This would be a welcome change as that is an unexpected behaviour to me, and so I would imagine others too. A workflow no longer being cached can cost the developer a lot of time (and potential resource, if hitting a Snowflake instance, for example). 

Thanks,
TheOC

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. 

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??