Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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.

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!

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.

Hi all,

When preparing reports with formatting for my stakeholders. They want these sent straight to sharepoint and this can be achieved via onedrive shortcuts on a laptop. However when sending the workflow for full automation, the server's C drive is not setup with the appropriate shortcuts and it is not allowed  by our admin team.

So my request is to have the sharepoint output tool upgraded to push formatted files to sharepoint. 

Thank you!

Hello all,

The reasons why I would the cadence to be back to quarter release :

-for customers, a quarter cadence means waiting less time to profit of the Alteryx new features so more value

-quarter cadence is now an industry standard on data software.

-the new situation of special cadence creates a lot of frustration. And frustration is pretty bad in business.

-for partners, the new situation means less customer upgrade opportunities, so less cash but also less contacts with customers.

Best regards,

Simon

Good morning!

This may be a very simple thing, but would it be possible to add a DateTimeQuarter() function? We have DateTime Second, Minute, Day, Month, and Year, and being able to have an easy formula for the quarter as well would be incredibly convenient. 

Thanks,

Kat

Apologies if this has been suggested already - did a search and didn't see anything similar.

This is a quality of life/UX idea. The search functionality in the results pane essentially does a 'contains' search on all of the columns (see below screenshots for the filter inserted by the 'apply data manipulations button). As I build workflows and profile the data, it'd be helpful if I could click one or more columns and limit the search bar to just those fields.

Right now, depending on the dataset I could get rows returned by the search due to the search term appearing in columns that aren't relevant. To workaround this I could add select tools to limit the columns or do more robust filters in a filter tool, but having it built in would be very helpful.

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. 

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):

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"

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.

As @Jonathan-Sherman pointed out in his blog post we love that the toolbar is back in version 2020.2!

One way that this toolbar could be enhanced, however, is to allow the use of the save button while a workflow is running. The user can still click File->Save while the workflow is running, but it would be quicker to be able to use the button on the toolbar.

The idea behind encrypting or locking a workflow is good for users to maintain the workflow as designed. 

However, when a user reaches a level of maturity equivalent to that of the builder or more, or even when changes are required - the current practice is to keep a locked and unlocked version of the workflow so that it allows for a change in the future. 

It would be much simpler if we can have the power to lock and unlock workflows with a password. Users can then maintain and keep the passwords so that they can continue with the workflow. 

Not everybody is on Server yet so this feature is very helpful for control before Server migration. Otherwise it’s just password protecting a folder containing the workflow package, then re-locking a new save file each time a change is made or when someone new takes over on prem. 

It would be great if we could add example workflows to our macros, accessible in the same way as from the original tools (example hyperlink shown after single-clicking on a tool in the tool palette or when searching in the search bar).

There is a post on how to do it for custom tools How to add an example link in the custom tool (alteryx.com). The way described there has limitations and does not seem to work on macros: I was able to get the link to show up, but nothing happens when I click.

My suggestion, make it easy to add an example workflow to a macro, like it is to change the logo or add a help link.

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.

Changing the Macro Input tool in an existing macro is dangerous and can result in unmapped fields or lost connections in workflows using the macro. For example, we have a widely used macro for which we'd like to change the name of an input field, change it's default type from Date to DateTime, make it optional while keeping other fields mandatory. Currently, we cannot find a solution which would not require us to fix each workflow using the macro after changing it. We should be able to change the field names, field types (e.g. String to V_WString, Date to DateTime), select optional fields and do other modifications to Macro Input without having to update each workflow using the macro. The new Macro Input UI could be enhanced with a window similar to that of Select tool's. Technically, the Macro Input fields could have a unique ID by which they would be recognised in workflows, so the field names would just be aliases that could be changed without losing the mapping. In summary, we are restricted to our initial setup of Macro Input and it is very complicated to change it afterwards, especially if the macro is used widely.

Hello all,

A few weeks ago Alteryx announced inDB support for GBQ. This is an awesome idea, however to make it run, you should use Oauth2 Authentication means GBQ API should be enabled. As of now, it is possible to use Simba ODBC to connect GBQ. My idea is to enhance the connection/authentication method as we have today with Simba ODBC for Google BigQuery and support inDB. It is not easy to implement by IT considering big organizations, number of GBQ projects and to enable API for each application. By enhancing the functionality with ODBC, this will be an awesome solution.

Thank you for voting

Albert

When I import an Excel file in to Alteryx I get an error: “shared strings root=x:sst” and Alteryx cannot read the file.

I can work around this by manually opening and saving the excel before importing it into Alteryx but this is not ideal, especially considering the automation implications.

I believe this may be happening because the XLSX generated by the source of the report has a prefix “x:” in all the tags in the Shared String XML embedded in Excel. See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/open-xml/working-with-the-shared-string-table 

Essentially, it would appear Alteryx is not able to read generated Excel sheets which has the prefix "x:" (e.g. from a bot). The second file which has been opened and saved in Excel manually can be read by Alteryx correctly.

Example of file as exported from ”BOT”:

How the same file looks once it is manually opened and saved:

Ideally Alteryx would read the file as is, i.e. with the "X:SST" tag seen above as having to manually open and save the excel before it can be read is rather clunky.

Thanks!