Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas
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We have discussed on several occasions and in different forums, about the importance of having or providing Alteryx with order of execution control, conditional executions, design patterns and even orchestration.
I presented this idea some time ago, but someone asked me if it was posted, and since it was not, I’m putting it here so you can give some feedback on it.
The basic concept behind this idea is to allow us (users) to have:
- Design Patterns
- Repetitive patterns to be reusable.
- Select after and Input tool
- Drop Nulls
- Get not matching records from join
- Conditional execution
- Tell Alteryx to execute some logic if something happens.
- Record count
- Errors
- Any other condition
- Order of execution
- Need to tell Alteryx what to run first, what to run next, and so on…
- Run this first
- Execute this portion after previous finished
- Wait until “X” finishes to execute “Y”
- Orchestration
- Putting all together
This approach involves some functionalities that are already within the product (like exploiting Filtering logic, loading & saving, caching, blocking among others), exposed within a Tool Container with enhanced attributes, like this example:
The approach is to extend Tool Container’s attributes.
This proposition uses actual functionalities we already have in Designer.
So, basically, the Tool Container gets ‘superpowers’, with the addition of some capabilities like: Accepting input data, saving the contents within the container (to create a design pattern, or very commonly used sequence of tools chained together), output data, run the contents of the tools included in the container, etc.), plus a configuration screen like:
- Refers to the actual interface of the Tool Container.
- Provides the ability to disable a Container (and all tools within) once it runs.
- Idea based on actual behavior: When we enable or disable a Tool Container from an interface Tool.
- Input and output data to the container’s logic, will allow to pickup and/or save files from a particular container, to be used in later containers or persist data as a partial result from the entire workflow’s logic (for example updating a dimensions table)
- Based on actual behavior: Input & Output Data, Cache, Run Command Tools, and some macros like Prepare Attachment.
- Order of Execution: Can be Absolute or Relative. In case of Absolute run, we take the containers in order, executing their contents. If Relative, we have the options to configure which container should run before and after, block until previous container finishes or wait until this container finishes prior to execute next container in list.
- Based on actual behavior: Block until done, Cache, Find Replace, some interface Designer capabilities (for chained apps for example), macros’ basic behaviors.
- Conditional Execution: In order to be able to conditionally execute other containers, conditions must be evaluated. In this case, the idea is to evaluate conditions within the data, interface tools or Error/Warnings occurrence.
- Based on actual behavior: Filter tool, some Interface Tools, test Tool, Cache, Select.
- Notes: Documentation text that will appear automatically inside the container, with options to place it on top or below the tools, or hide it.
This should end a brief introduction to the idea, but taking it a little further, it will allow even to have something like an Orchestration layout, where the users can drag and drop containers or patterns and orchestrate them in a solution, like we can do with the Visual Layout Tool or the Interactive Chart tool:
I'm looking forward to hear what you think.
Best
Currently if I have a connection between two tools as per the example below:
I can drag and drop a new tool on the connection between these tools to add it in:
And designer updates the connections nicely, however if I select multiple tools and try and collectively drop them inbetween, on a connection then it won't allow me to do this, and will move the connection out of the way so it doesn't cause an overlap.
Therefore as a QoL improvement it would be great if there was a multi-drop option on connections between tools.
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
Very often, I used a container to make notes about certain parts of the workflow. Some of the comments that I created are pretty long. Could the user have the possibility to have at least rows for the title of the container?
I have created a screen to show what I have in mind. Potentially users could have the ability to turn this option on or inside the container?
If the tables in the config window has lots of rows, it is quite complicated to find those of interest.
Please add a filter or search option (e.g. by the field name) to display only the relevant rows.
It would also be helpful to select or deselect multiple selected rows with one click.
Find an example from the "Select-Tool":
Hello,
I think the option Overwrite File (Remove) shouldn't throw an error if the file is not present
Or, I don't know, make 2 options : one with fail if file is missing, the other to not fail.
This idea is the same than https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Overwrite-Table-for-output-write-indb-should... but for files.
Best regards,
Simon
Hi
The wording of the tool tip displayed in results window cells with long strings is misleading. The current wording is "This cell has truncated characters".
New users tend to infer that this means that the data value has been truncated somewhere upstream. See here, here and here. Changing this message to something like "Only a portion of long strings is displayed" will help reduce the confusion immensely.
Dan
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
Hi all,
When debugging an error, we need to verify tool by tool in a sequence to better understand what is really going on.
Sometimes the tools are miles away from each other. Imagine a gigantic workflow with a lot of connections going back and forth and wireless connections everywhere to help the workflow organization. Here is an example with more than 1300 tools:
My idea is to have a shortcut showing all the previous/next tools and by selecting the previous/next one you go directly to them.
Something like this:
What do you guys think about that?
Best,
Fernando Vizcaino
After I type something into the filter box, I should be able hit enter and then it just applies my change (ie enter hits the apply button). It used to be this way, but it's not working as of 2021.2. This feels like a very tiny move in the wrong direction. Currently enter does nothing. It looks like if I hit tab twice and then enter, it finds the apply button. I shouldn't have to hit tab twice.
I can't even count how often I looked at an Excel, CSV or even YXDB file, where I KNEW that it was generated by Alteryx, but I couldn't remember the workflow. Currently, I have to simply go through all workflows I ever build and see if I can find it.
Theoretically, I could use a text-search across all workflows and see if I can find the output names - problem here: Most of my output filenames are generated dynamically on the run.
It would be amazing if Alteryx could simply write the Workflow name (maybe even path) into the metadata of a file.
(Screenshot from Google, as my os is set to German)
How about, we write "This file was created with by "Create Controlling Reports.yxmd on 2023-02-06 with Alteryx Designer 2021.4.298434" in the field 'Comments'?
This would make it extremely easy to find what workflow the file generated. I think it would be an option to talk about "filepath" instead of filename, but the filepath could include the local machine name, which might include GDPR information.
@Community: Is there any additional information that you'd like to see in the metadata?
Best
Alex
The Edit menu allows you to see what your next undo/redo actions are. This is super helpful, however sometimes I decide to scrap an idea I was starting on and need to perform multiple undo's in a row. It would be great if we could see a list of actions like in the debug undo/redo stack menu then select how many steps we'd like to undo/redo.
For example, using the below actions, if I want to undo the Change Summarize Properties and also the Modify Summarize, currently I have to do that in two steps. I'd like to be able to click the Modify Summarize and have the workflow undo all commands up to and including that one.
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