Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

...and now for probably the most trivial request in a long time, but also one of the most annoying things (for me anyway)..........

When viewing a browse window, it's so darn awesome to be able to sort and search.  However, it would be even awesomeer (yes, I just made up a word) if when you actually conducted a sort or search, you could make your selection (for sorts) or type in your criteria (for searches) and simply press the "Enter" button on the keyboard and  have it do the same thing that selecting "Apply" with the mouse does.  This is common Windows functionality and I think should be easy to implement.

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 

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?

Hi currently if you use the cross tab tool and the names of the new fields should have special characters they end up being replaced in the new headers with underscores "_", and then need to be updated in someway. It would be great if this was all done in the tool. In other words the new headers have the special characters as desired

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. 

cc: @Hollingsworth @A11yKyle 

It looks like as of 2022.3, workflow tabs get shortened to a specific width. This is fine however now the asterisk that lets me know if my workflow has changed doesn't display in the tab anymore. I would have to look at the top of the screen to see this. I know this isn't a huge deal, but it would be nice to still be able to see the asterisk in the tab so that I can still know which workflows have been saved even if I am currently looking at a different open workflow. One solution may be to move the asterisk to the front of the workflow name.

Also, would users want a setting to allow them to keep full workflow names versus shortening them?

Thanks!

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,

It would be very helpful to have a search box for field names in the summary tool, I think it would help decrease errors by selecting fields by mistake with similar names and will help gain a couple of seconds while looking around for a specific field, particularly with datasets with a lots of them.

Like this:

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

I will start off with a story. I have built a process to manage batch API requests. It's an iterative process that checks to see where the export is at by calling an API and then returning some status. It will run and wait and run and wait until the export is ready to be downloaded. However sometimes, the jobs don't finish and a status returns something like "failed" or "cancelled". When this is the case, I have my process (which is a little bit batch macro) kicks off an error message, using the nifty error message tool. After some time I noticed that it was a PAIN to go back and figure out which of my requests failed and I decided that I need to add some messaging around where this was failing, so I could do some easy auditing. So I go back into my tool and much to my chagrin, I cannot pass variables into the message section. I would expect it to have worked something like this:

"Record "+[#2]+" is not 'A'"

Can we please get a change to this. It would save a lot of time and energy if we could create a dynamic error message option.

TL;DR Please allow us to use formulas in the "If expression is true, display error message:" settings area.

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.

DearAlteryx team and community,

all the best for 2021!

Thank you very much for enhancing the output option from Alteryx Designer to Excel keeping the format.

For a lot of my use cases this is very helpful!

Still, there are some use cases left. In case I want to overwrite a calculated/linked number (e.g. calculated prediction) with the Actual number, it would be very helpful to feed into those cells as well. At the moment Alteryx is doing the job but I receive a lot of Excel Errors (xml errors) and a corupt Excel file when overwriting calculated fields/linked fields.

Is there a chance to extend the current setup for all of those cases?

Thanks and best regards

Chhristoph

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!

Hello All,

I'm using the dynamic input tool for SQL requests in my Workflow (WF).

I'm using the "Replace a Specific String" to replace elements in the SQL statement dynamically depeding on results of prevoius tools, user input etc.

So the statement looks like

select * from Schema_Name_xx where invoice_number = 'invoice_number_xx'

Since Schema_Name_xx is no valid Schema in the Database, the statement (= Validation) won't work. Only if I replace Schema_Name_xx by e.g. Invoice_Data_Current it will work, same with the invoice number, invoice_number_xx is replaced by e.g. 4711.

Therefore, validation makes no sense and will never work, only if the WF is running, the correct Schema is inserted in the SQL statement by the "Replace a Specific String" function.

It would be great to disable it in the users settings or wherever in the Designer, changing a config file would also be great :-)

Pls. note: I'm thinking (since I'm not allowed anyway ;-)) about changing/disabeling anything in the Alteryx Server settings.

Reason:

1. Speed: Validating a WF with SQL statements that don't work takes time (every time I save it), sometimes I get even a timeout...

2. WF error entries: Each upload with a  failed validation creates an entry in the WF result list which makes it harder to seperate them from the "real" WF errors...

Thanks & Best Regards,

Thomas

Hi there,

When connecting to data sources using DCM - could we please add the ability to make JDBC connections?

see:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Ideas/Add-the-ability-to-connect-to-data-s...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Engine-Works/JDBC-Connections-in-Alteryx/ba-p/968782

As mentioned in these threads - JDBC is very common in large enterprises - and in many cases is better supported by the technology teams / developer community and so is much easier to make a connection.    Added to this - there are many databases (e.g. DB2) where JDBC connections are just much easier 

Please could you add JDBC connections to the DCM tooling?

Thank you

Sean

cc: @wesley-siu @_PavelP 

When packaging a workflow, or uploading to a Server environment the ability to manage the assets which need to be included is critical, particularly in more complex solutions which may have numerous dependencies. 

The asset management display should be modified to present two column with the first showing just the file name and extension of the asset, and the second column can then show the full path of the asset. This easy change would would prevent the need for scrolling left and right to see the file name when longer paths are utilized. 

An alternative approach would be to allow the window to be resizable so the user could see everything without the need to scroll.

The ability to filter/sort the assets by type would also be useful with the following categories: Macros (.yxmc), Data Files (supported file types from file input screen), Other Assets.

Hi there,

When creating a database connection - Alteryx's default behaviour is to create an ODBC DSN-linked connection.

However DSN-linked connections do not work on a large server env - because this would require administrators to create these DSNs on every worker node and on every disaster recovery node, and update them all every time a canvas changes.

they are also not fully safe becuase part of the configuration of your canvas is held in the DSN - and so you cannot just rely on the code that's under version control.

So:

Could we add a feature to Alteryx Designer that allows a user to expand a DSN into a fully-declared conneciton string?

In other words - if the connection string is listed as 

- odbc:DSN=DSNSnowFlakeTest;UID=Username;PWD=__EncPwd1__|||NEWTESTDB.PUBLIC.MYTESTTABLE

Then offer the user the ability to expand this out by interrogating the ODBC Connection manager to instead have the fully described connection string like this:
odbc:DRIVER={SnowflakeDSIIDriver};UID=Username;pwd=__EncPwd1__;authenticator=Snowflake;WAREHOUSE=compute_wh;SERVER=xnb27844.us-east-1.snowflakecomputing.com;SCHEMA=PUBLIC;DATABASE=NewTestDB;Staging=local;Method=user

NOTE: This is exactly what users need to do manually today anyway to get to a DSN-less conneciton string - they have to craete a file DSN to figure out all the attributes (by opening it up in Notepad) and then paste these into the connection string manually.

Thanks all 

Sean

Just like there is search bar for Select Tool, there should be one for Data Cleansing tool also.