Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

When working in the Designer, I sometimes have to undo changes. And this experience is quite often very confusing and annoying.

For every change in the workflow, you have to press undo once. However, quite often, one user interaction results in other actions such as automatic move of the donwstream tool, change of size of a tool container etc. In such cases, you have inserted a single tool but need to press undo a couple of times to get back to the original situation. It is, however, often not clear how often. In most cases, I fail using undo at the end and revert my changes by hand.

Please change undo towards undoing one user-action in one undo step.

In case there might be users who like the current behaviour, you might make this a user setting how to deal with the undo history.

One of the most frequent issues I have with my workflow is when the Join Tool reorders columns for no reason. There is an option in the configuration to have the columns revert to the incoming order. It would be nice if the workflow automatically had this set as a default, or provide a toggle option in the settings for this to happen. In many of my flows I've had to create macros to keep the integrity of the column order or remember to go into the settings of this tool and re order the columns before a workflow run. 

Cleanse Macro

Given a choice between the delivered macro and the CReW macro, I’ll choose the CReW macro for both speed and functionality.  Wikipedia says, “Data cleansing or data cleaning is the process of detecting and correcting (or removing) corrupt or inaccurate records from a record set, table, or database and refers to identifying incomplete, incorrect, inaccurate or irrelevant parts of the data and then replacing, modifying, or deleting the dirty or coarse data.”  If Alteryx were to convert the macro to a true tool, here is my feature request list:

Performance:

• AMP compatible – Fast!
• Faster than the CReW macro for deleting empty fields/rows
• Resolve time it takes to load the tool (current macro versions are slow), html is faster.

Feature Enhancement:

• Allow selection of fields based on data type
• Include incoming/outgoing SELECT functionality
• Allow for PREFIX functionality (like multi-field formula), but NOT default
• Read incoming metadata to provide color coding of fields to indicate where potential problems exist (e.g. NULL, Whitespace) – part of browse everywhere currently
• Allow for Nulls to convert to 0/blank or 0/blank to convert to Null
• When removing punctuation, provide for exceptions (e.g. Numeric set of negative, comma and period).
• Include HTML tag removal
• Support internationalization (character sets)

Going the extra mile:

• Display or opt for output, cleanup metrics.  How dirty was my data?  Potentially, allow for ERROR to stop workflow if garbage is detected.
• Optional:  Detect outliers in numeric data.  I’ve got an outlier detection macro that we can review, but while you are passing all of the data for numeric values, explaining or tagging outliers would be useful.  Could be a box-whisker on numeric values maybe?
  • Make outlier actionable
    • Identify in data (new field indicator)
    • Remove
    • Modify/Impute
  • Test/Preview against metadata:  (pre-run), see what the incoming/outgoing results would be on *all of the metadata before I run the workflow.
  • camelCase:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case
  • Identify/Replace unknown values (e.g. N/A, Not Applicable, #) with Null() or other?
  • Identify/Remove duplicate values within a cell
  • See also:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cleansing
  • Option to point to a “personal” dictionary for spelling or validation
  • Provide “smart” annotation on tool

Our company often builds applications where we need the ability for it to dynamically update dropdowns based on a user's previous selections. 

For example: 

• A user needs to select their Server, database, and table for analysis (3 dropdowns).
• When the user selects their server, a query is run to get a list of all databases on that server. Then the database dropdown will automatically populate with this list of databases. 
• The user then makes a database selection, and a query is then run to get all tables within that database. The table dropdown will automatically populate with this list of tables. 
• The user makes their table selection, and then runs their analysis using the server, database, and table variables with values that they have selected from each dropdown.

We can do this in other programs, but unfortunately the lack of dynamic selections/dependent dropdowns is a big limitation for us when building Alteryx applications. Our current workarounds are chaining applications together, or using PyQt within the workflow. Chaining is clunky and often causes unforeseen issues when uploading to Server with errors that are non-descriptive, and using PyQt comes with Python versioning issues. 

If this interactivity can somehow be added to Alteryx applications it would be a huge upgrade to our current Alteryx processes. Any suggestions for further workarounds would also be helpful!

Thank you, 

Amanda 

Hi there,

When you connect to a DB using a connection string or an alias - this shows up in the Workflow Dependancies in a way that is very useful to allow you to identify impacts if a DB is moved or migrated.

However - in 2023.1, if you use DCM then the database dependancies just show up as .\ which makes dependancy management much more difficult.

Please could you add the capability to view the DCM dependancies correctly in the dependancy window?

BTW - this workflow Dependancy Window would be a great place to build a simple process to move existing DB connections to a DCM connection!

CC: @wesley-siu @_PavelP 

Hi:

I believe the ability for Alteryx Designer to read from/write to parquet files will enhance its capability to serve the DSML community better. Potentially someone can design this connector as part of the App community but given the importance parquet file formats have gained as a columnar storage format (as opposed to something like Avro - which is a row storage format), Alteryx supplying native connectors to such files would be awesome. 

Thank you,

Shiva Badruswamy

Principal Architect - DSML

Stratascale

@RithiS ,

I'm a fan of using DETOUR tools in Alteryx.  I often place "test" code into a standard workflow and opt to use it or not based upon a detour.  The challenge is that adding a detour and detour end invariably leads to having to re-route connectors (default of adding tools is to connect to the left).  Here's a picture:

What I'd like to do is SELECT the tool or tools that I want to connect around (in this case, just the formula tool).  I'd like to right-click and DETOUR.  The detour and detour end would be added (putting the selected tools in the path of the RIGHT option.  This would greatly speed up the tool configuration process.

If you want to go for extra credit, you could modify the GUI to express which direction a detour is travelling in a standard workflow (e.g. make connections wireless or dashed when not selected).

Cheers,

Mark

@Claje @Hollingsworth @SeanAdams 

Hello!
I like to annotate my workflows when finished, and it can be a bit of a pain to add more and more comment tools by searching for them, or going through the current right-click menu:

What would be nice is the option to right click anywhere on the canvas, and have the option of 'add comment', similar to how we have the option for 'add container' when selecting tools on the canvas.

Cheers!

Alteryx is not able to read generated Excel sheets which have the prefix "x:" within it's XML tags.  Often this occurs when an xlsx file is created from a bot or rpa process.  Example file attached.

I think we can all agree that Workflow Summary Tool is immensely powerful in summarizing large and/or complicated workflows.  However, some companies have begun to bar the use of certain GenAI applications, like ChatGPT. Unfortunately this makes the use of the Workflow Summary Tool impossible.  At the same time those companies are allowing the use of other forms of GenAI, like AzureAI.

In the Workflow Summary tool, it would be nice to have the capability to select which GenAI engine you want to use (ChatGPT, AzureAI, etc) so that you don't break corporate policy by using barred applications.  This could simply be a dropdown in the GUI configuration for the Workflow Summary Tool with a list of the most common engines.  The user would then supply their API key for that engine, and you're off to the races.

I would like to propose a more interactive results window.  The reason is that if you click on any of the tool hyperlinks next to the messages while the output is compiling, you get trapped inside that tool's output for the entire time that the workflow runs.  You do not get to see any additional workflow result/detail as it compiles until after the entire workflow is run. It would be great if a user could escape back to the main workflow's results.

For instance if I am running a fairly long or complex workflow that does not all fit on one screen...I may want to zoom in on a tool if it has a warning or error before the workflow finishes.  By clicking on the hyperlink "Union(5)" the palette will zoom to Union (5) so I can see which tool is a problem.

I can see any messages attached to Union(5), however I am stuck with this view the rest of the time the workflow runs.  Clicking on the canvas (or really any other action I try to take) does not take me back to the overall workflow result window.

Granted if I have an error I may want to stop the workflow altogether, but sometimes warnings may prompt further investigation once the workflow is run and I may want to get an immediate read on where in the workflow the problem is while it is still running...which inputs might I have to check etc.

Hello!
Currently when you share a workflow that contains a Directory tool, it will instantly fail if you do not setup the directory tool to point at a similar folder structure. This is expected, but can make it painful to share workflows between multiple users, especially when a shared network drive and dynamic paths cannot be used. 

What I propose as an addition to Alteryx Designer would be the option to 'convert to yxdb' / 'cache and replace' any tools that are at the start of a workflow, similar to the cache and run workflow option:

What i expect this to do is to containerise the tools previously used, and create a new file within a temporary location, and replace the containerised tool connection with a new data input to that file:

Why this would be fantastic, is that it would allow me to now export the workflow, including the file that has been created:

and I could then share that with a colleague.

Kind Regards,

Owen

I find it annoying that the count records and heat map macros have file inputs which point to a W drive. This will show up in workflow dependencies and can cause false alarm warnings. Since these are packaged with Designer, simply change the macros to text inputs instead of file input. 

Thanks!

When viewing results of a workflow that has Errors, could we add External error resolution data if the user clicks on the error message?  Like browse everywhere it could lookup the error in help and in community posts.  

cheers,

 mark

I know that the container title/label should or can be short, and as much descriptive as possible. Also, adding extra comments inside the box helps to a more detailed explanation on regards what process is run inside the container. Visually, if I collapse the container, the "Short" title given can't be of much help.

Could it be possible to enhance the "caption" for the "Container" title? I mean to allow to type 2, 3 or more lines of text?. This will make the Container title more descriptive and visually will allow to have the containers collapsed but with a reasonable amount of text that describe (as much as possible) what happens inside the container.

At the moment, If I type certain amount of text, the container expands according to the length of the text 

Below is the typical container Title 

Below is the current situation if a person would like to give a bit of more description in the "Container" header (The container expands)

An dream would be to have the workflow with all containers collapsed and with titles that tell you what they do (see image below)