Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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

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.

One of the common issues when you build macros is the error "the schema of macro output XXX has changed between iterations"

So the next step that we commonly follow is to put a select tool into the flow just before the macro output - and convert all the fields to a specific type; untick the "unknown" field; and then sometimes have to go into the XML to add the "Forced = true" flag into the XML so that it doesn't change over time:

Please could you add an option under the "Options" tab to force / lock down the type of every field with one click?     That would eliminate dozens of clicks on every creation of a macro.

Thank you 

Sean

When you enter a search term in the results window, it would be great if it highlighted that term in the data results window. Otherwise, it still takes work to find where your search term is located in each row.

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

When building a workflow with testing tools, you tend to want to be able to put these in container and then minimise this to improve readability of the workflow.

For example instead of this:

You might want to minimise the error checks like this:

However when running apart from reading through the results window, there is no immediate indicator that there is a tool inside the container that has errored:

So the feature enhancement request is to add in an exclamation marker to show the user that a tool inside has an error and you can then easily open it up and investigate further.

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.

Currently if I drag a tool onto the canvas and it has multiple input anchors, Alteryx will try to connect to the first input anchor from the output of the nearest tool I am hovering near.

However the improvement I would like to see is where there are specific tools which are required to go into each input that it 'intelligently' connects to the correct input, for example on the gif below I have a PDF input and PDF template tool (pre-computer vision), and when I bring the image to text tool in, it will try and connect the output of the template tool into the D input anchor, when the correct input is the T anchor. What this leads to is me having to delete a connection and then re-wiring which slows down the development time.

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. 

When I proceed with this command in a python tool:

from ayx import Package

Package.installPackages(package='pandas',install_type='install --upgrade')

in Alteryx it only updates to 0.25, but the Latest version is 1.1.2.

When I would like to upgrade from the Python side i get the following:

ERROR: ayx 1.0.54 has requirement pandas<0.25.0,>=0.24.2, but you'll have pandas 1.1.2 which is incompatible.

Can you please make sure we can upgrade to the latest version of pandas without any compatibility issue?

This is important because of json_normalize. Really useful tool, available from pandas 1.0.3!

When using the Sharepoint Output tool - we have seen a few situations (which are widely reported in the designer discussions thread) where the write to sharepoint fails, but no error is raised.
This often happens because of mismatch in data types, but we've also seen this for other reasons (e.g. we had this once due to column ordering).   In the worst case - this can end up with the sharepoint list being emptied out if the write fails on the first item, again with no error indicator.

The Sharepoint Input and Output are very widely used as a way of giving users a very simple UI to input data that can flow into an Alteryx Canvas - so this is a very commonly used pattern in our environment.

Could we request that the Sharepoint output tool be changed to include explicit errors and warnings on write, so that the user has a guarantee that either the write took place or there was an error to reflect the issue?

Thank you.

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):

Currently in 2020.2 (but I assume all versions), when you have a workflow running and click on the Tool Name/ID (1 - in the picture below) in the results window it is then not possible to click on the canvas OR get back to the messages for the full workflow as it is then locked to that tool.

The idea is that it should be possible to get back to all of the workflow messages if you click on a tool name in the results window whilst the workflow is running.

However, a neat little tip that I found is if you click on the input, output or browse hyperlink (2 in the picture below), it will open a pop-out browse rather than show the data in the results window, meaning you can still see all of the messages)

This leads me to think that it could and should be possible to see browse anywhere data whilst the workflow is running if this is fixed. Here's a separate idea for that. 

To embed the "Not ok" filter option in the browse tool

Hi,

This idea is to suggest we add additional comparison capability to the Designer Join tool to more closely mirror what is possible in SQL. Usually, teams work around this limitation by adding tools after the Join tool (or using SQL queries at the start of a workflow), but it would be great to do this in the Join Tool itself.

The current Join Tool in Alteryx only allows for exact field comparisons, but not for more flexible joins, such as the example below

LOAD * FROM Table A

LEFT Join Table B

ON A.Firstname=B.FirstName

And A.Country <> B.Country

AND A.Lastname LIKE (B.Lastname)

OR A.Nationality = B.Nationality

I've drawn a mock-up of what I think could be enhancements to the existing tool. In simple terms, I think there are these options for improvement:

1. When joining on specific fields, allow the user to specify operators for how the fields should join, e.g. Field A=Field B and Field C  !Contains  Field D (almost like the Filter Tool does this). This could be enabled by permitting operators in the menu between the 2 fields, as illustrated below

2. Have the option to say that if either field matches, you'd like to join (i.e. option to choose if this is an AND or OR join condition). A new field would need to be made to the left of the field selection, as illustrated below

3. Perhaps there could be the option to write the expression as you would a formula for the Error message tool (but in a positive context), e.g. Field A != Field B

4. How about enabling the Left Join/Right Join/Full Outer Join options from within the Join tool? E.g. if you select the Venn Diagram buttons, you will return your selection? If you don't want to compromise existing capability, you can automatically add a pre-configured Union tool (with the correct left/right/join inputs) after the Join tool based on the user's selection?

Regards,

Tom

As of version 2023.1 once a workflow is locked, it cannot be unlocked. If Alteryx can unlock it, can it be made into a user option?

My idea has two parts. See the images for examples.

1. Add an option on the lock screen so the user can get an unlock passkey.

Passkey is either generated by Alteryx or set by user

2. Change the behavior when trying to open a locked file by giving the user an option to enter the unlock passkey.

Same behavior if there is no passkey

Dialog box with passkey input and cancel button if a passkey exists

This would be useful as a way to revise or edit a workflow or update the expiration date on the existing workflow without having to reload or resave a new file.

In the new Intelligence Suite tools the PDF Image Template tool allows a user to select portions of the document to be OCRed downstream by the Image to Text tool, however there is no way to currently zoom in and out of the document to draw the annotations, the only way I have found is to stretch the configuration window and the PDF width will autoscale, but doing so will lose the annotations.

So the request is to have zoom in/out and pan options within the configuration pane to improve the UX.

In order to make it easier to find workflow logs and be able to analyze them we would suggest some changes:

• In the log name instead something like "alteryx_log_1634921961_1.log" the log name should be the queue_id for example: "6164518183170000540ac1c5.log"

This would facilitate when trying to find the job logs.

 To facilitate reading the log we would suggest the following changes: 

1. Add the timestamp 
2. Add error level 

For the example of current and suggested log: 

 Please consult the document in attachment.

In the suggested format the log would be [TIMESTAMP] [ERRORLEVEL] [ELAPSEDTIME] [MESSAGE]