Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Exactly as the subject says: It would be incredibly useful to be able to change the colour, and possibly the line thickness of the connectors between tools.

We have workflows with huge amounts of stuff going on, as I'm sure many people do.

Being able to colour code the connections between tools would help us to trace things from place to place when stepping through the workflow.

Similar to "Start here" dataflow, it would be useful to specify a path within the User settings to open a dataflow "template" file when the users do not have permission to add or replace "start here" dataflow.

Within our organisation, we are required to have the dataflow summary. We have prepared a dataflow to meet these requirements but currently unable to share it like "start here" template so that every Alteryx session opens the agreed datalow "template" file.

Before Designer 2019.4 there was a "bug" in the workflow statistics collection that under the "SampleModule" data from the UsageGallery collection the name of the workflow run from within Designer was available.  We used that information to determine the common workflows run in our community as well as generating a measure of community growth.  The "bug" was removed in 2019.4 and now we can only determine the number of runs, but not the number of distinct workflows that were run.  This idea to do return the workflow name run to the information stored in the Mongo database.

Can we have an option to save a workflow in a prior version for backward compatibility? I think Tableau offers this functionality.

Example:

If I have 2019.4.8 and a colleague has 2019.1.x, I cannot share my workflows because my colleague will receive a notice that the workflow was built in a newer version. I want to be able to save my workflow in 2019.1.x and send to my colleague.

This is predicated on the workflow not containing any tools/features not present in the older version. In that case, give me a warning about the specific tools/features that are not backward compatible. Thank you.

I love using the YXI installer for distributing custom macros; I have even used to install an entire palette of macros.  However, when installing to a new, user-defined palette, I still need to instruct users to copy custom_palette.png into C:\Program Files\Alteryx\bin\RuntimeData\icons\categories.

It would be nifty keen if we could add custom_palette,png into the config.xml file and have the YXI installer place the file into the \icons\categories directory.

I imagine that some checks would need to be added, to ensure we weren't overwriting icons for the built in palettes.

Part of the joy of using Alteryx is watching connections progress, tools turn green, and messages flow to the results window. As workflows are running, the messages provide crucial information for the developers/executors in real time. This UX is absent when running on the Gallery. It would be lovely to run a workflow on the Gallery and let it stream all those messages, and possibly even the canvas, to my Designer window in real time. I could even catch issues/problems and stop the workflow instead of waiting for it to finish on the Gallery and then diving into the log. Is it possible to have the same experience in Designer regardless of executing the workflow locally or in Gallery?

Because this is a desired feature in Designer, I decided to post in Designer Ideas rather than Server Ideas.

The Connected Tools submenu of a tool configuration is useful for navigating rapidly. One can double-click an Incoming or Outgoing line and jump to that connected tool. It gets tricky when a tool has multiple in/out anchors, like Append or Join. In those cases, it isn't possible to tell which tools are connected to which anchors. In the case of a Join tool, please change Incoming: to Incoming L: and Incoming R: and do the same for Outgoing. Please do this for all tools with multiple in/out anchors. Thank you.

I version all of my Alteryx work professionally and personally using git. Positions seem to be stored as floating points in XML and this can lead to unwanted behaviours in git. Containers can float around the canvas over time across many commits. There is also plenty of noise while diffing workflows. The noise is all of the "changes" in tool and container positions actually resulting from floating points. Is it possible to store positions in XML without floating points?

Please could we add Qubole to supported data sources,

https://www.qubole.com/

It is possible to connect to Qubole via ODBC Connection

However, this error message is often returned on a query: InboundNamedPipe GetOverlappedResult: The pipe has been ended 

I've been advised by Alteryx Support that this is likely due to the ODBC driver. 

If it's possible to add Qubole to supported data sources it would save a lot of time committed to troubleshooting this error.

All the best

One idea that could help a lot of users while preparing dashboard solutions where we might need to attach artifacts for proof or references that might have helped us in developing the dashboards. 

The email tool, such a great tool!  And such a minefield.  Both of the problems below could and maybe should be remedied on the SMTP side, but that's applying a pretty broad brush for a budding Alteryx community at a big company.  Read on!

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

What I said the first time I ran the email tool without testing it first.

1. Can I get a thumbs up if you ever connected a datasource directly to an email tool thinking "this is how I attach my data to the email" and instead sent hundreds... or millions of emails?  Oops.  Alteryx, what if you put an expected limit as is done with the append tool.  "Warn or Error if sending more than "n" emails."  (super cool if it could detect more than "n" emails to the same address, but not holding my breath).

2. make spoofing harder, super useful but... well my company frowns on this kind of thing.

It was possible to read and write .gml (geography markup language) files in Alteryx. From 2018.2 and up, only write is supported. I do not understand why such a feature was removed, considering that this has become one of the standard geoformats. Joining data from .gml and .shp files is one of the key activities when dealing with geodata. Now I have to spend time converting the files (e.g. in QGIS or ArcGis). FME can read/write .gml just fine, so why can't Alteryx?

I'd love to see a Haskell Tool similar to the already existing Python and R-Tool.

Haskell is a great way to handle data without side-effects. I know I am probably pretty much alone with this suggestion, but I wanted to share it anyway.

I also know Python can do basically everything Haskell can do, but it isn't as beautiful and effective as it is in Haskell. Haskell brings many logic operators and great syntactic "sugar" out of the box. Things like pattern matching with input parameters is just amazing in Haskell and would require way more code in Python.

Dear Alteryx Gods,

Please hear my plea and add these beloved excel functions into the formula tool, using 3 Alteryx tools to do this simple task is ridiculous.

Thanks!

It should be made more clear when a container is just closed versus inactive/deactivated. Maybe highlight the container header in pink or light red if it's just closed and not deactivated. I've seen others in my group make the mistake of assuming the container is inactive if they simply close it. The current switch is kind of subtle. 

Every time I open a new workflow I start with a heading and subheading. 

• Heading: Verdana 8pt bold. Color=black. 
• Subheading: Verdana 9pt regular. Color=gray. 

The aim is to ensure I know what this workflow is for, the date, who it is for and what was happening around me at the time I created the workflow. This helps bring me back to the premise that kicked this whole thing off and puts me in the frame of mind to understand what was happening at the time I created this workflow. 

Occasionally in my workflow I'll have some comments, snippets of code and especially warnings for things to pay attention to when I open or before I run a workflow. 

It would be fantastic if the documentation palette can be expanded to more than just three tools to include some of these comment tools, or a customizable set of tools/macros that will allow me to just set it once and reuse them as needed to keep style and formatting consistent so that I can focus on the workflow while keeping everything documented and tidy. Bonus points for including one that allows me to put my logo/signature on the canvas too. 

My current workaround to this is putting all my styles in a workflow and having that open to copy and paste the comment and update the content. 

In the Results - Workflow - Messages and Message Tool would like to add a new message type called Passed.

Changes:

1. In Results - Workflow Messages add new section between Warnings and Messages of Passed with Green Circle Icon

2. In Message Tool, add Message Type of Passed

Rationale:

This would be used for verifying data and indicating that tests have passed. I think one of the great advantages of Alteryx is all of the data verification you can do.  For example I can download a report of the totals of all transactions for the year and compare to my daily transactions making sure they sum to the same number.  Automated testing!!!  The issue is I have to report when the test pass as a warning and I would rather have some green success messages of Passed!  I like the visual indicator of success rather than just reporting the negative warnings & errors.

Thanks for considering.

After hitting "Test" in Workflow Dependencies:

Failed result = Bold red text (and a message)

Success result = Nothing? 

Maybe we could get bold green letting us know that the test completed successfully. 

In every application, be it in Designer or on the Server product, please make version number easily available in Help --> About and make it copy-able so that we can quickly copy-paste it when submitting a case.

Currently, the Server product does not even have a menu item to quickly be able to see what exact version number it is on.