Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Please see attached PDF file, since I am not able to paste the contents of the idea in the body of this field.

I repeatedly get "Correct the highlighted errors" -- but nothing is ever highlighted.  I raised this problem with Support.

I spend too much time repositioning tools by hand to minimize space between tools (especially when trying to parse messy XML documents).  It would be great to have a feature that automatically reduces the space between the set of selected tools, such as "Distribute Horizontally and Compact".   This would help free up canvas space.  

Problem.

My Workflow poll incoming data directory for new files. When there are no files, I want Workflow processing to be stop without any error.

1. Workflow has an email event - send email on error. This is to notify owner that workflow has failed.

2. If I fail workflow on my given condition using Message Tool - error and stop further processing, then event in step 1 triggers and send email which is undesirable.

I want event in step 1 triggers on workflow errors excluding user initiated error as in step 2.

Proposal:

1. Can have a tool or config for controlling Events dynamically? Say, on a given condition I want to disable a Workflow Event?

2. Message Tool : Can have another Message Type options like:

          - Stop Workflow Processing without Error

          - Stop Workflow Processing with Warning

Dynamic Input is a fantastic tool when it works.  Today I tried to use it to bring in 200 Excel files.  The files were all of the same report and they all have the same fields. Still, I got back many errors saying that certain files have "a different schema than the 1st file."  I got this error because in some of my files, a whole column was filled with null data.  So instead of seeing these columns as V_Strings, Alteryx interpreted these blank columns as having a Double datatype.  

It would be nice if Alteryx could check that this is the case and simply cast the empty column as a V_String to match the previous files.  Maybe make it an option and just have Alteryx give a warning if it has to do this..

An even simpler option would be to add the ability to bring in all columns as strings.  

Instead, the current solution (without relying on outside macros) is to tick the checkbox in the Dynamic Input tool that says "First Row Contains Data."  This then puts all of the field titles into the data 200 times. This makes it work because all of the columns are now interpreted as strings.  Then a Dynamic Rename is used to bring the first row up to rename the columns.  A Filter is used to remove the other 199 rows that just contained copies of the field names.  Then it's time to clean up all of the fields' datatypes.  (And this workaround assumes that all of the field names contain at least one non-numeric character. Otherwise the field gets read as Double and you're back at square one.)

As reported in this post, I would suggest to only add new browse tools to outputs that do not have a browse tool attached already when using the "Add All Browse" feature.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Undesired-behavior-using-the-quot-Add-...

Thank you!

I keep Connection Progress on "Show" by default. I find that the row count tooltips are crucial for spotting issues during development. Sometimes, the counts are huge and I have to mentally insert commas. Please give the option to add commas/decimals (based on US/EU standards) into the Connection Progress tooltips. Thank you.

Hi All,

My company has been using Alteryx designer for several years now but recently started a pilot for Alteryx server. One of the issues we have found is users keep trying to publish workflows that have aliased data connections. As our current Gallery Admin, i do not have permission nor do I know the wide range of connections that the users are trying to connect to. W would like to give users the ability to create/publish an aliased connection directly to Gallery. When this happens, it would automatically add that user to the data connection. They would also be given the ability to share the data source just like they can share a work flow.

One of our goals with this pilot is to promote self service, but having users wait on Admins to create the connections slows their process down.

Current State: In current scenario, once we add a new tool to the workflow and want to see its output, we are required to run the complete workflow.

Challenge: This step takes a lot of time if the input data files are huge in size with million of rows and multiple tools are operating on them.

Suggestion/Idea: We could have a "freeze" functionality inbuilt or in tool palette to freeze a portion of workflow or an entire tool container which is not dependent on the output of the newly added tool. This would save time in running workflow.

Example: For example, in attached workflow snapshot, freezing the Tool container 1 while adding tools in Tool container 2 and then running those tools will take less processing time.

Do we have a capability to read number or may be text for that purpose from a PDF format file as an input to Designer Tool we have a system which actually produces a PDF report and then we manually have to segregate the issues according to the categories. Can some one please suggest if there is a solution existing or in working stage

Within the fuzzy match tool, it would be great to see a pre-configured match style to help with matching e-mail addresses. I understand it may be possible to configure something manually but as a newbie to the tool who relies on the pre-configured styles I think this would be a great feature.

An extra feature could be a table to match domains such as .gmail.com and .googlemail.co.uk, maybe similarly to the Names / Nicknames table.

Do you often present your workflows to others within Alteryx, as opposed to just printing a PDF? Wouldn't be nice to have a formatted heading that describes your workflow?

I'm sure you may already be adding and formatting nice headers, like many of our Alteryx tools. For example, the Filter tool:

However, once you begin to scroll down the headers disappear. I recommend we add the ability to freeze the canvas. In this scenario, I would want to view this Header no matter how far I scroll down or right. This would be extremely beneficial when presenting to stakeholders. Additionally, it would be nice to have this repeat on each page, when printed!

Thanks,

Mark

Idea:

Let's add the universal PMML predictive markup language to rapidly deploy our predictive models. 

Rationale:

Most of the predictive models created are essentially built to be deployed into well known enterprise level decisioning tools.

These decisioning tools are working at banks, non bank financial institutions, credit card issuers, insurers on a daily basis.

If Alteryx want's to replace SAS, SPSS and similar competitor this PMML addition seems to be a must.

They all have a common markup language and even with the newer version we can deploy almost all data pre-processing steps too...

Current status in Alteryx as I'm aware of:

Only case where Alteryx and PMML comes close is the following link; http://www.alteryx.com/topic/pmml promising including PMML in the upcoming releases in 2012. And then no word of it. The writer is retired already and no word since 2012 (3 yrs is a long time span). 

What to do:

On easy way is already done for R, this is a Java library for converting R models to PMML https://github.com/jpmml/jpmml-converter

Clients:

FICO is one of the well known credit bureaus worldwide and also the vendor of decisioning software. They also have an Analytics Modeler Suite. All FICO systems are PMML compliant. Chek it out: http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/2014/10/17/first-look-fico-analytic-modeler-suite-jtonedm...

Also Experian is one of the other big software vendors in the Analytics space with decision management tools and they are actually a partner of Alteryx too... Their well known widely implemented Powercurve tool has PMML language import too... Check it out: http://jtonedm.com/2014/05/13/first-look-experian-powercurve-update/

IBM ODM is a nother vendor for decisioning tools in the enterprise level. They also have PMML integration, look; http://www.prolifics.com/blog/odm-integration-spss-predictive-analysis-suite-part-1-pmml-import

Competitor status:

SAS supports PMML export from SAS Enterprise Miner

IBM SPSS products (Modeler and Statistics) offer a great deal of support for PMML

KNIME is one of the leaders in processing PMML documents 

RapidMiner has a PMML extension

MicroStrategy strongly supports the standard

Hi there!~

I work as an accountant for one of the nation's largest firms. In my day-to-day work, I utilize alteryx to cleanse and format data provided by our clients in preparation for use in another program that is very specific with its imports.

I was recently reviewing an Alteryx workflow prepared by a colleague. Upon attempting to run it again (with new input data) I noted some data fall out and am now reviewing the workflow tool by tool (first to develop understanding of the developer's mind, and second to make changes where needed).

During this review, I thought it would be very cool to have a Review/Markup view, where each tool could have a checkbox that could be checked/unchecked if that specific tool was reviewed/unreviewed. There could also be a circle function that could bring attention to specific places that are of concern in a workflow. This might work similar to how when one drags an Interface tool on the canvas, appropriate connections above non-Interface tools appear, only it would be a view that could be turned on/off.

In addition, I have a tendency to annotate the heck out of my workflows I create -- however there isn't really a way for reviewers to do this without modifying the workflow annotations nor adding a Comment tool with comments. It's especially difficult to do the later since space might be tight. Having a comment function that only shows up in the Review/Markup view would be amazing and very appreciated as I don't want to visually alter the workflow to accommodate such comments if it can be helped.

It would be even more helpful if a review/markup report (maybe a temporary PDF or .yxdb) that would summarized what was summarized as "reviewed, with no comments", "reviewed, with comments', "unreviewed, with comments", "needs attention", etc.

Lastly, with regards to fallout data, I would like to tag/trace a record and, after running the workflow, have the last location of that record be circled in red (or some other visual cue) on the canvas. Currently, I just create a "Flag" column (or, if it works, track a specific RecordID in Alteryx and follow my best guess of where the data may have fallen off -- something that can be very time consuming when I'm not familiar with the workflow.

The organization I work for has experienced some of the best time savings from Alteryx and currently supplies licenses to our staff members. In particular our Audit function may need to review some client processes, which may be entirely in some part Alteryx. As our managers attain Alteryx familiarity, they may also want to review our workflows for completeness and data integrity purposes. Having these functions above would definitely be something to look into and would further drive the review function further away from other more archaic programs and increase our usage of Alteryx throughout, and I'd be happy to be part of a testing for this if possible!

Thanks!~

Jon

Maybe I am a newbie, but it is really galling that the drop down tool in the interface palette wont show the values in a connected tool unless they are spun up as headers in a cross tab using a record ID ruse. Alteryx really needs to provide this very common use case. This functionality is so easy to implement and is a fundamental part of any UI. Take a field and show its values as a drop down. Please tell me I am missing something and that this is really easy. I know we can save it as a name value pair in a yxdb and then input that, but I should not have to do so many things for what is an essential function.

Every workflow I write, I want it to avoid having references to my C: drive.  Every time I enter a tool, I have to remember to reset the Workflow Dependencies to All Relative. 

If the setting for Workflow Dependencies could be a persistent environment variable, I could flip the flag, and every tool added after that would use relative references.

Could you please assess the idea of reverse engineering existing SQL code (in special inside DataWarehouse's code, thousands of LOCs filled with SELECT and JOINS) and replace it with Alteryx widgets?

Doing this will accelerate penetration rate of Alteryx products in large companies and dismantle IBM Cognos and their cousins.

I want to check out which things downstream are receiving data from the true and false branches of this filter.

I could step through them one by one.

It would be much easier if I could simply select the tool and see directly which tools are connected to which output by colour, or line style.

For the Sample Tool, can we add a selection to "Skip Last N Rows".  We have a "Skip 1st N Rows".  We have a work-around but it would be easier if we had that choice in the tool.

We have a lot of workflows with a lot going on in them, as I'm sure a lot of you do.

Sometimes, the way that Alteryx draws the connections between tools is loopy, literally.

It would be very helpful if we could explicitly control how the connectors were routed, as this would allow us to prevent them from cutting across other complex areas of the workflow.

Also if we could bundle the connectors (think tying together a bunch of cables with a cable tie) so that things that were heading to the same part of the canvas could route there as a bundle.