Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

The Python tool has been a tremendous boon in being able to add capability that is not yet available in the Alteryx platform.

It would make the Python Tool much more usable and useful if you can define the inputs explicitly rather than just relying on the good behaviour of both the user; and also the python code that reads the inbound data (Alteryx.Read('#1'))

This is not something that the Jupyter notebook code-interface may handle directly (because the Jupyter notebook has no priveledged knowledge of the workflow outside it); so this may be best handled by the container itself.

The key here is that if my python app requires 2 inputs - it should be possible to define these explicitly so that we can test; and also so that we can prevent errors and make this more bullet-proof.

The same would apply on the outbound nodes for the Python tool.

Can there be a User or System setting option for Desktop Designers to save the default SMTP server to be used for all email functionalities?

I recently upgraded from 2018.1 to 2019.1 version and with that lost the "Auto detect SMTP server" option in the email tool. 

The existing workflows still seem to work. However the email tool errors out when I make any enhancements to those existing workflows. Dictating the email tool to use the default SMTP server pre-configured by the user in the user/system setup options will be extremely helpful.

The Source field of the field metadata is very useful, but has some problems.

• It is repetitious. A long connection string repeated for many fields from the same source can bloat the size of the workflow above 10 MB, and when removed is around 0.5 MB.
• It exposes sensitive information about a company's infrastructure, such as server names, ports, user ids, and proprietary data structures.

I first started paying attention when we found a user's password in the metadata because they had passed it as a string to the Dynamic Input Tool (separate Idea submitted for that - LINK). Then when I had to share an App with the Alteryx Support team for support with an issue, I thought to check the metadata, and I noticed that the file was too big and was exposing information that I would not normally share with another company.

I'm not sure how you want to handle this, but here's some thoughts:

• Default the Source field to 'off' and provide users the option to turn it 'on' in the workflow/app settings.
• Provide a mechanism to strip the 'Source' field at time of saving or exporting the workflow.
• If nothing else, provide education to users on the implications of including this information in the file.

Thanks for listening!

Cameron

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.

If a macro or tool is missing in a workflow, all configuration and connections of said tool is broken, and if you save, all previous configurations and connections are lost.

I am proposing all connections and configurations of these tools are instead 'frozen'; all connections and configuration are saved but not editable (with the exception of deleting them). This would allow collaboration with users who do not have the tool/macro.

Additionally, functionality to be able to manually point towards another tool and maintain the connections/configurations (in case you have the same macro versioned or named differently) would be nice.

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.  

I enjoy using Alteryx. It saves me a lot of time compared to manually writing scripts. But one of my frustrations is the lack of 'intelligence' in the IDE. Please make it so that if I change a name of a column in a select tool or a join, every occurence of that variable/column in selects, summarises, formulae and probably all tools downstream of the select tool renames as well. In other IDEs I believe this is called refactoring. It doesn't seem like an big feature to make, it would save enormous amounts of time and would make me very happy.

While we're on the 'intelligence' of the IDE, there is a small, easily fixable bug. When I have a variable with spaces in the middle, for example, 'This is my column name', and start writing in the code field "[Thi" then the drop downbox suggests "[This is my column name]". All good so far. But if I get a little further in the variable name, and write instead "[This i", then the dropdown box suggests "[This is my column name]", and I click this, the result is this: "[This [This is my column name]". Alternatively, I could write "[This is my col" and the result would be "[This is my [This is my column name]". Clearly this could be avoided by my using column names with underscores or hyphens; but I wanted to highlight to you the poor functionality here.

Kind regards,

Ben Hopkins

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.)

Want to upload image to Amazon S3 however the current types don’t have .jpg or .png option for us to choose.

As an ETL developer I have an experience of working in Informatica and Talend.

As a developers, we often make changes to fields in the workflow at different stages of workflow development, and in the same time we wish that those changes would propagate flawlessly to the subsequent tools/transformations within the workflow.

One such amazing feature is available in Informatica Powercenter, where we can propagate field attribute changes in just few steps. Please see below article which explains in-details about this feature. Link - http://exploreinformatica.com/propagate-port-attributes/ 

Reference:

I would suggest that something similar should be available in Alteryx Designer. Please review.

Thanks,

Anoop

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.

When selecting a colour for a container I would like to be able to click randomize and let Alteryx pick the colour, however I would like the option to click 'random new colour' so it picks a colour not already used in a container on the current workflow  I should then be able to customize the transparency as per normal.

Hi,

I was told this feature is working as intended/designed, so I decided to post an idea to see if there was interest in the feature I'm looking for.

In debugging a workflow that another Alteryx user at my company was developing, we realized that an in-db connection was inadvertently pointing to the wrong environment.  Because of how in-db tools output messages, there wasn’t anything visual pointing to this as an issue without manually inspecting the connection in “Manage In-DB Connections”.  Since I’ve encountered some challenges with In-DB connections before, I suggested using the Dynamic Output In-DB tool, which I’ve used before for the “Input Connection String” option.

What I had never done before, and didn’t realize until I tested this, was use this with a connection that leverages an embedded SQL Server account username/password.  When using this type of connection, an error is thrown that says: “              Dynamic Output In-DB (1)             To use this tool select an appropriate data source and select the "Allow Decryption of Password" Password Encryption option in Manage In-DB Connections.”.  However, the tool still works and appropriately pulls the connection as it exists.

For security reasons, we don’t want decrypted passwords floating around in this information, and we can’t enable “allow decryption of password” in our server environment.

So, my request would be to either add logging to In-Database tools to pass the connection string information (similar to regular input tools), or to add a method for outputting a connection string without a decrypted password that doesn't cause an error in Alteryx.

Screenshots below for reference.

When I perform data type conversions I sometimes receive conversion errors. There is not a slick way to programmatically handle these that I am aware of. Instead, I have to manage them with half a dozen tools or really unsightly expressions in formula tools. As an example, I have a string field with a value "two" and I want to convert to a decimal or int. I receive a conversion error and the value is either "0.000" or "0". This is clearly wrong and I want to have a NULL value instead. I want to use a function to attempt the conversion in the formula tool so i can nest it inside conditionals in a cleaner fashion.

Here is a reference to the try_cast doc:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/try-cast-transact-sql?view=sql-server-2017

Dear Alteryx GUI Gang,

I'll create a container and then customize the colours, margins, transparency, border and then want consistency for other containers.  It would be nice to have a format painter function (brush) to apply the format of one container to another.  This of course could be extended to other tools like comments.  There might be a desire to apply this to more tools too, but the comments and containers would be my focus as they are almost always custom configured.

Cheers,

Mark

Understanding that for some tools / data sets this feature would favor larger displays with more screen real estate, I think it would be helpful to be able to view both the input(s) and output(s) data in the results pane simultaneously via dedicated sub-results panes for each input / output. 

To try to put some form to the picture of it I had in my head, I patched together a few screenshots in SnagIt as a rough idea on what something like this could potentially look like to the end user, using the Join tool as an example (though I think it would be cool for all tools, if that is practical). Not sure how well it will show up in the embedded photo below, so I also also attached it - for reference, the screenshot was taken with Alteryx in full-screen mode on a 3440x1440 monitor.

Not the prettiest - but hopefully you get the idea. A few general features I thought might be helpful include:

• Clean / streamlined GUI elements for each "sub-pane"
• Ability to toggle on / off any of the sub-panes
• Ability to re-sized any of the "sub-panes" as desired
• Ability to customize how many results are included in the results view of each input / output (i.e., either by row count or size)

I'm sure there would be several more neat features a view like this could support, but these are the ones I could think of offhand. To be clear, I wouldn't want this to replace the ability to click any individual tool input / output to only view that data if desired, but rather imagined this "view" could be optionally activated / toggled on and off by double clicking on the body of a tool (or something like that). Not sure whether this is feasible or would just be too much for certain large tools / datasets, but I think it would be the bees knees - am I the only one?

Let me know if anyone has any thoughts or feedback to share!

Josh

Hi,

With multiple Workflows open, I'd like to be able to grab one of the Workflow tabs and drag it out on to the desktop.  This act would then cause a new Alteryx Window to open up with the Workflow that was pulled out.  Just like when you have multiple tabs open in I.E. and you drag a tab out and drop it on the desktop - you end up getting another I.E. opened up and the tab you dragged out is in the newly opened I.E.

This would be handy because I'm often wanting to copy/paste tools, formulas, etc. and it would be nice to do that w/o flipping from one tab to another.

I know I can right-click and open another Alteryx but when opening several - they all open in the same one.

Thanks,

Brad

I usually don't mind the bell sound at the completion of workflow run.  But when wearing earphones the ding can be a bit jarring.

There is a "fix" as evidenced here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Remove-Workflow-Completion-Sound/td-p/...

Another option is to use the Sound Mixer to mute system sounds

However, we could enjoy more granular control if we could mute the sound within Designer.  An option to choose our own Alteryx-specific sound would be gravy.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

David