Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

When you click on 'Open results in a new window' or in when viewing results in the 'Results - Browse' sometimes it would be nice to have a freeze pane feature so you can pin column(s) to the left and scroll to the right.

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.

The one single feature I miss the most in Alteryx, is the possibility to restart the workflow from wherever I want by using a built-in cache functionality. I have used the 'Cache Dataset V2' macro, but it really is to inflexible and really doesn't make me a happy Alteryx user. I would like to se a more flexible, quicker way of working with cached data.

On a single tool in the workflow I want to be able to set the option to:

• Enable cache
  This would enable me to always use cached data from this node when possible
  
  
• Run to this node
  Run from start OR from node with enabled cache to this node.

There should be lots of workflow options regarding the creation/deletion of cached data. Examples:

• Enable data cache on all nodes
  This would enable functionality to always use cached data on all nodes in the workflow
  
  
• Enable data cache on end nodes
  This would enable functionality to cache data on all 'Run to this node'-nodes.

...and so on. These are just a few examples, but there should be lots of options and shortcut keys revolving the cached data functionality in the workflow.

In an enterprise environment, or a reasonably sized BI team - you want a degree of consistency on how workflows look and feel.   This increases maintainability; portability; and also increases the safety (because like well structured source-code - it's easier to read, so it's easier to peer-review)

Looking at all the samples provided by Alteryx, they all have a similar template, which makes them very easy to use.

Could we add the capability for larger BI teams to create a default canvas template (or a set of templates) which enforce the company / team's style-guide; layout; and required look-and-feel?   

Thank you

Sean

Hi ,

Price Elasiticity is an important topic in Retail Business. I have browsed over the net trying to find an optimal methodology to calculate Elasticity mainly in a retail Setting, where we have Point of Sale, Transactional data.

Can we develop a tool for the same?

I would like to see some functionality that would allow the user to select a specific tool(s) and run them. It looks like the workflow caches data at each tool so it should be doable to make it where i can run a specific tool from any point.

I know for me, i often run my new workflow and have forgotten a browse somewhere then have to add it and run the whole thing. Instead it would be ideal to be able to insert my browse like normal and select the tool before that browse and run just that one.

Do you guys think this would also be a useful capability?

Please include IBM DB2 as an in-Database option. Currently, my primary use of Alteryx is for copying DB2 tables into Teradata for use on that server. Copying large tables and particularly joining several tables and copying the results to Teradata is too slow in Alteryx.

Need to allow Aliases to work with the Google Sheets Input / Output tools, so that I can input API keys in one place to service multiple tools.  I know I can do this via Macros, but I also know it's best practice to avoid nesting macros.

This is the screen when trying to access HDFS through Alteryx:

When publishing a workflow that contains the user ID and using Kerberos, one would need to login to the Alteryx server and run the MIT Kerberos Ticket Manager.

It would be a great enhacement to add the possibility to allow the users to use the keytab file to authenticate alongside the existing authentication.

So, if one checks "Use Kerberos", there would be an option text box that would allow the user to select the keytab file. That would ensure that the ticket is always valid and there is no need to login to the server to renew the kerberos ticket every day manually (!).

[-t keytab_file]

Ref: https://kb.iu.edu/d/aumh

http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/krb5-devel/doc/user/user_commands/kinit.html

Does anyone have any workarounds?

Hi everyone,

Could it be possible to have alteryx being able to encrypt/decrypt files or data by using external keys. I believe it could be useful to have it handle AES and/or RSA encryption...

What do you think?

Julien

There are cases where a batch macro is used for multiple tasks where not all of the control parameter inputs are available all of the time. To use a batch macro control parameter it must be populated with a field, meaning sometimes a field containing a dummy value may have to be created to work-around this forced populating.

It would be useful if control parameter inputs could be made optional, passing a NULL value when a field hasn't been provided and handling any NULLs passed in within the batch macro.

Often when working on problems posed by other people, they provide a sample table of data.

Would love a trivial way to copy from the Community to Alteryx.

It would be nice to have the ability to automatically generate twbx files from a master Tableau workbook so that end users can open the file in Tableau reader.  For example, if I were creating separate CSV files with my data for each state I would similarly want to create them as a ready to consume twbx file with Tableau Reader.

@AdamR_AYX,

Limit conversion warning allows for a minimum of 1 message.  Can we set the minimum to 0 to completely ignore the message?

Perhaps we can allow warning messages a similar function as ERROR messages and allow the designer to Ignore, Warn or Cancel?

ConvError: Imputation (441): Tool #104: No demand: 0.200000000000031 had more precision than a double. Some precision was lost.

ConvError: Summarize (456): Data: 0.360000000004675 had more precision than a double. Some precision was lost.

End: Designer x64: Finished running FP Model - Marquee Crew v3.yxmd in 32.3 seconds with 16 field conversion errors and 4 warnings

Thanks,

Mark

Idea:

I know cache-related ideas have already been posted (cache macros; cache tools), but I would like it if cache were simply built into every tool, similar to the way it is on the Input Tool.

Reasoning:

During workflow development, I'll run the workflow repeatedly, and especially if there is sizeable data or an R tool involved, it can get really time consuming.

Implementation ideas:

I can see where managing cache could be tricky: in a large workflow processing a lot of data, nobody would want to maintain dozens of copies of that data.  But there may be ways of just monitoring changes to the workflow in order to know if something needs to be rebuilt or not: e.g. suppose I cache a Predictive Tool, and then make no changes to any tool preceeding it in the workflow... the next time I run, the engine should be able to look at "cache flags" and/or "modified tool flags" to determine where it should start: basically start at the "furthest along cache" that has no "modified tools" preceeding it.

Anyway, just a thought.

I've seen several posts and questions concerning NULL dates.  Is 09/31/2010 a valid date?  I know that 02/29/206 isn't valid and that 02/00/2006 isn't either, but I really don't like finding out about these in conversion warning messages.

I might suggest a function that returns True or False on the date check and let the user configure appropriate rules to rethink the attempted date prior to committing the field to the date data type.

Cheers,

Mark

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 think the scheduler should include another frequency otpion of every other week.  Let's say I want a workflow to run every other Monday, there is currently no simple way to do this.  There are some workarounds but they are not ideal and include some additional manual work which defeats the purpose of having the scheduler.