Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Currently you can just give a name to a connection:

But I would like to see the ability to apply additional formatting to a connection, most importantly color. 

Currently you can click on an individual tool and the incoming and outgoing connections will be color coded, but when working in a complicated workflow color coding would make understanding the connections easier, without the need to click on individual tools.

Just like the ability the right click on a tool and say "Make (incoming / outgoing) connections wireless" you should be able to right click on a tool and specify the formatting of all  incoming or outgoing connections.

I would like the ablity to view the processing order of tools within module prior to processing and if needed reprioratize which tool processes first/last.  It would also be great to have the ablity to disable a subset of tools within a module prior to processing.

Create a new module that outputs statistics after processing. For instance creating a table of all used modules by reference number with fields for records input, records output, processing time, processor load, memory used.  As well as starttime, endtime, username, hostname, etc.  This would make debugging quite a bit easier, expecially if the results could be output to Excel.

 Hi!

I opened up WorkflowA and WorkflowB.  Later, I went to Windows Explorer, and clicked open WorkflowA, because I wanted to make another change in it.  Not realizing that it was already open, I inadvertently forked WorkflowA into two versions.

It is desireable to be able to open a workflow twice.  Say, I made several changes and wanted to compare that to the original. However, it would be nice if Alteryx produced a warning saying that the workflow has already been opened.  In my case, WorkflowA was pretty complicated, and I don't know if I "un-forked" the workflow correctly.  A notice would have prevented this scenario, which has happened to me multiple times.

Thank you,

Joe Kelly

In the Select tool, it would be very helpful, particularly with tables with lots of columns, to show the number of columns showing and the number of columns selected.  This would help accounting for all columns when having to split up a table's columns for different kinds of operations before joining them back together again.

When my workflow is done running, this box pops up:

Previous to 2018.4, the space bar would select ok and the box would go away. Now the space bar selects the checkbox.

Please change it back so that the space bar selects ok.

Development can get super slow for larger workflows with the automatic syntax checking.  Would be nice to flip to "Pro Mode" that pauses the syntax checking until either un-paused or a run is kicked off to save on the wait time between tools during development and more particularly going back to make numerous changes.

We encountered an issue with clob data.  Looks like alteryx is very slow performing while loading clob data to Oracle database. We need to figure a better way to handle the clob data.

I often have up to ten or more workflows open at a time, several are named and are active workflows that I want to save, and the rest are just scratch workflows where I'm trying something out. When I close Alteryx it asks if I want to save changes to workflows, with the list of all the workflows. If I don't want to save the scratch workflows, I have to cancel, close each one individually, then exit Alteryx again, saving the ones I want to save.

It would be great if there was a check box next to the workflows in the list where you could check the ones you want to save, and it would drop the rest.

We have been running into an issue lately where a workflow error thrown by a message tool was not properly halting execution of downstream tools.  It appears that the Message and Test tools do not actually throw an error in the engine, but rather just write the error to the log so even if you have your workflow set to Cancel on Error, they won’t kill the workflow.

After doing some exploring, it seems that there are four different ways to detect and raise error conditions in workflows:

1. Test tool
2. Message tool with "Error" set as the message type
3. Message tool with "Error - And Stop Passing Records Through This Tool" set as the message type
4. An Error Message tool wrapped inside of a macro

Methods 1 and 2 will not properly kill execution, while methods 3 and 4 will kill execution and stop downstream processing.  If a user wants to flag an issue in their log, but not stop execution of a workflow, the warning would work well, and I think ensuring that each of these methods properly kills execution of workflows would alleviate confusion and potential errors.

I have attached a workflow highlighting the four different scenarios outlined above.  If the green containers are both disabled, the output will still write despite errors in the workflow and "Cancel Running Workflow on Error" turned on.

In a large enterprise - one of the key challenges is cleaning data in a consistent way.    Many of the big EIM stacks have tooling for this which allows end users to create data cleanup rules, and the Microsoft version is called DQS (Data Quality Services).

Can we please add a connector to alteryx to allow us to drop a DQS cleaning tool onto a canvas - and then the 3 outputs will be

• data cleaned by DQS rules (managed by the data steward)
• error data that is invalid
• any status messages from the DQS call?

This would allow Line of Business users to build their own data cleaning rules consistently in one place, an lift this burden from the data analyst.

Thank you 

Sean

Often when copying and pasting a flow the lines of the old flow behave oddly. Here is a simple example: the lines going to the bottom most Browse tool take an extra loop. If the flow is more complex, there result might be quite curious circles.

The reasons seems to be that Alteryx tries to fit the lines nicely to accommodate the pasted items. However, this functionality should be disabled when pasting items to the canvas. Mostly this is a small nuisance, but adjusting items and the lines back might take a small time and break the workflow.

It would be extremely useful if most Alteryx tools had the option to output error records seaparetly. This functionality is already present in most other ETL packages, even freeware ones like Pentaho - Kettle. From its wiki: http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/EAI/.09+Transformation+Steps

http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/EAI/.09+Transformation+Steps

Step error handling allows you to configure a step so that instead of halting a transformation when an error occurs, the rows that caused an error are passed to a different step.

Like many of you, I have a lot of modules and macros ... and growing. I keep them fairly organized in different folders and subfolders but sometimes I can't find that particular module I was working on weeks ago.... and I need to get it now. Now I end up doing an advanced search in windows explorer by date and maybe looking for certain keywords.
It would be nice to keep track of them in alteryx - add tags, customer names. depts to modules (meta info tab)?
Maybe a special container/gui with time line would read the meta info tab so you can more easily find that one module/macro

Also, another gui containing tool name tags so you can easily find all module that use that one tool you're looking for

When it comes to something going wrong in Alteryx the last thing I can ever remember is the email address to use for support. Instead of trying to remember whether to use customersuccess@ or clientsvcs@ why can't it just simply be support@?

At your time of need, please make it as simple as possible to get help.

Is there a technical reason why you can't navigate the GUI while the module is running? There can't be because it works using Overview. Can you enable the scroll bars?

Most of the times we end up having multiple new workflows open and would have to scram through every tab to identify the correct one. Also when we try to search on Auto saved workflows it appears as  New workflow -1,2,3 etc.

If there could be an option to temporarily name the workflow (like name sheets on excels) before we save,it would be easy and user friendly to identify the workflow as there are multiple iterations that we do before saving few workflows. 

AutoSave View

When opening an Excel workbook or Word document, the Microsoft start screen enables users to minimize or cancel opening. These would be convenient features to add to the Alteryx start screen. Because the Alteryx start screen appears in front of everything you have open, I feel the ability to minimize it would add a lot of value. Additionally, the ability to close it would be beneficial for those times when you accidentally click the wrong workflow, for example.

I'm a brand new user to Alteryx. I have Designer + Scheduler. I had read about the advantages of MongoDB. I went into the Scheduler System Settings and changed it to MongoDB to find that the service didn't start, among other issues. 

Come to find out, MongoDB is not supported for Scheduler-only installs/licenses. 

Therefore, I believe that the option to change the db storage for scheduler-only installs should be disabled.