Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Given the prevalence of XML - it seems that it's worth adding a native XML capability to Alterxy (similar to the discussion with @CharleyMcGee and  @KaneG in the discussion forum).    Currently XML is treated mostly like a big and oddly behaved text field, which really undermines the usefulness of XML in real applications.

What I'm thinking is:

- Add in a component, which acts like a join, but what it does is validates an XML file vs. an XSD file so that you can see if your XML file matches the schema definition.   Tremendously useful if you've ever had to hand-craft XML.

- Add in a native data-type for XML (like you have a data-type for Centroids)

- On this XML data type - you can then do interesting things like walk the document object model, or iterate through all children (which fixes the issue of deeply nested XML being such a pain).     This would bring XML parsing into the level of usefulness that programmers in Java & Visual Studio have enjoyed for years

- Finally - an ability to construct XML data files without having to text-hack this.   i.e. something similar to the transpose tool, where for a given node, you can add children etc.

These four things would really really assist with getting Alteryx to be able to deal with modern data sets like JSON; XML and even web-page scrubbing.

As always - very happy to commit time to helping shape this - please feel free to reach out if that would be useful.

Thank you all

Sean

CC: @JoeM; @mceleavey; @MarqueeCrew; @NeilR; @Ned; @dawid_nawrot; @TaraM; @GeneR

Has anyone tried to build a flow that goes from right to left?

All your tools should have a mirror rotate feature.

As a good housekeeping practice, I want to create a workflow where connection lines are crystal clear and do not overlap or mess up with other lines.

Expected:

I want to create my workflows in both directions to make it tidy, as shown here:

Thank you to @LeahK for suggesting that this should be a separate idea (cc @JulieH; @TaraM, @LeahK, @JoeM😞

The lack of home use / learning editions of Alteryx is a serious mid-term competitive threat factor for Alteryx - and it's well worth both this Alteryx community; and the Alteryx Community Management team making this a key priority for the Alteryx platform.

Rationale:

The BI/Data science space is very competitive (as evidenced by the recent Gartner 2016 Magic Quadrants), and although Alteryx was given very favourable review in some factors - there were serious concerns about licensing costs; and time to productivity.

Clearly - Alterxy succeeds in direct proportion to the size of the active user base - so the question is "How do we increase the licensed / deployed user base" and I believe that there are 3 factors which all relate to the issue of learning-edition alteryx licenses.

a) Time to productivity:   Right now - I cannot ask one of my staff to learn Alteryx at home and prove their capability before paying several thousand dollars to give them a license.   Once I give them a license; it then takes them 2-3 months to become productive, and we run the lottery of finding out whether this person was a good fit for this kind of role in the first place.   Solution:  Make Alteryx available in a learning edition at home with a robust certification program; and a learning progression built in - that way I can tell my staff "I will give you a license once you demonstrate your competence by learning to this level".   How does this help Alteryx: lower time to productivity = more attractive product

b) Size of committed user base:  As tech professionals - we take our tech bias with us to our new role (the "Affinity effect"), and often will have some leverage in tool selection.   The more people know Alteryx and are invested in their Alterxy skill set - the greater this "Affinity effect" will start to show in sales figures.   This also makes the tool more sticky, reducing the defector population if users can see and use latest features at home.

Solution: Give the learning edition away for free - Pentaho spoon is currently free for learning; as is Tableau Public; and MS Power BI is incredibly cheap to learn.   If Alteryx doesn't do this - others definitely will anyway, and this "Affinity Effect" will be washed out.

c) Increase the skill pool in the market:  The more wide-spread the skills are - the more likely I am to purchase a toolset.  So - if Alteryx skills are very broadly available in the market - it's easier to make the purchase decision for Alteryx rather than competitors.   However - right now the skillset growth is severely constrained, so Alteryx is making the "Buy Alteryx" decision needlessly harder.   

Solution: Make Alteryx available for training; learning; & Certification for free.   

Note: Although this is directly contrary to my personal interests in the short term (the smaller the number of people with skillX, the higher the market value), it is also long-term selfish because I will be able to increase the impact within my firm by having access to a greater pool of skilled and instantly productive workers in the market.

Although price may be an issue - this is a separate matter.   I believe that Alteryx can do a lot to create future sales pipeline, and a committed and very sticky user base by providing this home-learning & certification program.   In my mind - this is probably one of the biggest competitive opportunities & threats facing Alteryx right now, given the velocity of this particular industry & segment.

I'd be very happy to talk this through in detail with the Alteryx team if that's helpful (just PM me)

Many thanks

Sean

When working in a large workflow wireless connections help to make it easier to work with. However sometimes you want to be able to see all your connections (when debugging). 

I'd like to see a toggle (button on the toolbar) which would display all the connections including wireless. Ideally the wireless connections would be a different color. You could then click the button again to make the the wireless connections invisible.

Reason:

The existing options to display are limited as you have to click on individual tools to see the connections. 

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

The canvas has 3 options as demonstrated by exhibit A:

The user settings can change 2 of the 3 defaults as demonstrated in exhibit B. The layout default and connection settings progress can both be defaulted for all new workflows:

Thus, I would propose that a user setting be added to the annotation box so that I can set the default to hide.

Mic Drop

In a multi-person BI team; or where you have a multitude of different flows hitting similar data - it's easy to loose track of the right connections; the right data sets etc.

Could we please add to the Alteryx toolset, the ability to:

- Register a set of connections with readable names

- Register a set of data-sets which are community managed.

Connection Registration:

I frequently connect to 5 different datastores to bring together analytical results.   Because Alteryx remembers the connections once-used I don't have to keep on building these connections from scratch, but these don't have a human-readable name; and they cannot be shared among the team to make workflow creation easier.

Suggestion: 

• Create the ability in Alteryx Designer to set up a data-store connection, with a human-readable name (e.g. "Timesheet Server").   
• Allow me to share this connection list with my team
• Allow me to either do pass-through password (i.e. don't save a password in the connection); or embed a password but make sure it's masked & encrypted so that the receiver cannot use this to get the password for the DB
• For enterprise customers - it would be great if I can connect to the enterprise connection store and use known good connections that way too...

Known Good Data Sets:

The other part of this is the community effect once a large number of people in the company start to get data-savvy.    for e.g. One person has found a good way to query the actual timesheet data (username; project; hours) - and another person has found a good way to query the HR systems to get user demographic information (username; location; contracted working hours).   

• Can we add to the Alteryx server, in the same way as Tableau and IBM Cognos / Watson have done; to allow users to publish a data-set connector which is known to work.
• That way - if I want timesheet data - I just browse the known good data-sets through Alteryx designer, and if I have questions I can go back to the connector owner
• additionally - the central administration team can then identify the ones that are certified as "golden source" or "clean; valid; governed data", and which ones are in a state of "user supplied - use at own risk"

For enterprise customers - this would transform alteryx from a stand-alone tool where everyone is re-inventing the wheel every time - to a Data Platform where each additional piece of work done increases the net value of the full ecosystem in a virtuous cycle.   It would also MASSIVELY accelerate every workflow build.

Happy to talk through this live with the Alteryx team if that's appropriate and helpful.

Thank you

Sean

all too often, we build an alteryx flow just to realise that step 8 out of 10 was wrong -so back to the beginning and rerun the entire thing.   this often is tedious if your work requires a big data set.

So there is a workaround, using the Cache Macro which can be downloaded (but this does require quite a bit of fiddling with containers; disabling items; setting flags; etc) - but it would be good to allow the user to "restart from here" like you can with a powerpoint slide deck.    I appreciate that this may be tricky since Alteryx may be flushing data out of memory as it goes along, so it cannot restart from any arbitrary point - but if we put the workflow into a "testing cached mode" to cache data at each step; or allowed users to set particular controls as a breakpoint and cache at these points, that would help immensely.

Thank you

Sean

We are attempting to connect to a Sybase DB. The version we're trying to connect to is 15.7.0. It seems Alteryx only officially supports 15.0.2 connection. 

Will there be an update coming in a future release so that we can connect directly and not have to use DB extracts? 

When we open any workflow, its becomes very difficult to understand from which gallery I have opened the workflow(s). Could you please do something, so that once the mouse pointer gets move into the workflow tab in designer, it will display the corresponding path as well.

As part of our documentation process, we'd like to save the documented image of the Alteryx workflow to a OneNote project folder. However, the image quality of the Print->Send to OneNote option is too low to capture many of our processes.

It would really help the project documentation process if we could increase the image resolution of the output image so that the workflow can be zoomed in to and seen clearly. I think this could be achieved by either enabling larger paper sizes in the Page Setup, or by giving the ability to increase the DPI of the outputted image.

 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

Hi,

     I would like to see Global Variable being made available in Alteryx. I have seen the Global Constant being made available under Workflow "User" configuration. But this is constant and needs to be defined at Design time.

How about a Process Id that needs to be auto genearted and the same needs to be available across the formula tools used with in the workflow.

Hi,

        I would like to have something similiar to in SSIS called as Sequence Container implemented in Alteryx. A sequence container would ensure that the process flows in a particular order. Lets say I would like to read 3 different files having different schema each and I want to read/validated it in particular order. I don't see any tool that would help me do this.

I utilize the Workflow Events quite a bit, but the standard options fall short in a few critical cases.

For example: I use the events to send me an email after the workflow runs with errors.

Usually that is all I need.  But, I have run into a few situations where the workflow didn't run at all - thus, no email was sent.

One such instance was on our server.  While still initializing (before it even hit tool #1) the job hung.  It sat like that for over a day before I noticed that there were no jobs running through a particular worker at all and saw this one sitting there. 

A second such instance was recently when I changed Persistence Options and accidentally deleted the source for a scheduled job.  The workflow marked itself complete in the scheduler and gave an error message of "Corrupt: Internal Error in PersistenceContainer......"

I realize that these are unexpected events and application errors (which I've worked with support on); but it would add great value to have that fallback mechanism to let us know the error happened.

Understandably, it would probably take a lot of work to engineer a schedule monitor that would catch this - but I think it would be worthwhile.

One option to do this: have an Event to email or run a command if a workflow hasn't started within a certain grace period after its scheduled time.

It's really great that you guys have such clear communication about updates to the third party data, like CASS. 

But, would you consider sending out those update emails to just the contact person for an organization?

We are trying to keep all of our users in sync on the same versions of CASS and US Data; and the email blasts have caused some confusion.  Not to mention too that our IT security policy is to not download zips/exe's from the web.  We have a centralized way to bring it in, prep the download, and make available all at once to keep everyone up to date.

Whenever I add an interface tool, it adds a constant just like the 4 engine constants and any user constants. It would be useful if tools like the formula and filter automatically added question constants to the list for you to use. This would be identical to how user constants behave currently. Here is the before and after for visual effect:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

The Undo button in Alteryx has saved me many times! Unfortunately, I never know what all was "undone" when I click the button. It would be nice to update the Undo process in 2 ways:

• Replicate the Excel undo drop down (which includes a brief description of what will be undone and allows you to undo multiple actions at once).

• Move your location on the canvas to the area affected by the Undo-ing. Currently your location on the canvas doesn't change when you press Undo, even if the change being undone was off screen.