Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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.

Hi Alteryx,

Today, Alteryx is can connect to AWS Aurora DB, but it is only for MySQL.

How about AWS Aurora PostgreSQL ? Will it be included in the next release ?

Best Regrads,

Samuel

In-app screens, lot of space is wasted because components/tools can just be stacked one below the other.

It would great if we could also insert them horizontally.

Thanks !

Arno

Tags : screen, app, macro, layout, tools, UI

Hi

We have recently upgraded to 18.3 and noticed that the Filter tool expression box has lost its colour coding of expression elements. The Formula tool (which still has the 18.2 look and feel) however still has the old colour coding.

It would be great if the colour coding could be included for all tools with expression editing boxes.

Examples attached for clarity.

Thanks

After evolving my workflows to provide email alerts after they run with errors I thought it would be a good idea to include conditional alerts. Meaning: incorporating formulas(if then) to determine when the alert will run. Currently, the only options are "Before Run, After Run, After Run with Errors, After Run Without Errors, Disabled".

Posting on behalf of Door To Door Organics:

Canvases can get pretty huge and it's an unintuitive pain to have to scroll and shift+scroll across a large canvas, and an even bigger pain to rely on the sliders at the edges of the canvas. It would be REALLY nice if we could navigate the canvas by dragging the canvas around, much like a touch interface, in the same way that Photoshop's "Hand Tool" works. 
 
As an added plus, the same hotkey that Photoshop uses (the spacebar) should also be usable in Designer, since, I'm pretty sure it's not used for anything else at the moment, as a hotkey. The functionality would look like this: hold down the spacebar (which changes the mouse cursor to a hand tool) and then, while the space bar is still held down, you'd be able to "grab" the canvas and drag it around in your view port in order to traverse it in a much more intuitive way. Bonus points if you could manage to implement some inertial scrolling with this as well. 😃

I really like the new toolbar & tool palette. I think that the toolbar would be improved by a couple of (hopefully) minor tweaks:

1) The ability to 'lock' the Favorites toolbar so that it is always visible, no matter how far you have to scroll

2) The ability to move tool sets within the toolbar so that those less used are further off to one side

Similar to the post from @MarqueeCrew here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/In-Database-Update-and-or-Delete/idc-p/72744#..., there is a need to increase the ETL functionality of Alteryx to allow this to serve the needs of an enterprise BI audience.

Specifically: 

- Bulk file sync.   Similar to SSIS, the abilty to very quickly bring a file in a staging area up-to-date with the latest in the source

- Dimension update.  Built in macros to make dimension update (especially for slowly changing dimensions) easier - these would take care of the various time-dimensions, and checking for surrogate keys - and also add in translation tables

- Central registry: register a central list of shared dimensions, shared fact tables, etc

- Symantic layer: where several teams use different identifiers for a particular concept, such as customer.   By marking a particlar field as "Customer", the Alteryx engine can make more intelligent decisions about how to normalise these to a confirming dimension

- Simpler logging of ETL errors (similar to the ETL logging recommended by Kimball)

A focus on large-scale BI & ETL applications like this will really help to allow Alteryx to bridge from point solutions to a broader spectrum of opportunities in large-scale enterprise BI.

tl;dr It would be great if auto-detected assets on output tools were included when exporting/saving to the gallery.

Suppose I have an output to my C drive and try to package that file when exporting or saving. It gives me the option to package my file:

The only problem is, that file isn't actually saved with the package; instead, it just creates an externals folder where it will write the file to. But the file itself isn't included. The current work around is to go to your output tool and add that file manually as a user asset:

Notice that I had to manually add the same file that was already auto-detected. Now when I go to export, I get the same screen as before:

The big difference is that now that I've added the file as a user asset, the file itself is included in the export.

In conclusion, it would be great if auto-detected assets on output tools were included when exporting/saving to the gallery (so that it has the same behavior as user-added assets).

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to CTRL+Scroll-Up and have the font size of the browse contents EXPAND?

The idea is specific for streaming analytics;

Alteryx seems it can be scheduled frequently to see if there is an update to a file in question.

It would be awesome to enable a listener which will be auto triggered when;

• ay new line is added to a data set (probably a log file) or
• an update to an existing row in a database (then the relevant score will be recalculated for ex.)

It will be straight forward to provide reactive responses to a log file and voila!

Alteryx automation and alteryx server will become a "complex event processor"...

complex event processing with Alteryx?

Here is a link to wiki page for CEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_event_processing

@GeorgeM would you think this will put Alteryx to another gartner MQ* as well?

*https://www.gartner.com/doc/3165532/add-event-stream-processing-business

Let's say I have an Input tool and a Browse tool connected in my workflow (Picture 1). I drag and drop another tool between them, it's fine (Picture 2).

Now I have a Select (or any other tool) connected to the Input tool but not to the Browse (Picture 3). So now my input tool has two output connections.

I want to add a tool, let's say a Filter tool after the Input but to both connections. If I drag and drop the Filter tool where connections are together just after the output anchor of the Input tool it insert the tool only within one of the connection (Picture 4).

The idea (and you might have guess by now) is to automatically add the new tool to all output connections  when it is dropped near the output anchor of the a tool present in the canvas.

It would be great if you could link a comment box to an object.  This would be great because if the objects moves for what ever reason the comment would stay with it.   

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.)

It would be nice if we could use our gallery with a mobile app. We like to run demographics on site and have to pull up on the ipad.

Also, if instead of typing in an address, we could use the iphones "current location" option. 

Hello,

From my experience, an SSD drive allows a big improvement of performance when the RAM is not sufficient and Alteryx has to swap on the temp storage location. It really changes the user experience. Also, I noted a correlation with the AlteryxProcessManager::Start : ConnectNamedPipe :  error : I think it happens less with a SSD.

Given that, shouldn't be a requirement or at least a recommandation?

I saw this article (Oculus App Makes Programming Tangible To Non-Coders) and immediately thought of Alteryx.

How about a virtual reality based version where the user can be in the canvas and reach out and touch their data directly?

Please allow the "Manage Data Connections" window to resize ... including changing the widths of the Columns (Name, Connection Summary, Type).

Thanks

ps. There may be other windows that may need to have resizing added to them ... it never hurts.

Make it easier to use Delete and connect around 

ex: Shift + Delete