Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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

Like PDF Reader and Tableau Reader wherein things can't be edited but users (at large scale) can execute pre-designed content and business logic can interactively use it; I'd like to propose Alteryx Executor as free platform for the end users. Once the business logic has been designed on the designer, the alteryx wizard/ app/ workflow can be handed over to the clients for easier adaptability.

These days I get my work done easily though Alteryx and it creates client delight and once they also want to have it for their production usage - they push me to convert it all into MS Office/ SQL/ Python platforms. Which ends up into very inefficient usage as well as drop in adoption of Alteryx. I've significantly dropped using Alteryx and have stopped encouraging others to use as end state is extrememly painful.

What's Alteryx is doing about it? USD 3500 is a lot of money to shed for data blending and analysis tool each year for the license whereas lot of freeware like Sisense/ Pentaho/ Python is available to the clients for their usage.

I'm in a situation where IT has to install all my updates, so I always forget if I have Admin or non-Admin installed.

It would be nice to have that info onthe "About" screen within the software itself.

Had to get on a live chat with support today to get the secret decoder ring to figure it out.

Let's put it where it makes more sense and is easier to find...

Let's put it where it makes sense and make it obvious!

Add an option to cancel an occurrence currently queued to run without it removing, or completing, the original schedule. Not sure if this is by design or a bug but when you cancel a workflow that's in queue, it sets the scheduled workflow to "Completed" even though you just wanted to stop that occurrence and still keep the workflow schedule “Active”.

Also, adding an option to PAUSE a scheduled module. This is useful when you need to temporarily suspend a workflow from running, but save the hassle of re-configuring the schedule when you want to turn it back on.

I'd like a simple option to zoom to the full extent of my module, showing all the tools centered on the canvas.

Thank you.

An additional feature would be to have Alteryx be able to auto-arrange or clean up the canvas tools, specifying a mimum distance between tools and reducing connector overlaps.

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.

It would be great if Tool Container margins were adjusted so tools inside could snap to the grid perfectly. Right now they are just a pixel or so off and it creates slight crooks in connectors. (Minor I know, but it would go a long way to make canvases look clean)

Example:

Currently working through an assignment on the Udacity Nano-degree related to A/B testing (thank you for the great course content @PatrickN ) 

Unfortunately - when using the AB testing tools for the first time, I encountered several cryptic error messages.   

This request is not to help diagnose this error message, but rather to wrap these error messages in a way that gives users some useful info so that they can solve this problem themselves.

As you can see from the error message below - the error provided does not give the user any hints on how to go about fixing the problem.

I've attached the workflow with embedded data so this should be replicatable

Hit F2 when a tool is selected or click on an existing annotation box to quickly edit it.  Would save a bunch of time having to move the mouse to that left tray etc.

Hi all,

I was wondering if any of you have achieved "Transaction rollback" type of feature in alteryx.

Following is the usecase:

If a workflow that writes data into multiple outputs (could be relational tables / files) is failed half way through in writing to one of the outputs, is there an option to rollback the partially loaded data & reset the process to the original state (i.e., before the execution of the workflow)? (OR) does this needs to be done programatically?

There is a workflow level property - "Cancel Running Workflow on Error". This stops the execution but doesn't perform rollback.

Thanks,

Sandeep.

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.

One of the common things that I find myself doing is to create a random data-set to learn a tool or to test a theory or to build an experiment; or to load-test a flow.

It would be helpful to have a data generator input that allows you to specify some attributes, which then allows you to generate randomized outputs:

- For Int: random between X and Y; with Z rows

- For dates: random between X and Y; with z rows

- for strings; random strings of length X; with z rows; with selectors to allow for letters; whitespace; numbers; and invisible (e.g. control) characters

- Spatial

etc

This would really make it very rapid to whip together data to test a process

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

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'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.

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?

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.

Hey everyone,

I'd like to suggest making use of Windows Taskbar progress feature to highlight running workflow status, it would be helpful for when you start a workflow and continue working on another application.

I made a workaround tool I append at the end of my workflows alongside with output tools to do the same thing, having the feature natively in the designer would be better.

the tool doesn't take care of other running workflows or different alteryx windows, it can't detect warnings and errors from other tools, although Alteryx Engine API might be better for this implementation, a quick python one is done for demo purposes.

Attached are the tool and a test workflow to demonstrate the feature, all the best.