Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hello all,

When looking at the Results window, I often find it a headache to read the numeric results because of the lack of commas. I understand that incorporating commas into the data itself could make for some weird errors; however, would it be possible to toggle an option that displays all numeric fields with proper commas and right-aligned in the Results window? I am referring to using a display mask to make numeric fields look like they have the thousands separator while retaining numeric functionality (as opposed to converting the fields to strings). 

What do you think?

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

Roughly, in all versions of Alteryx Designer, you can use the Annotations tab and rename a tool.  This is awesome for execution in designer, because you can then easily search for certain tool names, better document your workflow, and see the custom tool name in the Workflow Results.

However, when log files are generated, either via email, the AlteryxGallery settings, or an AlteryxEngineCMD command, each tool is recorded using only its default name of "ToolId Toolnumber", which is not particularly descriptive and makes these log files harder to parse in the case of an error.

Having the custom names show in these log files would go a long way towards improving log readability for enterprise systems, and would be an amazing feature add/fix.  For users who prefer that the default format be shown, this could be considered as a request to ADD renames in addition to the existing format.  EG "Input Data 1" that I have renamed to "Load business Excel File" could be shown in the log as:

00:00:0.003 - ToolId 1 - Load business Excel File: 1 record was read from File Finished in 00:00:0.004

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. 

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

Hi there,

Adam ( @AdamR_AYX ), Mark ( @MarqueeCrew) and many others have done a great job in putting together super helpful add-in macros in the CREW pack - and James ( @jdunkerley79 ) has really done an incredible job of filling in some gaps in a very useful way in the formula tools.

Would be possible to include a subset of these in the core product as part of the next release?

I'm thinking of (but others will chime in here to vote for their favourite):

- Unique only tool (CReW)

- Field Sort (CReW)

- Wildcard XLSX input (CReW) - this would eliminate a whole category of user queries on the discussion boards

- Runner (CReW - although this may have issues with licensing since many people don't have command line permission - Alteryx does really need the ability to do chained dependancy flows in a more smooth way.

- Date Utils (JDunkerly) - all of James's Date utils - again, these would immediately solve many of the support questions asked on the discussion forum

I think that these would really add richness & functionality to the core product, and at the same time get ahead of many of the more common queries raised by users.   I guess the only question is whether the authors would have any objection?

Thank you

Sean

This functionality would allow the user to select (through a highlight box, or ctrl+click), only the tools in a workflow they would want to run, and the tools that are not selected would be skipped. The idea is similar to the new "add selected tools to a new tool container", but it would run them instead. 

I know the conventional wisdom it to either put everything you don't want run into a tool container and disable it, or to just copy/paste the tools you want run into a blank workflow. However, for very large workflows, it is very time consuming to disable a dozen or more containers, only to re-enable them shortly afterwards, especially if those containers have to be created to isolate the tools that need to be run. Overall, this would be a quality of life improvement that could save the user some time, especially with large or cumbersome workflows.

Maybe it was a lack of planning, but I've had a need to rename a variable within a workflow and would like to (outside of the XML view) be able to rename the variable so that downstream tools don't have to be reconfigured (e.g. formula, join, union).  

As @JordanB mentioned in his post (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Stop-workflow-on-a-condition/tac-p/74403#M19...) - there's a common need to stop a worfklow when an condition is met.

However, at present there's no way to do this without generating an error.

Please can we either alter the message/test component to allow for error-free termination on a formula condition; or alternatively implement the fuller idea that Mark ( @MarqueeCrew) mentioned in his programmatic Detour idea?

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Programmatic-Detour/idi-p/12763

I superimposed multiple screens and multiple workflows and rendered them into a single image below. Have you noticed something?

 There is a space never being used at all times, painted in yellow for emphasizing...

Actually this is an enough space for ads 🙂 And we can make the designer for free...

Though I suggest a better placement and use of the available screen space;

As each version of Alteryx is rolled out, it would be much easier for our users and admin team to validate the new version, if Alteryx allowed parallel installs of many different versions of the software.

So - our team is currently on 11.3 - if we could roll out 11.5 in parallel then we could very easily allow users to revert to 11.3 if there are issues, or else remove 11.3 after 2-3 weeks if no issues.

The same goes for versions which are in BETA.

This would be a huge help!

cc: @avinashbonu ; @Deeksha ; @revathi

When saving an alteryx module (yxmd, yxmc, yxwz, yxzp), can we have a simple "SAVE AS" function that allows us to choose the version number?  Conversely, could we open a newer version module with a warning message rather than an error?

In either case there would be the logical CAVEAT that certain functions or features may not be compatible with the save/open function.

Thanks,

Mark

Dear Alteryx GUI Gang,

I'll create a container and then customize the colours, margins, transparency, border and then want consistency for other containers.  It would be nice to have a format painter function (brush) to apply the format of one container to another.  This of course could be extended to other tools like comments.  There might be a desire to apply this to more tools too, but the comments and containers would be my focus as they are almost always custom configured.

Cheers,

Mark

Configurable hotkeys/keyboard shortcuts would be awesome.  For instance, select/deselect highlighted fields or remove prefix are two commands that I use frequenctly but which are buried in menus.

Being able to assign hotkeys to favourite tools would be another time saver.  Imagine, ctrl-alt-F and a formula appears under the cursor!

Currently when you add an event to notify you of workflow failure / success - you have to enter the SMTP settings every time.    It would be more efficient to set this up as a user setting which can be used for the default across all canvasses that this user creates.

Every time we create a file output - you first have to check if the folder exists - and if not then create it.

Currently it's quite onerous to do a directory create - especially with all the error trapping to make this production safe - and everyone is reinventing the wheel in their own companies.

Given the commonality of this need - could we add a tool that allows you to check for existance of a directory and attempt to create it (with nested directories and useful status / error descriptions to act upon)

There would be great usefulness in having event triggers in 2 different places:

- Similar to Informatica - it would be useful to have event triggers for workflow - specifically "trigger when file arrives" or "trigger when value exceeds X"

- It would be also useful to have an event trigger component with an input so that we can use semaphore type flags to control sequencing in complex sets of flows.    For example:

    - When the ETL is done - mark the "Completed" flag as true

    - The reporting job is running, waiting for a completed flag to complete

Overall, it would be useful for Alteryx to have event-driven triggers.

As a developer I want to Cache & Run all/selected inputs in a Workflow with one command. Maybe even with a keyboard shortcut?

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.