Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Can we have a tool to optimize another tool's configuration based on an output target? For example optimize the fuzzy logic setup to find the optimal tool configuration that yields the best matching score for a given data set.

Having the ability to call-out via ARROWS/SYMBOLS (gold star) would be nice without requiring the user to create images and call them to the canvas.  This makes the workflow even more readable.

Watermarks (e.g. DRAFT, AMP, Do NOT AMP, FINAL) would be useful on the canvas as well.  

Cheers,

Mark

Could you add a presentation mode to Alteryx Designer. When I demonstrate Alteryx Workflow to my colleagues, what Alteryx is doing is great, but it doesn't look great. I'd like to see more clarity and flair when running workflows. In presentation mode, all tools should be dimly grayed out immediately after run, and tools that are 100% complete should be bright and clear.

Over the period of time, it is quite natural to forget why we have used certain filter in the filter tool or why we have used certain transformation etc....

I am looking for an option for every tool that I use in the canvas... .by right click and choose "maintain legacy" kind of option and it opens up a pop-up or appears from the far right side of the canvas, and date and time is already populated there and provides a place to maintain 'note' of each of the transformation why we have done that and when we have done that. So, it helps us to track what changes have been done to the tool or workflow over period of time. 

In our situation, we have been making several changes to the workflows and implementing new business rules as and when it becomes necessary. After a year or so, when we revisit the workflow, forgetting what kind of decisions made us make those changes to the rules or filters or joins etc...

Thank You,

Suresh Saguturu.

I often encounter situations where I would love to be able to use the tool container name as a constant within my workflow. This would be a huge time savor for me as I use containers often to segment my work and those segments often have a meaningful purpose within my workflow. Having the ability to use the name for decision making or as a file prefix/suffix would be a great enhancement 

The data view of any anchor is searchable. I want to search the metadata view please.

I've recently developed a complex Standard Macro which gets called from a workflow. It has multiple input tools and output tools where the output tools create an excel file on a drive location.

Every time I try making changes to my macro, I want to test certain aspects of the macro and would not want any output file generated. The way I am doing that now is by placing each output tool in a separate container and manually disabling each container. This involves unnecessary extra containers, is quite time consuming and I risk missing disabling an output causing an unwanted file creation.

It would be nice if I could have an option to disable all Output tools in one go - perhaps an extra setting can be offered in the Canvas to do this. A "debug" mode could also be explored where, much like VBA and possibly other coding languages, Alteryx runs a workflow / macro from Point A to Point B only, or runs the entire workflow and skips the output portion unless specified.

Right now when user share a screenshot of the workflow, we can't see the setting. I would like to be able to save workflow as code (JSON or YML), so people can read the config for each tool in the text file. 
It also easier to do version control as well as quick editing some workflow without open Alteryx Designer.

It also help new user to learn the tool easier. When they see the workflow and the text that describe the config, they can understand it without the need to open Designer -> they can read about questions and answers on the forum using phone and tablet.

Hello Alteryx Dev Gurus - 

We are migrating and some workflows that used to successfully update a datasource are now giving a useless error message, "An unknown error occurred".  

Back in my coding days, we could configure the ORM to be highly verbose at database interaction time to the point where you could tell it to give you every sql statement it was trying to execute, and this was extremely useful at debug time.  Somewhere down the pipe Alteryx is generating a sql statement to perform an update, so why not have something on the Runtime tab that says, 'Show all SQL statements for Output tools'?  Or allow it on an Output tool by Output tool basis?  If this was possible by changing a log4j properties file 15 years ago, I'm pretty sure it can be done today.  

Thank you for attending my TED talk on how allowing for detailed sql statements to bubble back up to the user would be a useful feature improvement.  

So many times, a given source field name could change. If you have a complex workflow it can be time consuming to update various join, select and other tools to replace the old field name with the new field name. For example in sales you may have fields that include the year  "Sales_2020".

It would be nice to "mimic" the functionality that Tableau provides where you can somehow click/select a field (e.g. Sales_2020) and then select "Replace Reference" and select the new field you want to use instead (e.g Sales_2021). This functionality would then automatically carry through the entire workflow and wherever you used Sales_2020 you will now automatically use Sales_2021.

Thoughts on this?

I would like to lasso or select multiple tools and have a count of selected tools. Perhaps this count could be in a tool tip or somewhere else.

I was looking at the ideas history to see if this was already posted and couldn't find it, but feel free to merge if there is a existing one.

The motivation for this is that I have a workflow that works perfectly when you hit the run button in Designer, but fails when runs from schedule (To local computer).

So the idea is to allow the users to run the workflows from within the scheduler, once a workflow has been scheduled (So it runs exactly as it'll be when the schedule triggers it, but without having to reschedule every time).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this possible in old (I mean very old)  versions of Designer?

This may be a bit of a pipe dream but having an interface that would automatically and efficiently implement quantum computing functionality against different back ends would position Alteryx to be a user friendly interface to the quantum computing realm. My feeling is that, at the end of the day, most people will know quantum programming about as well as they currently know GPU programming, which is to say not at all. They'll need an easy-to-use tool to translate their wants to some form of quantum speed-up. Q#, Qiskit, Cirq and Bra-ket are neat, but suppose Alteryx had a "quantum solver" tool that would handle a lot of the dirty work of setting up, say, a quantum Grover Search, where the user just describes what they need.

I know some of the heavy hitters are already trying to simplify the interface to the quantum realm (e.g. as of 1/1/2021: Google Cirq, Microsoft Q#, IBM Aqua, AWS Braket all moving beyond basic enablement into realms of user friendliness.)

Just a thought!

Essentially my idea is to add a connection similar to an optional Macro Control Parameter to the standard Input and Output tools that would respond to a basic formula result like "True" / "False" so that we can conditionally toggle on and off the Import and Export Tool itself within a workflow. This would solve the Alteryx problem of conditionally disabling Inputs and Outputs to avoid output errors, avoid input / output timing errors under different record # loads or when no data is present in a given routing configuration, add a ton more flexibility for complex workflows and reduce runtimes.

Ideally this approach could also be used for entire containers to actually disable all of the contained Inputs/Outputs at once within a standard non-macro workbook.

#Deployment #LargeScale #CleanCode #BareBonesCode

Request to add and option to strip out all unnecessary text within a Workflow / Gallery App when deploying to the Alteryx Server to be scheduled or used as a Gallery App.   Run at file location still causes the reading of unnecessary information across the network.  

Often the workflows are bloated with un-used meta data that at a small scale is not an issue, but with scale... all the additional bloat (kBs to MBs in size) - sent from the controller to the worker does impact the server environment.

The impact explodes when leveraging the Alteryx API to launch the same job over and over with different parameters - all the non-useful information in the workflow is always sent to the various workers to handle each one of these jobs.

Even having a "compiled" version of the workflow could be a great solution. #CompiledCode

Attached is a simple workflow that shows how bloated the workflows can become.

I appreciate your consideration.

Hi there,

I was hoping that there could be an update to track changes in workflows more dynamically like on other coding and saving platforms such as git and java. There are systems that will highlight an area where a change has been made from one version to another. This would be very beneficial for users that use the alteryx server to be able to load any historical workflow and when it opens in the canvas, lets say a macro has been changed from one version to the other, that macro would glow red to know there was a change here so coders can see what was changed if there is now an error or if they are not completely sure what was changed without just relying on comments.

Thanks!

-Jacob

It really would be great if Alteryx supports the 'set' data type.

I often have situations where I really wish I could make a field with a data type of "set".

For example, I have a table of pets owned by each person.

The "Pets" Field would be perfect if it could be processed as a "set" type.

(I sort the pet values in alphabetical order, and concatenate the string values using the summarize tool. This is the best I could think of)

Hi Team,

I have an idea where we can use Alteryx to build a virtual Assistant. As we are currently using Intelligent suite extract information through pdfs. Now we can connect the VA and Intelligent suite to offer a complete product.

Please let us know your views,

Hello,

My idea is that the current Download tool does not handle errors and continues its path even if it does not find for example a file in the transmitted URL or if it does not find the hostname it crashes.

In the case of a user with several URLs in a row, this is penalizing.

In the case of downloading files with recording, it still writes a file (thus overwriting the existing file) but which is not openable and is not in the correct format. (BLOCKED file!) Which then causes problems in workflows reading these files.

The idea would be to put a second output to this tool for all the URLs where there was a problem (non-existent hostname, file not found, HTTP KO) and one where it received the expected elements so as not to prejudice the processing. and allow better management of error cases.

Regards,

Bruno