Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

To enable a check mark kind of option to lock or edit the configuration window of each tool.

It could be very useful to keep safe the settings in the configuration window.

Hi Team,

It will be great to have a replace all functionality in Alteryx. There are times when we have to change the paths/ field references etc in formulas for a basic WF. The replace all functionality will help replace references in a go.

See this community link for context:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/There-is-no-option-to-clear-the-In-...

tl;dr: 

An option to clear the In-DB File History is not available in the Designer's GUI. If this feature is required, it's recommended to open an Idea on the Alteryx Community to submit an enhancement request.

Please implement this as an idea; I need to clear some In-DB connections that are no longer valid and in a managed environment, accessing the registry is laughable.

Thank you!

Designer only shows the current log during execution or the most recently executed log in the wf results pane. Please add a button underneath the hamburger menu that allows the user to see all of the logs of this wf executed during this session, or, even better, associated with this wf for all time. Please.

While there are many keyboard shortcuts, we primarily interact with the workflow using the mouse. In order to improve efficiencies and easily create saving habits, we should have the ability to Save our progress by right clicking on the workflow tab. Ideally, it should have Save and Save As. 

Current:

New:

On the canvas, underneath the Run button, there are zoom out and zoom in buttons. It would be lovely if between them existed a number box indicating the current zoom level of the canvas. This would operate much like my web browser, which typically shows 100% unless I have zoomed in or out. Bonus points if the button is clickable to reset to the default zoom level.

I have 5 containers in my workflow that don't all need to be run every time. I could play the game of manually enabling and disabling them depending on the need that day, but that quickly becomes a hassle with larger workflows. It would be much more efficient to have a functionality somewhere that displays all my containers with a checkbox of which ones I want run and the ability to set the run order I specify so I can make sure my 'Data Pull' container always runs first. An option to select/deselect all containers would be nice to, and maybe the ability to rename my containers much like the select tool does for fields. 

Hi,

I know that @MarqueeCrew had an idea for Auto-UNC which was "Not Planned" last year, https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Auto-UNC-when-saving/idi-p/194681, but what about a simple flag/pop-up to let users know when they hit "save" or "save as" that there are relative paths being used in the workflow (Perhaps even indicate any/all tools that they appear) and closes out the upload without closing out the workflow.

I don't see a solution out there for this, but if it exists and I am just a bonehead, please feel free to delete this thread.  🙂

Thanks

Dan

Alteryx Gods,

Following a discussion with a person with whom I spend way too much time, @Jeff_Neklason , we were wondering would it be possible to allow users to drag and drop the position of the actual sections at the top of the designer?

Some users find they use the Developer section more than the Parse section, for example, and it would be beneficial if they could move the Developer section to the left to be more easily accessible.

Thank you Alteryx Gods.

I love you.

Kisses.

xxx

Many users will probably follow best practice style guides with Alteryx to use comment boxes under tools to describe in detail what is happening with these tools - such as this one shared by @BenMoss.

However a limitation of this is the comment boxes do not move with the tools, so if you have a well documented workflow but then need to add a new tool, you need to adjust all the spacing and re-align the tools, which with a large workflow can be time consuming. 

Therefore the improvement would be to have an ability to lock comment boxes to individual tools (similar to a group function in Office).

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.