Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

The DateTimeParse function always works if there are leading 0 but if one digit day of month or month it can be harder to parse

Thanks to members of this forum I have now got my head around how the Run Command tool works and find it incredibly useful. The documentation around the tool is minimal (only this community really...) plus the naming of the items isn't always obvious what values they expect to have entered.

This is one of the most powerful tools in the Alteryx toolset, with Run Command it's possible to do more or less anything you want using Alteryx, it's just unfortunate it's highly opaque how to use it with the existing documentation.

For example it's far from clear what input should come into the tool. I now know you can write a command line script in a formula tool and only bring that script into the tool, which will then create that script and save it based on the name given in the Output section. There is no way to know this using the documentation within Alteryx. Then you can run this script you have somehow created in the Command section just by entering the file path of this currently non-existent bat file.

How you're meant to know the button Input will then output the results of the script, assuming the script was written to output the results, is still a mystery.

Naming the components of the tool more appropriately would be a good start, although I admit not simple to do. Introducing a detailed help section with a few examples would be very useful and unleash far more Alteryx power to more users.

Would be nice to make it so if I change from RowCount to index it all is linked together.

Something like a $FieldName$ which would automatically get substituted. 

Also nice in other formula tools, but most useful in places where name needs to be duplicated over and over

The Optimize tool is a very useful capability - and if we could improve the error messaging then it would be much more approachable for users to learn and make use of.

For example - the error message in the attached image - could we please update this to provide information about what went wrong, and how to fix it?

Many thanks

Alteryx does not currently have to email tool that is configurable to use SMTP Authentication for Microsoft Office 365 or any server requiring authentication.  Our office printer can authenticate over SMTP and with TLS enabled why not my Alteryx mail tool - 'mic drop!'. 

Further explained, Alteryx is a tool that needs to live within abide by the policies and security standards in the organization not vice versa.  Therefore, it shouldn't be a big surprise, or a big ask for that matter, that a mail client should have the ability to authenticate prior to sending email of SMTP.   I'm very surprised this tool is so arcane.  Please implement quickly.  Thank you

It seems that currently the Python tool is raising a `FileNotFoundError` exception in Python when there is not data incoming on an input connection. I have, for example, a Filter tool before the Python tool and sometimes there is just no data coming to Python tool - as it is intended.

Unfortunately, the Python tools gives my an error message in those cases with this message before the error:

This is only the case when there is no data incoming. In all other cases, the tool works fine.

Since this is not really an error, a way to either catch this before using `Alteryx.read("#1")` or just having `Alteryx.read()` return an empty data.frame (as I would expect it to do) would be appreciated.

Today I have some workflows which have certain steps that occur after files are output.  I have these set up inside of Tool Containers so that I can easily enable/disable them as I am working if I do not want to produce output for this particular run.  However, sometimes if I need to troubleshoot on a workflow that I haven't worked on for awhile, I can neglect to disable these, which can cause errors.  This is usually harmless, but annoying.

Having two more options on Tool Containers could really help to improve this!

Disable When Browse Tools Disabled would be useful for any analysis/debugging steps that I only want to run when I am browsing to find data, but should not run otherwise.

Disable When Output Disabled would be really useful to ensure that these tools are turned off alongside the "Disable all tools that write output" option in Workflow-Configuration-Runtime.

This would save me a lot of unnecessary error messages and moments of panic, and would make these types of workflows easier for other users to debug without extensive notes.

Would save an extra select for parsing text files in correct format for dates and times.

Hi all,

We were working through some ideas with @BenG and @KatieH about how we can streamline the process of understanding data at the point of bringing this into Alteryx.

We currently have a visual way to see columns that have leading whitespace or null (with the visualitics that have been added to the browse tools) - we can take this further:

• After any input tool, alteryx looks at the data to see what can be done to help cleanse:
  • for columns that look like they have dates - check cleanliness and offer to add the required tools to get these into a clean date format
  • for columns that look like ZIP codes - offer to check vs. US ZIP codes and cleanup
• For columns that have leading or trailing whitespace - offer to add a tool to the canvas to clean this up
• For number columns that have nulls - offer to add a default
• For columns that have strings that contain dates - quick wizard for any anomalies and then add in the tools to automate this cleanup next time.
• For columns which are XML - offer to check this for XML errors
• For any CSV files - check for rows that have different number of columns - and intelligently sideline these

Putting this wizard immediately after input tools, which would then automatically add tools to the canvas to automate the cleanup that we'd agreed during the wizard - we can dramatically reduce / eliminate the cost of the standard data prep tasks.

NOTE: This is exactly how Watson Analytics works when you bring in data, and it makes the process much quicker.

Hi, due to this time we are living, creating and analysing exponential charts has become a part of our rotine. And there are some times that we need to transform the chart scale to a log scale to better understand the data's behaviour. However, there is no option within Alteryx's Interactive Chart tool to change the scale of an axis, like Excel does so easily. It'd be great to that! 

The Alteryx Python tool currently throws an error if the inbound record set has zero rows (screenshot 1).

In order to manage that - you need to create try-except block around the Alteryx.read that instead creates an empty record set data frame. (screenshot 2).   This is inefficient because every time you change the canvas before the python tool, you need to re-code a static field list into the try-except block (i.e. you can no-longer deal with variable fields)

Please could you change the Alteryx.read method to create a zero-record dataframe with the correct column names if the input is zero-length?

Thank you

Sean

Screenshot 1:

Screenshot 2:

the SQL Editing screen has recently been changed (thank you @JPoz  and team!) - and now has syntax indenting and keyword coloring.

Could I ask that you make a minor change in the indenting, where the on part is indented underneath the Join?

Select

    Field1,

    Field2,

    field3

from

    Table1

    inner join table2

        On Table1.key = table2.key

        and table1.keyb = table2.keyb

    inner join table3

        on table3.key = table1.key

        and table3.date = table1.date

Other applications I work in reguarly utilize right-click menus.  Sometimes those menus seem annoying, but in working with Alteryx, I realize it’s actually quite smart because it eliminates unnecessary wrist movement.  In the screenshot below, I have highlighted a bunch of fields.  The boxes were previously unchecked and I wanted to check them to bring them into my workflow.  I highlight them, and if I were in a different application, I would just right click and get access to everything that is in the options menu, but in Alteryx, I have to actually move the mouse to the options menu.  This might seem super nitpicky, but as someone who is currently suffering from overuse injuries in my wrists and hands, I really appreciate minimal wrist movement.

When you add a tool in the canvas, the annotation is automatically set (for example the formula, or connection configuration etc). You can then customize the annotation text in the "Annotation" tool's tab. But sometimes it can be useful to revert to the "automatic" annotation, and it doesn't seem possible once you set it to something different.

Apparently there is currently no way to reset a tool's annotation text to the automatic value.

I've found a way to do it by editing the xml content of the file : as far as I know you just have to delete the <AnnotationText>[...]</AnnotationText> tag and reload the file, and the annotation gets back to the default "automatic" value, which is still present in the <DefaultAnnotationText> tag.

I think a simple button in the tool's annotation tab to reset it would be nice.

Thank you!

Regularly put true in or false in expecting it to work in a formula. 

I know there is an idea for Dynamic Summarize, however I think with only small change to Summarize tool this could be achieved. 

If we set the Summarize to Group by all our dimensions but then use ListBox + Action to control which dimensions we want to select - wouldn't it be nice (ahh Beach Boys comes to mind) to be able to tell Summarize tool that if the dimension in group by is not found just ignore it? At the moment it throws an error. I just think such small configuration would achieve this, right? 

Please let me know what you think

Add a search or find function that looks for content within a tool rather than just the tool number. e.g. ctrl Find, to look for any tool that uses a keyword or field in the formula/join/etc. This would save me a boatload of time editing, updating, and troubleshooting my workflows.

I'm really liking the new assisted modelling capabilities released in 2020.2, but it should not error if the data contains: spatial, blob, date, datetime, or datetime types.

This is essentially telling the user to add an extra step of adding a select before the assisted modelling tool and then a join after the models. I think the tool should be able to read in and through these field types (especially dates) and just not use them in any of the modelling.

An even better enhancement would be to transform date as part of the assisted modelling into something usable for the modelling (season, month, day of week, etc.)