Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

The "Manage Data Connections" tool is fantastic to save credentials alongside the connection without having to worry when you save the workflow that you've embedded a password. 

Imagine if - there were a similar utility to handle credentials/environment variables. 

• I could create an entry, give it a description, a username, and an encrypted password stored in my options, then refer to that for configurations/values throughout my workflows. 
  • Tableau credentials in the publish to tableau macro
  • Sharepoint Credentials in the sharepoint list connector
• When my password changes I only have to change it in one place
• If I handoff the workflow to another user I don't have to worry about scanning the xml to make sure I'm not passing them my password
• When a user opens my workflow that doesn't have a corresponding entry in their credentials manager they would be prompted using my description to add it.
• Entries could be exported and shared as well (with passwords scrubbed)

Example Entry Tableau:

Then when configuring a tool you could put in something like [Tableau Prod].[Password] and it would read in the value.

Or maybe for Sharepoint:

Or perhaps for a team file location:

Any of these values could be referenced in tool configurations, formulas, macro inputs by specifying the Alias and field.

Please add ablity to globally, within a module, forget all missing fields.

I love this tool,  but think it would be improved by including an option to create a column per delimiting character.  This could be added in the number of columns selector box.  In the case where 1 row has more delimiters than another, null columns can be created.  Without this option you have to Regex count the delimiters, select the max and then embed the Text to columns tools in a macro and then pass the max columns as a param.  Would be nice to resolve all this in the main tool.

Thanks, nick

A common problem with the R tool is that it outputs "False Errors" like the following: "The R.exe exit code (4294967295) indicted an error"

I call this a false error because data passes out of the R script the same as if there were no error. As such, this error can generally be ignored. In my use case, however, my R tool is embedded within an iterative macro, and the error causes the iterator to stop running.

I was able to create a workaround by moving the R tool to a separate workflow and calling it from the CReW runner macro within my iterator, effectively suppressing the error message, but this solution is a bit clumsy, requires unnecessary read/writes, and uses nonstandard macros.

I propose the solution suggested by @mbarone (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Boosted-Model-Error/td-p/5509) to only generate an error when the R return code is 1, indicating a true error, and to either ignore these false errors or pass them as warnings. This will allow R scripts and R-based tools to be embedded within iterative macros without breaking.

I propose another wildcard, %ErrorLog%, that would simply output the error codes and narratives instead of having to use the %OutputLog% to see these.  I'd rather not have a 4 MB text email depicting every line of code and action in the module when all I really need to see are the errors.

If you forget to put a name on a new column in the formula tool - the error message is 

The field "" is not contained in the record. (Expression #1)

Please could you replace this with a user-friendly message which is self descriptive like:

"Please provide a name for the new column created in expression 1"?

I personally think it would work better to tab from 'Select Column' to 'Enter Expression Here' and not the 'Functions' List as probably people who are tabbing would immediately like to start typing the formula rather than going through functions, fields, etc.

Please add xlsx files within the onedrive input/output tool

I find the Run Command tool to be counter-intuitive: rather than supplying a required I/O parameter (in at least one of "Write Source" and/or "Read Results"), I would rather just use a "Block Until Done" approach to 1. write file, 2. issue custom system command, 3. read file.  An even simpler example is the case where I don't need I/O to/from the system command... in that case, I just want to issue the command, nothing more.  But the current tool will require me to specify a dummy file, which is counter-intuitive and also leaves that unnecessary file somewhere.

To fix this up without breaking existing user implementations, the "idea" is:

• Do not require either "Write Source" or "Read Result" ... allow both to be blank.
• Allow (but don't require) any of "Command," "Command Arguments," and "Working Directory" to be dynamically populated from fields in the data streamed into the tool.

So... any existing user implementation should be unnaffected... but these changes would allow users to implement system commands in a more intuitive manner, and even allow for very dynamic system commands based on the workflow.

Thanks!

In order to debug a call to a REST API - it is often necessary to take the web call, and pop this into a web browser. Can you add a second output to a RestAPI tool (a derivative of the Download tool) that has a second output that provides the full web call that was made, including the full parameterised URL. This would make it MUCH easier to debug rest API calls.

cc: @TashaA

Similar to this idea https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Download-tool-Request-and-Response-details/i...

except my preference would be to pull Rest API calls into a more specific tool and give a second output for the responses

Hi Alteryx community,

It would be really nice to have v_string/v_wstring and max character size as a standard for text columns.

it is countless how many times I found that the error was related to a string truncation due to string size limit from the text input.

Thumbs-up those who lost their minds after discovering that the error was that! 😄

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).  

Frequently with more complicated tool configurations I end up having to setup certain elements over and over again.  Would be great to have a one click "use this as the default" configuration that would follow my profile and apply to all future drags of that tool onto the workflow.  Configuration elements that depend on the input fields would not be impacted.

Also an apply all feature to apply the similar configuration elements to all tools of the same tool type.

Example Configuration Elements

Comment Tool - Shape, Font, text Color, Background Color, Alignment...

Tool Container - Text Color, fill color , border color, transparency, margin

Table Tool - Default Table Settings

Union Tool - "Auto config by name", Actions when fields differ

Data Clensing - all configuration elements

Sample - all configuration elements

Some of the workflows I use have multiple inputs that can take a long time to initially load. The new cache function itself has been amazing, but there is one big drawback for me: I can't cache multiple tools at the same time.  Alteryx will allow me to eventually cache all of the tools I want cached, but it will take multiple times running the file.  This still saves me time in the end, but it feels a bit cumbersome to set up.

This has probably been mentioned before, but in case it hasn't....

Right now, if the dynamic input tool skips a file (which it often does!) it just appears as a warning and continues processing. Whilst this is still useful to continue processing, could it be built as an option in the tool to select a 'error if files are skipped'? 

Right now it is either easy to miss this is happening, or in production / on server you may want this process to be stopped.

Thanks,

Andy 

I recently came to know that Alteryx doesn't support Denodo Data sources. We at our company are using Denodo as a data virtualization tool and also Alteryx is used for data blending. The request is for Alteryx to start supporting Denodo as a data source so that our company can reach out to Alteryx for any support related issues with Denodo.

At the moment if a part of your python code takes more than 30s to run, Jupyter times out and Alteryx cancels the workflow. This makes the Python Tool unusable for anything intensive and the timeout should be removed by default or be configurable per workflow.

I've made this idea as none of the solutions in these threads feel satisfactory:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Python-tool-NbConvertApp-Timeout/m-p/3...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Python-Tool-Timeouts-When-Running-Work...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Python-SDK-timeout-error-cell-executio...

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.