Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

In 2018.4, in the Select tool we were able to select the attributes, and then with CTRL+C copy these lines to the clipboard.

You could then paste it for instance to Excel. I used a lot this feature to communicate with third parties, to who I provide data.

The email tool, such a great tool!  And such a minefield.  Both of the problems below could and maybe should be remedied on the SMTP side, but that's applying a pretty broad brush for a budding Alteryx community at a big company.  Read on!

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

What I said the first time I ran the email tool without testing it first.

1. Can I get a thumbs up if you ever connected a datasource directly to an email tool thinking "this is how I attach my data to the email" and instead sent hundreds... or millions of emails?  Oops.  Alteryx, what if you put an expected limit as is done with the append tool.  "Warn or Error if sending more than "n" emails."  (super cool if it could detect more than "n" emails to the same address, but not holding my breath).

2. make spoofing harder, super useful but... well my company frowns on this kind of thing.

It was possible to read and write .gml (geography markup language) files in Alteryx. From 2018.2 and up, only write is supported. I do not understand why such a feature was removed, considering that this has become one of the standard geoformats. Joining data from .gml and .shp files is one of the key activities when dealing with geodata. Now I have to spend time converting the files (e.g. in QGIS or ArcGis). FME can read/write .gml just fine, so why can't Alteryx?

Dear Alteryx Gods,

Please hear my plea and add these beloved excel functions into the formula tool, using 3 Alteryx tools to do this simple task is ridiculous.

Thanks!

I love the example workflows.  If I've already added a tool to the canvas that I need to reconfigure, however, it would be easier to simply right click the tool that's already there rather than finding the tool on the ribbon at the top to open the example workflow.  Please add the ability to launch the example workflow for each tool on the right click menu.

When I perform an average aggregation the data type changes to increase the precision.  While I could see this is useful sometimes, it is not when I have a currency based field and I want to keep the precision fixed at two decimal places.  The result is I have to either add another select tool to update the data type or find an embedded select in a tool that exists post summarizing.

Wondering why  I have to change 100s of my workflows every time password changes . system should read the latest password like Tableau can do embedded passwords on data sources automatically from active directory 

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"?

Hi there,

We often get the following error message from the download tool 

"00:00:23.555 - Error - ToolId 106: Error in libCURL: You have found a bug.  Replicate, then let us know.  We shall fix it soon."

Unfortunately this seems to be a transient error so we've not been able to replicate this in a useful & repeatable way.  However - we see this happening at least a few times per week on one of our servers, so this is a continuing issue.

Please could you provide more detailed error messaging on the download tool so that this error can be debugged and/or replicated?

Many thanks

Sean

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! 

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! 😄

We should have a simple mathematical functions under Formula Tool - Math functions to calculate specific Percentile data point. Or it can be a separate tool to derive various other statistical information.

The Python equivalent is Numpy.Percentile() OR quantile().

I have explored Alteryx app, help documentation and community posts without success.

MemSQL is a very popular high-velocity; high scalability database which is often used for analytics: https://portal.memsql.com/

However, when attempting to make a connection to MemSQL, Alteryx throws the error "Get Table List Error: Error opening "SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'aurora_version'": No Columns Returned."

From discussions with the support team at Alteryx - it appears that this is due to Alteryx presuming that the database is a MySQL database (because MemSQL also uses the MariaDB ODBC driver) and then sending a followup query to identify system version before making a connection - however MemSQL does not support this value so the connection fails.

Request:

- Please can we add the ability to connect to MemSQL without this error (i.e. trap this error and identify the DB version)

- Please can we give an advanced view to Alteryx users so that they can see this additional traffic and change this where needed?

          NOTE: By providing an advanced view - users can understand and diagnose / fix behaviours that Alteryx assumes by default, but which are not always relevant or useful.   An example of this is that on MS SQL Alteryx tries to open a cursor on columnstore tables by default and you have to use a workaround - please can you give us the ability to see and change these under-the-covers behaviours that are presumed by default.

- It may be useful to the Alteryx corporation to reach out to MemSQL and add Alteryx to the list of applications that can be used with MemSQL:  

https://docs.memsql.com/v6.8/guides/client-and-application/third-party-integrations/introduction/

To replicate:

- Fire up a MemSQL cluster (easiest is to get a trial cluster using the link above, or use an internal DB)

- Connect to this DB using the MariaDB ODBC connector (as recommended by MemSQL)

- Test this connection works with an ODBC compliant app like Tableau; Excel; etc

- Then attempt to connect using Alteryx  - see screenshot below.

I would like to have feature to disable the fitter tool so that all the filters added within the filter tool are ignored when the filter tool is disabled and data flows through to the next tool . At this moment there is no way we can achieve this as adding a tool to a container and disabling it stops the data flow to the next tool.

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:

IMO, Alteryx should bring new hot keys into newer version:

1. Search for tools, help, and resources

2. Search for Result windows: This is extremely wanted coz I always have to check, recheck results so it's so annoying to non-stop moving the mouse cursor to different positions

As reported in this post, I would suggest to only add new browse tools to outputs that do not have a browse tool attached already when using the "Add All Browse" feature.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Undesired-behavior-using-the-quot-Add-...

Thank you!

Alteryx Admin Designer
Version: 2019.2.10.64688

Use case: Improved accessibility of Designer functionality via Keyboard and UI Menus

Hello Alteryx Team. I am very new to the Alteryx world. As I continue to learn and go through training and tutorials, one thought occurred to me. Using Alteryx requires a great deal of mouse dexterity - especially as workflows grow in complexity. This could be extra-challenging or frustrating for users with limited mobility.

As a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts, I found the Find Tool (CTRL+F) to be very handy when locating and selecting tools without the mouse. And the View Possible Connections feature enables the ability to link anchors without a mouse. Excellent! However, this handy feature seems only accessible by right-clicking a tool with the mouse. I'm unable to find an entry for this feature in any of Designer's menus, nor does it appear when using the Menu key on the keyboard (which brings up the Context Menu, aka Right-Click).

Perhaps this has been addressed in other versions of Designer. Or it might be a UI oversight. But in terms of accessibility, I feel it would be very useful.

Please let me know your thoughts or show me how to find it outside of right-clicking.

Many thanks,

James

HI!  Love Alteryx.  I have a parameterized macro output tool that has 16 parameters linked to as many fields from my batch file.  The number of parameters is high enough that I have a scroll bar on the on the Config window. 

Just out of habit I use the scroll wheel to scroll to the bottom, but by doing so completely blow out the config of the fields-to-parameters mapping because you can use the scroll wheel to also change the fields that are linked to the parameter.  Then I have to go through all the parameters to set them back to the way they were before, which is tedious.  I would like the macro tool to only change the field-to-parameter mapping by clicking, not by scrolling the wheel.  That will keep from a bunch of setting and resetting of the parameters.

Thanks, Kurt