Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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

Please provide an option to have a the caption of a tool container sent to log/results after all items within it have been processed.

It would make it a lot easier to create and manage a work stream if you added the standard ability to maximize and minimize the workflow canvas and configuration and results windows.

In the Formula Tool, there is an Average() function which can be used to take the average/mean of multiple columns or expressions. This function treats null values as zeroes. This was a surprise/dissapointment to me as I am used to other applications & systems where nulls are ignored, for example Excel. It would be useful to have either an AverageIgnoreNulls() function or an optional extra parameter to Average() which specifies that nulls should be ignored rather than treated as zeroes.

When wishing to average a small number of columns and ignore nulls, a formula can be constructed using Iif(IsNull([Column1]),0,[Column1]) for each column to calculate the total, and Iif(IsNull([Column1]),0,1) for calculating the count. This quickly becomes unwieldy for more than 2 or 3 columns.

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

I have a 3 year license but am required to activate the license key each year. Is it possible to get the activation period matched to the duration of the purchased license? This would not only remove the need to update each year, but would also clarify the actual duration of the licence too.

For the purpose of debugging a workflow, I often filter just one customerID or any other ID to analyse the workflow.

With the Browse tool (ctrl-shift-B) you can just double click a cell and copy the value of it. This is not possible in the result tool, it would be nice if that would become possible.

Thanks,

Hans

It would be great if you could create default settings for the Tool Containers. As workflows become larger, I use containers a lot. But once I have 10-15 containers, I have to set all of them to have a Transparency of 1 and a margin of None. While the changes don't take long to make, it would be nice if they could be preset.

Field Summary is a great tool, but would be nice to have a count and count not null on it.

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

One of the common methods for generalization of different types of normal and beta distributions is triangular.

Though Alteryx doesn't have a function for this, even excel doesn't have this but

• SAS (randgen(x, "Triangle", c)) and
• Mathematica (TriangularDistribution[{min,max},c]) like tools include one.

Can we add something like randtriangular(min,mode,max)?

I have my solution attached, but this will ease the flow...

Best

Constantly using rand() function but also need;

• Normal distribution function like we have in Excel and
• Triangular distribution function too...

Idea: can we please add normdist() and triang(min,mode,max) functions...

Best

Edit: for normal dist. attached a discretized example...

Idea:

I know cache-related ideas have already been posted (cache macros; cache tools), but I would like it if cache were simply built into every tool, similar to the way it is on the Input Tool.

Reasoning:

During workflow development, I'll run the workflow repeatedly, and especially if there is sizeable data or an R tool involved, it can get really time consuming.

Implementation ideas:

I can see where managing cache could be tricky: in a large workflow processing a lot of data, nobody would want to maintain dozens of copies of that data.  But there may be ways of just monitoring changes to the workflow in order to know if something needs to be rebuilt or not: e.g. suppose I cache a Predictive Tool, and then make no changes to any tool preceeding it in the workflow... the next time I run, the engine should be able to look at "cache flags" and/or "modified tool flags" to determine where it should start: basically start at the "furthest along cache" that has no "modified tools" preceeding it.

Anyway, just a thought.

Would it be possible to change the default setting of writing to a tde output to "overwrite file" rather than the "create new file" setting? Writing to a yxdb automatically overwrites the old file, but for some reason we have to manually make that change for writing to a tde output. Can't tell you how many times I run a module and have it error out at the end because it can't create a new file when it's already been run once before!

Thanks!

There is MD5 hashing capability,using MD5_ASCII(String) and MD5_UNICODE(String) found under string functions

it seems to be possible to encrypt/mask sensitive data...

BUT! using the following site it's child's play to decrypt MD5 --> https://hashkiller.co.uk/md5-decrypter.aspx

I entered password and encrypt it with MD5 giving me 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99

Site gave me decrypted result in 131 m/s...

It may be wise to have;

SHA512_ASCII(String) and

SHA512_UNICODE(String)

Best

Altan Atabarut @Atabarezz

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

The Field Summary tool is a very useful addition for quickly creating data dictionaries and analysing data sets. However it ignores Boolean data types and seems to raise a strange Conversion Error about 'DATETIMEDIFF1: "" is not a valid DateTime' - with no indication it doesn't like Boolean field types. (Note I'm guessing this error is about the Boolean data types as there's no other indication of an issue and actual DateTime fields are making it through the tool problem free.)

Using the Field Summary tool will actually give the wrong message about the contents of files with many fields as it just ignores those of a data type it doesn't like.

The only way to get a view on all fields in the table is using the Field Info tool, which is also very useful, however it should be unnecessary to 'left join' (in the SQL sense) between Field Info and Field Summary to get a reliable overview of the file being analysed.

Therefore can the Field Summary tool be altered to at least acknowledge the existence of all data types in the file?

It would be great to get a random x number of records or x % of records for every grouped field in the sample tool.

Right now, the sample tool is lacking the random % feature and the random % tool is lacking the group by feature.

This is not a terribly important thing, but in the formula tool, the nitty gritty details of the Expression almost never fit into the annotation space. It would be nice if the annotation by default just contained the names of the variables being derived.  So, e.g. if I'm deriving "CalcVar1", "CalcVar2", "CalcVar3" and so forth, the default annotation would just be:

This gives a much cleaner (by default) canvas.  The same concept applies to the MultiRow and MultiField Formula tools, perhaps others.  Just a thought and obviously not very important.  Thanks.