Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hey @apolly 

You and the team have been doing a lot of innovative changes to the results window for data.

Could I ask for an uplift to the results window for Workflow Messages?

Summary: Error messages in the workflow results window cannot be fully viewed - have to be copied into Notepad and then reformatted before you can read.

Request: Allow user to double-click to see full readable version of a workflow result message

Detail:

If you have an error message in a workflow result - it gives you a message that is often longer than the window allows and there is no cell-viewer option

As a result, there is really no way to get to the important part of the error message to understand what's going on, other than to use Notepad

Step 1: Copy into Notepad

(you can see the end of line characters being misunderstood)

Step 2: Manually clean this up by breaking on the line breaks

And now you can see the important part of the result message..

Could we rather add the ability to double-click on a result message in the result window and bring up a modal window that formats the error message for you (similar to the modal window used for XML editing of a tool).   That would eliminate this entire wasteful effort of trying to read an error message and having to use Notepad?

Bring up a modal window, similar to this one; so that I can see the error without having to go to Notepad

The eMail setup for the eMail tool and the eMail notifications are subtly different - in that the eMail notifications screen does not offer an explicit location for port.    This is important if the SMTP server does not use the default port.   You may be able to do this with : notation, but it would be better to create an explicit field for this.

No Port available on the eMail settings for EventsPort is available on eMail tool

I would like to have all my annotations show on top of the tools by default. I can change them one at a time, but I would like to be able to change the default setting to be "Show Annotations on the Top" always.

I'll admit it, I'm a coder, a keyboard guy, a sublime text typing junkie; but I love Alteryx.  Currently if I open a new workflow and start typing what happens? nothing... Wa wa.  Now lets imagine I'm already pretty familiar with Alteryx and I'm 5 moves ahead of my click and drag. 

Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could click a whitespace and start typing?  Typing would bring up a context menu search with tools found by the search (similar to the "search all tools" in the upper left corner, but next to the cursor, and vertical).  I could continue typing until one tool was left or select a tool using my cursor keys. Hitting 'Enter' would insert the tool where I had originally clicked and open another tool search window, selecting the next tool would automagically connect the two and on down the line (if multiple leg outputs exist for the tool the context menu would appear allowing me to select the leg I want it to connect to, hitting Enter would again bring up the tool search...

Now get this, go back to just after my first search... if instead of Enter I hit the "Tab" key, boom, it would take me to the configuration panel and allow me to fill in/tab through the configuration.  Hit enter again and I'm off to the races with another tool search.

All you click and draggers don't lose any functionality, and we keyboarders can swiftly race through development with ease.  How about that?  (the standard syntax check/path validation would need to be paused to keep development quick until I clicked again on the workflow which would execute the Rapid development mode.)

Would love to have a 'common used' tab, rather than a favourties box (as that lags what I am currenty using).

Would be nice to have it look at my usage and create sort by frequency of use table. Could also be done with all users as well (some kind of opt-in telematary data?).

Hey all,

We have a policy (similar to the best practices guide published recently by the Copenhagen user group - thank you @danielbrun2) that Alteryx canvasses should run without warnings.

However - some of the warnings are tremendously painful to track down. For example - a union that brings together 20 or 30 input streams which gives you a warning saying "not all fields contain field X".

Can we change this to multiple warnings saying "Input X does not contain field X" so that we click straight through to the offending warning?

Additionally - when there's a conversion error - we then have to run the flow again with filters and diagnostics to find the offending row. Can we have a way that alteryx automatically sidelines an example row so that you can solve it in one pass?

If we look at all the warnings with the intention of "how do we make this something that can be solved right now, without having to run complex diagnostics, so that the very next run is 100% clean" that would be a big help.

Thank you Sean

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Inspire-2017-Buzz/24-Best-Practices-for-Moving-from-Ad-Hoc-Analysis...

Hello Dev Gurus - 

The message tool is nice, but anything you want to learn about what is happening is problematic because the messages you are writing to try to understand your workflow are lost in a sea of other messages.  This is especially problematic when you are trying to understand what is happening within a macro and you enable 'show all macro messages' in the runtime options.  

That being said, what would really help is for messages created with the message tool to have a tag as a user created message.  Then, at message evaluation time, you get all errors / all conversion warnings / all warnings / all user defined messages.  In this way, when you write an iterative macro and are giving yourself the state of the data on a run by run basis, you can just goto a panel that shows you just your messages, and not the entire syslog which is like drinking out of a fire hose. 

Thank you for attending my ted talk regarding Message Tool Improvements.

With complex ETL jobs, we often have a very similar ETL process that needs to be run for multiple different tables (with different surrogate and natural key column IDs)

While you can do a bulk-replace by opening this up in notepad (in XML format) - it would be better if the user could do a find/replace for all instances of a table-name or a columnID from the designer UI (a deep find/replace into all the tools).

This can also be used when a field is renamed in the beginning of the flow, so that we can update this for the remainder of the flow without having to do this by trial/error.

Working across a large organisation inevitably leads to people using different drive letters when mapping drives/folders. This makes sharing workflows and macros with other teams more difficult and the first thing I do when creating a new workflow is change the dependencies to All UNC.

This suggestion is to offer the option to default all workflows to UNC via the user settings. Acknowledging that some users will prefer listing files by drive letter and other UNC, adding the option could make life a little bit easier for everyone.

I'd consider myself as a power user in most of the tools I use. No matter what program it is, I try to learn most of the useful shortcuts and code them into my mouse or keypad.

It's probably pretty uncommon that someone uses a mouse with 12 extra keys or a keypad, but I think many people would be happy to have the option to define shortcuts for everything. I don't really ask for shortcuts for everything by default, but a menu like Microsoft Word has it, that would be great.

For reference: 

Microsoft Word has a menu were nearly every possible action is listed and you are able to define/assign shortcuts (one or more) for every action available.

(Sorry it's German. Path: File > Options > Customize Ribbon > Customize)

At work I use a laptop and two external monitors. (L, EX1, EX2) <- that's how it's set up

When working in Alteryx I put my main window of Alteryx on EX1 and Results/Configuration tab on EX2

Sometimes I need to unplug my laptop, go to the meeting - or, what I have been doing lately, go to one of the meeting rooms and use standing desk to work there.

Problem is when I disconnect my laptop from the docking station (where external monitors are connected) other windows "jump" to the laptop screen, apart from Alteryx external tabs - meaning I can't "reach" it, even if I disable/enable or restart Alteryx.

It's not really a complaint of any sort but just a discussion if there is a way for this to be improved?

Often we run into two pretty common situations:

• You want to move a Select, Formula, or Filter to a different point in your workflow
• You want to remove a tool entirely, without affecting the workflow in any other way.

In both cases, I would prefer that I can set the default behaviour of ctrl-x or delete like the way 'Delete and connect around' behaves.

Thanks,

Ruud

I really like the new toolbar & tool palette. I think that the toolbar would be improved by a couple of (hopefully) minor tweaks:

1) The ability to 'lock' the Favorites toolbar so that it is always visible, no matter how far you have to scroll

2) The ability to move tool sets within the toolbar so that those less used are further off to one side

I just upgraded to the new Alteryx 8.6 which I'm looking forward to using, however, it is quite frustrating that none of my customized user settings are maintained during the install process. I make a few customizations:

• Vertical layout
• Showing the grid and the XML
• Turning off the "module complete" pop-up
• My 'panes' where I put them
• A few favorite tools in the "Favorites" toolbar

And there are so many other customizations that I don't go near (but might if they were maintained during upgrade), like:

• Default temporary path and Logging
• Dataset defaults
• Zoom levels
• Startup page & Distance units

Please implement a way of maintaining these settings!!

My use case is simple. I place an explorer tool on the canvas pointed to a local htm file. During the workflow run, I update the htm file and want to update the canvas to display the results.

Cheers,
Mark

That has bugged me for years.

I'm digging the new holistic data view in the browse; however, there is one aspect of the old view that I miss: I liked the list of top values to be available without scrolling. Here is the current view of the new browse:

What are my top values? I either need to hover over the blue bars, or scroll down to see the list at the bottom. I would like the top values list moved to the top. For reference, here is what the old view looked like:

My top values are available right there at the top.

I just want to be able to make the width of annotations customizable. Yes, you can use comment boxes, but those aren't tied to any tools in any meaningful way. There is all this room to write out an annotation in the configuration window, but eventually on the canvas, it will be cutoff. Also, this isn't exactly the most friendly way to read.

I think being able to customize a canvas setting for max width would be awesome. It could be under the canvas tab of the workflow configuration. Additionally, the ability to adjust the width tool-by-tool could also be really helpful.

For people recently met with RegEx, you are lucky if the expression is short and understandable or "human readable".

But there are extreme cases too where it's really a pain to solve the puzzle.

if you'd like to catch e-mail addresses from masses of unstructured data this will work;

/^([a-z0-9_\.-]+)@([\da-z\.-]+)\.([a-z\.]{2,6})$/

and here is the elaboration;

when colorful it's fun but barely readable still... Here is a Regexper version

This visualizer I came across at https://regexper.com/ is awesome.

1. Can you please integrate this into Designer for ease of reading and understanding existing RegEx...
2. Can it be possible to develop an interactive tool to prepare;
   
   • The graphical representation of our regular expression first
   • And then writing it in the same old fashion...

Please support the idea if you like...