Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

On the canvas, underneath the Run button, there are zoom out and zoom in buttons. It would be lovely if between them existed a number box indicating the current zoom level of the canvas. This would operate much like my web browser, which typically shows 100% unless I have zoomed in or out. Bonus points if the button is clickable to reset to the default zoom level.

I have 5 containers in my workflow that don't all need to be run every time. I could play the game of manually enabling and disabling them depending on the need that day, but that quickly becomes a hassle with larger workflows. It would be much more efficient to have a functionality somewhere that displays all my containers with a checkbox of which ones I want run and the ability to set the run order I specify so I can make sure my 'Data Pull' container always runs first. An option to select/deselect all containers would be nice to, and maybe the ability to rename my containers much like the select tool does for fields. 

Hi,

I know that @MarqueeCrew had an idea for Auto-UNC which was "Not Planned" last year, https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Auto-UNC-when-saving/idi-p/194681, but what about a simple flag/pop-up to let users know when they hit "save" or "save as" that there are relative paths being used in the workflow (Perhaps even indicate any/all tools that they appear) and closes out the upload without closing out the workflow.

I don't see a solution out there for this, but if it exists and I am just a bonehead, please feel free to delete this thread.  🙂

Thanks

Dan

Hi team,

Currently, we can FILTER results in the result window using some string operations like "String equals", "String Contains", etc.

Firstly, it's a great feature. Kudos for the same.

However, it would be really helpful if we can add the IN operator functionality to this Result window FILTER.

Most of the time, we always want to check for multiple values while filtering the data.

I am attaching a screenshot of the FILTER location that I am referring to!

For eg, In the above screenshot of the result window, I want to filter for Name IN ('Bullock County','Baldwin County','Butler County')

Kindly look into this.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Shreyansh Rathod

Alteryx Gods,

Following a discussion with a person with whom I spend way too much time, @Jeff_Neklason , we were wondering would it be possible to allow users to drag and drop the position of the actual sections at the top of the designer?

Some users find they use the Developer section more than the Parse section, for example, and it would be beneficial if they could move the Developer section to the left to be more easily accessible.

Thank you Alteryx Gods.

I love you.

Kisses.

xxx

Many users will probably follow best practice style guides with Alteryx to use comment boxes under tools to describe in detail what is happening with these tools - such as this one shared by @BenMoss.

However a limitation of this is the comment boxes do not move with the tools, so if you have a well documented workflow but then need to add a new tool, you need to adjust all the spacing and re-align the tools, which with a large workflow can be time consuming. 

Therefore the improvement would be to have an ability to lock comment boxes to individual tools (similar to a group function in Office).

Having the ability to call-out via ARROWS/SYMBOLS (gold star) would be nice without requiring the user to create images and call them to the canvas.  This makes the workflow even more readable.

Watermarks (e.g. DRAFT, AMP, Do NOT AMP, FINAL) would be useful on the canvas as well.  

Cheers,

Mark

Hi 

The wording of the tool tip displayed in results window cells with long strings is misleading.  The current wording is "This cell has truncated characters".   

New users tend to infer that this means that the data value has been truncated somewhere upstream.  See here, here and here.   Changing this message to something like "Only a portion of long strings is displayed" will help reduce the confusion immensely.

Dan  

When building API calls within Alteryx there are a few common steps required

1) Build out the URI for the API call (base URL plus any query parameters)

2) Deal with authentication, such as basic authentication requires taking a key and secret, base 64 encoding and passing this into the tool

3) parsing the results out and processing these downstream

For this idea I am specifically focusing on step 3 (but it would be great to have common authentication methods in-built within the download tool (step 2)!).

There are common steps required to parse out the results, such as using Filter (to check for a 200 response), JSON parse, text to columns and then cross tab to get the results into a readable format. These will all be common steps anyone who has worked with APIs will be familiar with:

This is all fine for a regular user to quickly add in and configure these tools. However there is no validation here for the JSON result being as expected, which when embedding an API into a batch macro or analytic app means it can easily fail.

One example of a failure which I've recently come across is where the output JSON doesn't have all fields (name:value pairs) depending the json response. For example using the UK Companies House API, when looking at the ceased to act field at this endpoint - https://developer-specs.company-information.service.gov.uk/companies-house-public-data-api/resources... the ceased to act field only appears in the results if a person has actually ceased to act. This is important if you have downstream tools such as a formula to create a field [Active] where you have:

IF ISNull([ceased_to_act]) THEN "Active" ELSE "Ceased to Act" ENDIF

However without modification the macro / app will error if any results are returned where there is not this field.

A workaround is to add in the Crew Ensure Fields or union on a list of fields, to ensure that the Cease to Act field is present in the output for all API calls. But looking at some other tools it would be good if an expected Schema could be built in to the download tool to do this automatically.

For example in Power Automate this is achieved as follows:

I am a big advocate of not making things unnecessarily complicated. Therefore I would categorise this as an ease of use feature to improve the experience of working with APIs within Alteryx and make APIs (as load of integrations are API based) accessible to as many users as possible.

Could you add a presentation mode to Alteryx Designer. When I demonstrate Alteryx Workflow to my colleagues, what Alteryx is doing is great, but it doesn't look great. I'd like to see more clarity and flair when running workflows. In presentation mode, all tools should be dimly grayed out immediately after run, and tools that are 100% complete should be bright and clear.

Hi all,

When debugging an error, we need to verify tool by tool in a sequence to better understand what is really going on.

Sometimes the tools are miles away from each other. Imagine a gigantic workflow with a lot of connections going back and forth and wireless connections everywhere to help the workflow organization. Here is an example with more than 1300 tools: 

My idea is to have a shortcut showing all the previous/next tools and by selecting the previous/next one you go directly to them.

Something like this: 

What do you guys think about that?

Best,

Fernando Vizcaino

Issue:

Oftentimes when a workflow has an error, the error message is very long and is difficult to read in the results window. Currently, if you hover over the error message in the results window, the error message will popout but only for a couple seconds. Reading the error messages is a crucial step in troubleshooting the issue with a workflow, however, with the current experience it becomes very difficult to read the entire error message prior to the popout expiring.

Solution:

Simply double clicking any message, especially an error message, in the results window should have a permanent popout window presented to the user. This message window will allow the user to scroll down to read the entire message (if lengthy), popout the window further, minimize the window, and exit the window entirely. 

Over the period of time, it is quite natural to forget why we have used certain filter in the filter tool or why we have used certain transformation etc....

I am looking for an option for every tool that I use in the canvas... .by right click and choose "maintain legacy" kind of option and it opens up a pop-up or appears from the far right side of the canvas, and date and time is already populated there and provides a place to maintain 'note' of each of the transformation why we have done that and when we have done that. So, it helps us to track what changes have been done to the tool or workflow over period of time. 

In our situation, we have been making several changes to the workflows and implementing new business rules as and when it becomes necessary. After a year or so, when we revisit the workflow, forgetting what kind of decisions made us make those changes to the rules or filters or joins etc...

Thank You,

Suresh Saguturu.

I often encounter situations where I would love to be able to use the tool container name as a constant within my workflow. This would be a huge time savor for me as I use containers often to segment my work and those segments often have a meaningful purpose within my workflow. Having the ability to use the name for decision making or as a file prefix/suffix would be a great enhancement 

I find it annoying that the count records and heat map macros have file inputs which point to a W drive. This will show up in workflow dependencies and can cause false alarm warnings. Since these are packaged with Designer, simply change the macros to text inputs instead of file input. 

Thanks!

With the new keyboard shortcuts in 2021.1, I would love to see this same functionality added to the global search. I would like for

1) The global search bar to be accessible via a keyboard shortcut

2) You can navigate through the results with the arrow keys and

3) I can click enter on a tool and it will add it to the canvas just like the tool palette now functions in 21.1.

cc: @A11yKyle 

It would be great if Tool Containers had an I/O connector icon where you can connect the last tool in that container to and then Cache the container so that it wouldn't have to run every time.

For example, in the diagram below, the output of the Spatial Match would connect to an object such as the "I" that I drew below. We would then be able to cache the output of that container so that all objects in the container wouldn't have to run each time. The "O" would be the cached output and would feed the rest of the workflow. 

The data view of any anchor is searchable. I want to search the metadata view please.

I've recently developed a complex Standard Macro which gets called from a workflow. It has multiple input tools and output tools where the output tools create an excel file on a drive location.

Every time I try making changes to my macro, I want to test certain aspects of the macro and would not want any output file generated. The way I am doing that now is by placing each output tool in a separate container and manually disabling each container. This involves unnecessary extra containers, is quite time consuming and I risk missing disabling an output causing an unwanted file creation.

It would be nice if I could have an option to disable all Output tools in one go - perhaps an extra setting can be offered in the Canvas to do this. A "debug" mode could also be explored where, much like VBA and possibly other coding languages, Alteryx runs a workflow / macro from Point A to Point B only, or runs the entire workflow and skips the output portion unless specified.