Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hello!
Just another QOL change from me today. 
When building a workflow - just for fun sometimes I like to make mistakes. It's never by accident I promise 😎

Now theoretically, if I did make a mistake, and put a tool in the wrong place (or want to refactor, or want to move a select earlier in the workflow etc), I would typically right click, cut and connect around, and then right click the connection I want to paste onto. This works fine, however, some users are unaware of it, and it can still be a bit of a pain.

What would be really nice, is if we could hit ctrl and click/drag a tool, to move it elevated of connections. I have attempted to create a couple of gifs to illustrate.

The current method of moving a tool within a workstream:

What I'd love, if you could hold ctrl + drag:

Cheers!
Owen

It'd be great to have all DCM connections available in the Data connections window.

And when Use Data connection Manager (DCM) is ticked, The screen defaults to DCM Connection list. 

Currently, if you download and Alteryx package from an alternative version it doesn't allow import into a newer version.

Workflows allow this with a warning it would be good to allow it on packages too. 

Would be nice to have a way to cache-uncache all inputs or a selected group of tools.  Caching and Uncaching workflows with many input tools or slow data-read tools gets to be a bit cumbersome.  Would be a nice QoL improvement :)

I looked around for something like this but didn't see a solution, so thought I'd recommend.  Please let me know if something like this exists already natively in designer desktop.

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

@RithiS ,

I'm a fan of using DETOUR tools in Alteryx.  I often place "test" code into a standard workflow and opt to use it or not based upon a detour.  The challenge is that adding a detour and detour end invariably leads to having to re-route connectors (default of adding tools is to connect to the left).  Here's a picture:

What I'd like to do is SELECT the tool or tools that I want to connect around (in this case, just the formula tool).  I'd like to right-click and DETOUR.  The detour and detour end would be added (putting the selected tools in the path of the RIGHT option.  This would greatly speed up the tool configuration process.

If you want to go for extra credit, you could modify the GUI to express which direction a detour is travelling in a standard workflow (e.g. make connections wireless or dashed when not selected).

Cheers,

Mark

@Claje @Hollingsworth @SeanAdams 

Currently, you have two choices for Auto Configure while working on workflows:

• Auto Configure switched on: After every change, the configurations (= columns) of tools are re-evaluated for the entire workflow (at least, this is how it feels like).
• Auto Configure switched off: Configuration of tools is only re-evaluated when pressing F5 (or when using the clipboard).

Pros and Cons of both:

• Auto Configure switched on:
  • Configuration in each tool is always accurate so that working on tools is straight forward.
  • Editing workflows gets annoyingly slow for complex workflows, especially when data sources from network locations or macros are used. Sometimes I have to wait a minute between two mouse clicks.
• Auto Configure switched off:
  • Editing workflows is faster (at least in theory).
  • I have to press F5 all the time (because I nearly always change output configuration of tools when working on workflows). Even after pressing F5, Alteryx does not always succeed in calculating the correct configuration of a tool.
  • Working with clipboard, loading, saving workflows is still slow.

I would love to have something in between all, kind of an intelligent Auto Configure with following features:

• F5 still starts full configuration evaluation.
• Configuration of input tools is frozen (unless F5 pressed) so that no network access is started during editing the workflow.
• Check for update of macro files is switched off (unless F5 pressed).
• After changing a tool configuration, either a flag is set that this tool was changed but no re-assessment of the workflow configuration is run (approach 1), or only downstream configuration is updated (approach 2). Whether approach 1 or 2 is started could be decided on various criteria: Number of downstream tools (or other measure of complexity), how many "change flags" according to approach 1 are already set, etc.
• If approach 1 was chosen: If you edit a tool which is downstream to another one for which the change flag is set, re-evaluate only the portion of the workflow between the previously changed upstream tool and the tool supposed to be edited.
• Using Clipboard should not invoke full re-configuration.
• Before saving a file, full re-configuration needs to be run (as already now).

This idea will add quite some complexity into the logic of Auto Configure but should have quite some potential to speed up editing workflows because network access and number of re-evaluated tools in each editing step will be reduced.

I would like to propose a more interactive results window.  The reason is that if you click on any of the tool hyperlinks next to the messages while the output is compiling, you get trapped inside that tool's output for the entire time that the workflow runs.  You do not get to see any additional workflow result/detail as it compiles until after the entire workflow is run. It would be great if a user could escape back to the main workflow's results.

For instance if I am running a fairly long or complex workflow that does not all fit on one screen...I may want to zoom in on a tool if it has a warning or error before the workflow finishes.  By clicking on the hyperlink "Union(5)" the palette will zoom to Union (5) so I can see which tool is a problem.

I can see any messages attached to Union(5), however I am stuck with this view the rest of the time the workflow runs.  Clicking on the canvas (or really any other action I try to take) does not take me back to the overall workflow result window.

Granted if I have an error I may want to stop the workflow altogether, but sometimes warnings may prompt further investigation once the workflow is run and I may want to get an immediate read on where in the workflow the problem is while it is still running...which inputs might I have to check etc.

When viewing results of a workflow that has Errors, could we add External error resolution data if the user clicks on the error message?  Like browse everywhere it could lookup the error in help and in community posts.  

cheers,

 mark

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!

When you have an Alteryx workflow open, Alteryx seems to by default try to keep you up to date on what might be happening with your data when it runs through your workflow. So if you for example add a misconfigured tool (a filter not connected to an input) and click somewhere on the canvas it'll presumably try to compile the code and then figure out that the new tool is misconfigured and it'll tell you why. A major thing it does seems to be that it tries to figure out if macros included in the workflow have changed and to take such changes into account so that it can notify you if there's a problem somewhere e.g. with the macro's output schema or whatever. I know it's doing this kind of thing because the moment I add a macro to the workflow I'll have to spend a 15-20 second 'tax' every time I touch the workflow canvas, a formula, when I click on a join, etc. Sometimes it's 30 seconds, sometimes you get lucky and it'll only be 5 seconds. This delay is by now from my perspective considered a fixed cost of adding a macro to a workflow. I'm assuming similar processes also take place in the context of other dependencies (main one probably being queries inside input tools) and that they may also cause problems for similar reasons.

I'm assuming part of the reason for the long delays is that the macro repository where we usually save macros in my organisation is saved in a server location which is close to the Alteryx server executing the in-production workflows/macros, but not close to me when I'm developing in my office. Yes, I could save the macros I develop elsewhere (locally) and then only save them in the repository when they're 'complete' (...we all know exactly when that's the case; we're never in doubt about that, right? ...and you'll still have problems if you need to modify a workflow which includes macros later, even if you're not touching the macro itself). I'm actually doing that in some contexts where the above user experience has been frustrating enough to justify such a step, and I'm always trying to find ways to just outright kill Alteryx' live connection to the macro (e.g. by caching the output) if it's not critical. But these things are not solutions, they're poor workarounds some of which are adding complexity and the potential for errors as a result of a problem which really shouldn't be a problem.

It would be desirable to have the option to pause these kinds of 'background processes'/'semi-live compiling'/'whatever', make Alteryx do this kind of thing less frequently, add an 'only update meta-data when running' option, or some fourth option of a similar nature. Debugger-mode is implicitly always on, why not give the option of turning that off if the user figures s/he can handle that? Give me the error when I try to run the workflow, don't try to have the software figure out if the code will run with an error every time I even touch it - this is not always helpful, it's in some contexts causing a huge waste of developer time.

Hi 

I'm really missing a search in the medata phane?

If I am on data phane:

If im browsing though metadata:

When numerous formulae exist within a single formula object, being able to "Expand All / Collapse All" would be most welcomed.  :-)

Also - the ability to Disable/Enable a single formula in the formula object - also very nice to have.

When you enter a search term in the results window, it would be great if it highlighted that term in the data results window. Otherwise, it still takes work to find where your search term is located in each row.

Hello!
I like to annotate my workflows when finished, and it can be a bit of a pain to add more and more comment tools by searching for them, or going through the current right-click menu:

What would be nice is the option to right click anywhere on the canvas, and have the option of 'add comment', similar to how we have the option for 'add container' when selecting tools on the canvas.

Cheers!

One of the common issues when you build macros is the error "the schema of macro output XXX has changed between iterations"

So the next step that we commonly follow is to put a select tool into the flow just before the macro output - and convert all the fields to a specific type; untick the "unknown" field; and then sometimes have to go into the XML to add the "Forced = true" flag into the XML so that it doesn't change over time:

Please could you add an option under the "Options" tab to force / lock down the type of every field with one click?     That would eliminate dozens of clicks on every creation of a macro.

Thank you 

Sean

Hello!
I recently build a couple of workflows where i needed to union many parts of my data together. 

Take for instance, the following:

I appreciate this is an unrealistic workflow - but if i am splitting data, at any points, and doing different processes, i am going to need to union that data back together.

Now without my fix - the solution is to put a union tool onto the canvas, and drag each connection to the union tool. This is fine on a small scale, but when its 5+ connections this can become tedious.

My proposed solution, is similar to the 'cache and run' functionality, in that you can select many tools with Ctrl + Click, and at the bottom you have the option for 'Union Outputs':

And when clicked, a union is added to the canvas, following the furthest most right tool (or last clicked), and have a union setup, with all connections made:

Hope this makes sense!
TheOC

Containers are a great feature.  They allow us to create larger workflows in smaller canvases, and manage the flow and appearance of our work.  However the design whether intentional or flawed that allows the container window to interact with the layers behind it is annoying.  Connection wires should not redirect within a container because of things on the canvas behind the container.  Likewise if I have a container open, I should not be able to grab a tool or container behind the open container through the container canvas.  Please fix this flaw.