Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Currently pip is the package manager in place within the Designer. Unfortunately this is something that doesn't fit our requirements as Data Scientists. We prefer using conda due to the following reasons:

1. conda manages also non-Python library dependencies. This way conda can be used to manage R packages as well which comes in quite handy (even tough not all packages from CRAN Repository are available)

1. conda provides a very simple way of creating conda envs (similar to virtualenv but with conda one can also install and manage pip packages --> virtualenv cannot install conda packages!) to isolate required packages (with specific versions) used in a workflow (e.g. for a Python Tool in Designer).

 

So I would like to have conda instead or additionally to pip and would like to create my conda envs where I install the packages I need for a specific task within my workflow. Moreover, if you think about to feature an R jupyter notebook capability (like the Python Tool) it could be beneficial to change from pip to conda for managing packages in both worlds.

Looks like several users are losing floating panes when they go from dual monitors to one when undocking from a workstation: 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Setup-Configuration/How-to-recover-results-screen-when-going-from-d...

So I just realized that if I click F2 I am brought to the annotation window in the configuration window. 

It would be great if I can click F3 to bring me back to the Configuration window! Often times I switch back between configuring and annotation a tool multiple times. 

 

‘]Thanks,

 

J

It would be great to have a way to find a column by its name.

This feature would be particularly useful when exploring with data sets having a large number of fields.

This feature would be useful within several tool, in particular with the "Browse" tool and with the "Input" tool.

Ideally the user should be able to  "Ctrl-F" and jump to the column matching the name being typed.

Alternatively, the user could be able to sort the columns alphabetically.

 

Thank you for considering this feature suggestion.

 

Davide Gerbaudo

 

P.S. I understand from this discussion that such feature is not currently available.

Whenever Alteryx recognizes a field as a Date, it should default to Date, not Date/Time. I don't think I'm in the minority, but I rarely need to see the date AND the time. 99.9% of all of my date fields do not have a time associate with them; such as: Open Date, Close Date, Remodel Date, Lease Expiration Date, Lease Start Date, Date Record Updated, Relocation Date, etc., etc., etc. So I always get results like 4/1/2013 12:00:00, which makes it difficult to query against without changing to just Date. I would venture to guess that most people don't use the time either, but I may be wrong. So, defaulting to just Date would save a lot of us that extra step for each date column.

Both of these can be partially accomplished with the output of the directory tool:

- List Directories - Summarize unique list of directories from the directory tool output

- Exclude Paths - use filter tool to exlude files or directories based on patterns

 

 However, here are some scenarios that aren't addressed cleanly:

- Directories are not listed unless there is a file contained within.  The tool is called Directory, but it only lists files.  The directory has to be non-empty to be listed.  An option is needed to either list files and/or directories (including empty optionally)

- I can't figure out whether the file specification is a wildcard expansion only or supports regular expression for inclusion/exclusion. I see in the File Browse tool that you can list multiple formats e.g. Text Files (*.txt)|*.txt|All Files (*.*)|*.*.  Here is a use case where this is required.  Our network shares have Windows file restore snapshots stored in a ~snapshot directory.  We don't want the directory tool to traverse this directory (because it literally takes hours to scan), but there isn't an elegant way to exclude it.  If you filter it from the directory tool output, it's already scanned it. What we've done is generate the top-level directory list outside of the tool and fed it into a macro that has a directory tool (with sub-directory scanning enabled) inside. 

- Another way to address this specific scenario woudl be to have an option to exclude traversal of "hidden" folders.  But a more generic approach is ideal.

For many of us who use Alteryx to transform sensitive data, the Gallery is only a potential liability.  While Alteryx was able to disable the Gallery for us through a custom solution, it seems like users/account admins should be able to draw a hard line more easily and confirm Alteryx is only enabled to work on prem. 

For charts with a secondary Y axis, it would be helpful to be able to apply dollar signs to one Y axis and percentage signs to the other Y axis. 

 

While the axis labels can say "These are dollars" and "These are percentages", the chart would be quicker to grasp if the units themselves were labeled.

 

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

I've found that double-clicking in the expression builder results in varying behavior (possibly due to field names with spaces?)

 

It would be great if double-clicking a field selected everything from bracket to bracket inclusive, making it simpler to replace one field with another.

 

For instance:

 

Current:

IF [AVG AGE] >=5 THEN "Y" ELSE "N" ENDIF

 

Desired:

IF [AVG AGE] >=5 THEN "Y" ELSE "N" ENDIF

Geohash is a latitude/longitude geocode system (public domain). It is a hierarchical spatial data structure which subdivides space into buckets of grid shape.

Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision).

As a consequence of the gradual precision degradation, nearby places will often (but not always) present similar prefixes. The longer a shared prefix is, the closer the two places are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

https://github.com/sharonjl/geohash-net

https://github.com/simplegeo/libgeohash/blob/master/geohash.c

For the Sample Tool, can we add a selection to "Skip Last N Rows".  We have a "Skip 1st N Rows".  We have a work-around but it would be easier if we had that choice in the tool.

Hello All,

Can you add the flexibility to access fields based on its position or index like a[1], a[2],... a[n]. a[1] being the first column. Also an option to get max[a] can give the last column and min[a] give the first column. In this way, we can easily subset the dataset. Most cases, we are handling survey data which has 1000s of columns and when we need to select certain columns, we have to manually select the column checkbox and its painful to select 100s of columns. It will be nice if there is an option to select based on ID or index. It will also be useful while doing multi-field formula with more number of fields, because currently there is no option to write formulaes based on field Name column in it. 

Regards,
Jeeva.

Could you please assess the idea of reverse engineering existing SQL code (in special inside DataWarehouse's code, thousands of LOCs filled with SELECT and JOINS) and replace it with Alteryx widgets?

Doing this will accelerate penetration rate of Alteryx products in large companies and dismantle IBM Cognos and their cousins.

It would be helpful to redirect Help Documentation searches to the latest version number.  When Googling problems I often get help page links that are for version 9.5 while I'm on version 11.7.  I'll usually change the version number in the URL to get to the right documentation.  It would be great if the version <11 documentation would automatically port forward to the current documentation with the option to go to older documentation for users on those versions.

Functionality to append to Calgary Databases.  Currently we are unioning Calgary Database to another dataset and overwriting existing Calgary database.  Ability to append would cut down on data processing.

Part of the joy of using Alteryx is watching connections progress, tools turn green, and messages flow to the results window. As workflows are running, the messages provide crucial information for the developers/executors in real time. This UX is absent when running on the Gallery. It would be lovely to run a workflow on the Gallery and let it stream all those messages, and possibly even the canvas, to my Designer window in real time. I could even catch issues/problems and stop the workflow instead of waiting for it to finish on the Gallery and then diving into the log. Is it possible to have the same experience in Designer regardless of executing the workflow locally or in Gallery?

 

Because this is a desired feature in Designer, I decided to post in Designer Ideas rather than Server Ideas.

I version all of my Alteryx work professionally and personally using git. Positions seem to be stored as floating points in XML and this can lead to unwanted behaviours in git. Containers can float around the canvas over time across many commits. There is also plenty of noise while diffing workflows. The noise is all of the "changes" in tool and container positions actually resulting from floating points. Is it possible to store positions in XML without floating points?

Currently with Alias Manager you can only create Aliases for database connections. 

 

We use HDFS Connections to write files to HDFS so it would be really useful to use an Alias especially when promoting workflows to Alteryx Server.