Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi, I'm new to Alteryx; we've had for just about a month. We started publishing our workflows to Tableau and it's working great.

One issue I foresee:

User credentials to the Tableau server are updated occasionally. When this occurs, I will have to update the credentials manually in each workflow. 

The number of workflows we are publishing is growing. Is there a way to automate this process? 

Request: Currently Alteryx does not support a connector to SharePoint lists if those lists are on SP sites with claims-based authentication. Please add in this functionality so data can be imported directly into a workflow.

 

Rationale: Claims-based authentication can be used in situations where two workgroups (or companies) want to collaborate on information housed in a SharePoint list. The claims-based authentication allows for both "internal" and "external" consumers of the information to access the SharePoint site, perhaps with different permission levels.

 

However, if information is placed in a claims-based authenticated site, it cannot be accessed directly in Alteryx. Using the data in workflows becomes extremely difficult without cumbersome workarounds. The power and flexibility of Alteryx workflow scheduling, analysis, reporting, and notifications should be extended to cover data in all SharePoint sites.

 

Sample Use Case: I maintain a SharePoint site / list for vendors to report in on the status of projects we have assigned them. The site uses claims-based authentication to enable the vendors, who are not employees of our company, to access and update the list.

 

SharePoint's built-in workflows are adequate for notification and updating when a new item is added, or an item changes. However, I often want to obtain and send out snapshots of the data as they stand: how many items are open, how many have recently been closed within SLA, etc. This cannot be done within the SharePoint platform without extremely convoluted means and potentially tying up resources on the SharePoint server.

 

Alteryx has the perfect tools for easily performing this analysis and sending notifications to stakeholders -- and when using the Gallery scheduler, it can do so on an automated basis. However, without direct import into Alteryx from SharePoint, I need to have scheduled exports to an intermediary Excel file. Said intermediate export has issues with authentication, which would be resolved with a SharePoint connector that authenticates with saved credentials every time.

If I need to change field text using an If Statement, I have to write in in a format similar to this:

 

IF [Product Line]=="" THEN
    "Others"
ELSE
    [Product Line]
ENDIF

 

Having an Else statement increases processing time and statement complexity and in this case is unnecessary.  Please allow me to write my code in this manner:

 

IF [Product Line]=="" THEN
    "Others"
ENDIF 

With the onset of Workflow Comparisons in V2021.3, it only seems natural to me that the next step would be a method of handling those changes. Maybe have some clickable dropdowns on the changed tools that have a few options as to what you'd like to do about them. I think the options to start off with would be "Apply this change to that workflow" and "Apply the other workflow's change to this one" along with the "Apply all of this workflow's changes to that one" and "Apply all of that workflow's changes to this one" somewhere in the header.

 

I know that I will occasionally get a request to change a workflow while I'm already in the middle of making a change to it or am waiting on approval for a change I've made and am hoping to implement. The current version control system on Server does not make it easy to implement multiple changes that may need to be implemented in an order other than the one in which they were started. The current process seems to be to merge them later by going through the whole process of selectively copying the changed tools and pasting/replacing them or otherwise manually modifying the tools to make them match.

 

Likewise, implementing the version merging proposed here will allow versioning strategies more akin to branches in git. One could more-or-less maintain two streams of changes until they were both complete and merge or productionize them as they're complete and ready.

Pulling data down from Salesforce takes a looong time. It would be a great feature to be able to cache this, similar to how 9.5 added database caching.

It would be great to have the option to FILTER on the columns within the TEXT INPUT TOOL.

Example, in the screenshot below I would like to filter this on the FirmCode Alphabetically

I have case where attached is the input excel file where column document name and document number is having hyperlink attached to it.  Wish we get functionality  to retain hyperlinks in those two column in the output excel file

When attempting to save from Designer to Gallery the last step of the save is the validation step.  The validation step, as I understand it, checks to make sure there's a valid license on Gallery.  This counts as one of the processing "threads".  If your organization is constrained by the throughput on Gallery, this can cause delays. 

 

Our business only has the 2-thread service level for Alteryx Gallery.  Consequently, if someone is running long, drawn out workflows on Gallery, this can create delays in saving the file from Designer to Gallery.  It can also cause delays if there's a long "line" of workflows waiting to run.  I presume that the save attempt is put in line along with the other jobs on Gallery that have to run.  If this is the case, it could take a long time to complete the validation--tens of minutes or longer.  

 

That window being open keeps the user from being able to use Designer at all.  Very inefficient.  There should be a requirement that the user has both valid licenses on Designer and on Gallery before they can run anything on Gallery.  However, the validation of both of those is already accomplished by virtue of the fact that Designer checks for a license whenever the program loads.  Also, if Gallery checks for the license anytime the workflow runs, then the second half of this check is already accomplished and, therefore, renders the check when saving to Gallery unnecessary.  Please correct me if i'm wrong on this. 

 

Change #1) Please the validation of Gallery license when saving from Designer to Gallery.

Change #2) Please adjust Designer such that you can continue to edit workflows on the same session while other files are being saved to Gallery.

Change #3) If we can't get #1 or #2, please change the queueing process to put attempts to save to Gallery in the front of the line because they should take <1 second to validate the license while other workflows could take many minutes.

Have a feature in Alteryx that automatically and dynamically creates documentation or a SOP standard operating procedure. I imagine the flow and connectivity of each process  would cause it to be easy enough to translate from a visual display into a written form. This would be extremely helpful to workflows that touch and handle data that has to be accounted for, whether that be through an audit or any other forms of IT controls.

It would be awesome if we could edit annotations while the workflow is running.

 

I love annotating all my tools, and I'm often sitting there looking at my canvas right after hitting run and thinking, "I should annotate that!" and then moving on and forgetting after it's run.  I'm not sure if that's feasible or not, but I think it would be neat.  

Allow users to disable any steps in workflow except input and Join conditions.

 

To edit existing workflow sometime we may required to remove few steps, it is better if we have option to disable and update mapping instead of delete.

Hi

 

While the download tool, does a great job, there are instances where it fails to connect to a server. In these cases, there is no download header info that we can use to determine if the connection has failed or not. 

 

Currently the tool ouputs a failure message to the results window when such a failure occurs. 

 

Having the 'failed to connect to server' message coming into the workflow in real time would allow for iterative macro to re-try. 

 

Thanks

 

Gavin

 

I would like to see the Publish to Tableau Server tool updated to allow appending an extract with Encryption at Rest enabled.  As data security requirements become more stringent, this would be a beneficial option.  Right now, I'm only able to create or overwrite an extract if I've turned on server-wide encryption at rest enforcement in Tableau Server.

I know there is an idea for Dynamic Summarize, however I think with only small change to Summarize tool this could be achieved. 

 

If we set the Summarize to Group by all our dimensions but then use ListBox + Action to control which dimensions we want to select - wouldn't it be nice (ahh Beach Boys comes to mind) to be able to tell Summarize tool that if the dimension in group by is not found just ignore it? At the moment it throws an error. I just think such small configuration would achieve this, right? 

 

Please let me know what you think

*This is an idea from @sayuri  from the Portuguese Community*

 

• Create a button to add any tool to all output anchors of selected tools (similar to “Add All Browses”)

I am aware there are posts on this in the community and that there is a macro available to do this on the public gallery, however I think this is such important functionality that it should be incorporated into the main product.  I want to be able to join 2 data sources by a date range.  In SQL the code would look like this:

 

select ric.*,map.*
from
Staging.TicksHourlySummary ric
LEFT OUTER JOIN Reference.ReutersInstrumentCodeMap map
on (
ric.#RIC = map.ReutersInstrumentCode
and ric.[Datetime] >= map.EffectiveFromDate
and ric.[Datetime] < map.EffectiveToDate

)

 

 

Figuring out who is using custom macros and/or governing the macroverse is not an easy task currently.  

 

I have started shipping Alteryx logs to Splunk to see what could be learned.  One thing that I would love to be able to do is understand which workflows are using a particular macro, or any custom macros for that matter.  As it stands right now, I do not believe there is a simple way to do this by parsing the log entries.  If, instead of just saying 'Tool Id 420', it said 'Tool Id 420 [Macro Name]' that would be very helpful.  And it would be even *better* if the logging could flag out of the box macros vs custom macros.  You could have a system level setting to include/exclude macro names.  

 

Thanks for listening.

 

brian 

Add a search or find function that looks for content within a tool rather than just the tool number. e.g. ctrl Find, to look for any tool that uses a keyword or field in the formula/join/etc. This would save me a boatload of time editing, updating, and troubleshooting my workflows.

It should be made more clear when a container is just closed versus inactive/deactivated. Maybe highlight the container header in pink or light red if it's just closed and not deactivated. I've seen others in my group make the mistake of assuming the container is inactive if they simply close it. The current switch is kind of subtle.