Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Sometimes a dependency with a macro breaks, or I am local 'versioning' a macro and want to replace it in another workflow, without losing all of the connections.

If we could replace a tool, or if it is missing upon opening a workflow select a tool to take the missing one's place but keep the same connections, that would be incredibly helpful.

Currently, you can right click on an input file and convert into a Macro input. however, in order for a fellow user to see what file was used as input, one has to click on it output anchor, copy the data and paste it on a new canvas. It would be nice to right click on the input macro tool and be able to bring up the original input or convert it into a regular input in one step. Thanks

From discussions the new distribute auto spaces when distributing. Any chance we can get a spacing setting in the user settings. Settings would be like we do our grid spacing except we would separate the horizontal and vertical spacing(set number of pixels for horizontal/vertical). This would allow people to have a different vertical spacing compared to their horizontal spacing. Particularly helpful for heavy formula usage. Thanks.
Also take into account ability for it to stay snapped to grid. Example I use a 72 px grid size for ease of lineups. With the new distribute it pulls between those grid snaps

Hi everyone,

 

Could it be possible to have alteryx being able to encrypt/decrypt files or data by using external keys. I believe it could be useful to have it handle AES and/or RSA encryption...

 

What do you think?

 

Julien

It would be really cool if we could drag an entire configured formula from one formula tool into another formula tool.

I use custom SQL statements in many of my input tools.  I also use the global system variable CURRENT_DATE to dynamically get a date range in my queries.  Alteryx is trying to parse and understand the query, but it fails to understand CURRENT_DATE.  Each time the time I selected to view the SQL in the input tool, a parsing error is generated,  "Invalid SELECT statement. Unexpected token "CURRENT_DATE" at line xx, pos xx".  Dismissing this error by clicking OK is all that is needed to workaround, but this is still less than ideal.

 

Please correct this so CURRENT_DATE will be an "expected token".

Reduce mouse movement required by bringing up the "Add" menu at the point of the cursor when right-clicking on a field in the Fields window.

Add an option to cancel an occurrence currently queued to run without it removing, or completing, the original schedule. Not sure if this is by design or a bug but when you cancel a workflow that's in queue, it sets the scheduled workflow to "Completed" even though you just wanted to stop that occurrence and still keep the workflow schedule “Active”.

Also, adding an option to PAUSE a scheduled module. This is useful when you need to temporarily suspend a workflow from running, but save the hassle of re-configuring the schedule when you want to turn it back on.

Change the sample tool to have an allow all records option.  This will allow you to include the sample tool in a production workflow and will be a constant tool to allow you to debug the workflow if necessary.  This will prevent you having to delete and re-add the sample tool everytime you need to use it.  Could also have a workflow option of 'set samples to all records' which you could click on when publishing to Gallery.

I spoke to an Alteryx Product Manager, Alex Polly and pitched an idea about having workflows bookmarked for weekly or monthly runs. 

 

I run weekly workflows together one after the one, from different folders and I have to open file location every single time. So here's a thought, how about if we can bookmark workflows as a set/folder itself and one click and all workflows open up. 

 

Chrome has this feature storing the links in a bookmark folder. 

 

Please find the link for your reference. 

 

https://lifehacker.com/save-sets-of-multiple-tabs-to-launch-later-in-the-bookm-1453967463

 

Thanks, 

Jai Katariya

 

 

It would be great to connect the email tool with MS Exchange without SMTP, because in my company the policy is to not use any SMTP (therefore its blocked) . 

For this reason I am not able to use the email tool..

 

 

 

I find that each time I create a new Workflow, I have to go into the "Workflow  - Configuration" and update to the settings I would like even though they are usually consistent.

 

Usually this is checking the "Cancel Running Workflow on Error" box (so if I am connected to Salesforce and my Password or Security Key changes it will not lock me out by continuing to connect as well as letting me know right away if there is an error)

 

If there was an option to save different Workflow Settings (so we can name them based on their use) for different purposes so when anyone presses "New Workflow" they can choose a specific one to work from - important to have a default one that is used most (Sometimes it's nice to have Horizontal - other times Vertical | Sometimes we want annotations, other times we don't).

 

I think in case we can have a feature at workflow level to check if the entire logic written inside an Alteryx workflow can be converted into a native language, there can be performance improvements in terms of avoiding too and fro between App (here Alteryx) level and DB level.

 

For e.g. if I am using Oracle as my source connection and target connection as well, and the transformations done in Alteryx can be pushed down to a DML statement (or some loop with commit interval set) to execute within Oracle itself, we might be able to get performance improvements as the overhead of pulling data from Oracle to Alteryx and that of pushing it back from Alteryx to Oracle can be avoided.

When passing a data connection to the Dynamic Input Tool as a string and using the 'Change Entire File Path' option, the password parameter of the connection string is not encrypted and is displayed in the metadata source information.

 

We have since changed our macro that was using this method, but wanted to raise awareness of this situation. I suggest that the same procedure used to encrypt the password in all other connection methods be called if the workflow is configured to pass a password through the input as a string.

I am in the process of thoroughly documenting my workflows should someone else need to run them. However, I find a lot of my time is having to adjust font style, font size, colors, comments, etc. for each of the items I'm notating. It would be far easier to have the ability to set up a custom scheme that I could apply overall to the workflow that would change all of those attributes to my workplace standards. Sort of like how you can define a style in Microsoft Word to use repeatedly, this scheme would include comment boxes, tool containers and any other means of notating the workflow.

There are cases where a batch macro is used for multiple tasks where not all of the control parameter inputs are available all of the time. To use a batch macro control parameter it must be populated with a field, meaning sometimes a field containing a dummy value may have to be created to work-around this forced populating.

 

It would be useful if control parameter inputs could be made optional, passing a NULL value when a field hasn't been provided and handling any NULLs passed in within the batch macro.

I think this is a product idea, but Alteryx doesn't look terrific on small 15" 4K screens (I have a Dell XPS 15 9550).  It's unusable without enabling display scaling (labels are too big/icons are too small), and with display scaling it looks a bit fuzzy.

I think this is fairly self-explanatory and is a very common use case.

 

Would like to have a tool that can natively support DateTimeAdd functionality where you can define working days of the week for inclusion and holidays for exclusion.

Must be able to handle both adding and subtracting.

We have a large number of apps which are used by a substantial number of end users. One frequent end user complaint is that forms do not persist, i.e. the settings need to be reselected each time the form is run.  We've heard that this is an Alteryx issue.   Are there any solutions or work-arounds? It is a huge ease of use issue.   It has occurred to me that we may need to dramatically simplify the forms (they have many controls) but I would like to have a solution that is correct in terms of complying with modern Web UI standards.  I remember pushing to make forms persistent twenty years ago.