Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hello

Cartesian product is a common issue when joining dataset with a bad key. What I suggest is an option to check if there will be a cartesian product on the join tool.

-there is a label "Cartesian product (non join key uniqueness) detection"
-under it a drop down menu with three choices
-do nothing
-fail
-warning

Algo :
if do nothing==> well... do nothing more than actual behaviour.
if "fail" or "warning" : count distinct of join key versus count row on each side of the join. If none is unique, display a warning or an error message.

Best regards,

Simon

Hello all,

The reasons why I would the cadence to be back to quarter release :

-for customers, a quarter cadence means waiting less time to profit of the Alteryx new features so more value

-quarter cadence is now an industry standard on data software.

-the new situation of special cadence creates a lot of frustration. And frustration is pretty bad in business.

-for partners, the new situation means less customer upgrade opportunities, so less cash but also less contacts with customers.

Best regards,

Simon

Please add ablity to globally, within a module, forget all missing fields.

Working in the accounting department, this has come up too many times now to ignore! 

Would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see a new formula available in the DateTime formula suite that mimics the function of the EOMONTH() formula when working with dates in Excel. 

The beauty of the EOMONTH() formula in Excel is that I can just give it a date, and then tell it how many months in the future or past I would like it to add/subtract... Alternatively, in Alteryx, this can require 2 or 3 nested DateTime functions to arrive at the same answer. 

Example: To find the end of the month 2 months in the future from today's date, I would use the following formula...

Excel = EOMONTH(Today(),2)

Alteryx = DateTimeAdd(DateTimeAdd(DateTimeTrim(DateTimeToday(),"month"),3,"months"),-1,"days")

Seems much more complicated than it needs to be in Alteryx, and easy to get lost in the nested formulas & non-intuitive adding/subtracting of months/days! I can see a new formula (something like DateTimeEOMonth?) being structured as follows in Alteryx: DateTimeEOMonth([Field],increment)

Please consider! Our accounting department thanks you heartily in advance... 🙂

Cheers,

NJ

Idea: Allow the user to set the data type including character field width in the Text Input tool.

The Text Input tool currently auto-senses the correct type and width of the field in a Text Input tool. However, this sometimes restricts the usage of the data downline.

Examples:

1 - I often run into the situation where I've copied some data from a browse tool and then pasted that as an input to a new workflow. Then I'll turn that workflow into a macro. But then I run into an issue where the data that comes into the macro is larger than the original width in the Text Input tool. This causes problems.

2 - The tool senses that a field containing zip codes should be numeric and then converts the data. This corrupts the data and makes me insert a Select/Formula tool combo to pad the zeros to the left.

So our company is relatively new to Alteryx Designer and Server and we recently found out that there's no official communication sent out from Alteryx on when there are patch releases for Designer and Server. We've encountered so many bugs that we later found on the release notes that would've been helpful to know about months before.

So my suggestion is to have an option for Administrators to opt in/out for communication emails on when the patches are released.

Thank you!

Whenever I overwrite an Excel sheet with data of the same format just different values (e.g. Q2 data versus Q1 data) all of my Pivot Tables break and I have to manually recreate them even though the schema didn't change.  Somehow the Table is being deleted/removed and replaced with a completely different Table which is what causes the Pivot Tables to break.  The only way to avoid this is to manually set the Cell Range, but who has time for that?  The only solution I have found is to manually copy all values and paste them over the existing data which is very inefficient the more sheets you are working with.

Hello all,

MonetDB is a very light, fast, open-source database available here :
https://www.monetdb.org/

Really enjoy it, works pretty well with Tableau and it's a good introduction to column-store concepts and analytics with SQL.

It has also gained a lot of popularity these last years :
https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/MonetDB

Sadly, Alteryx does not support it yet.

Best regards

I'm testing out the new Data Connection Manager (DCM) and think it needs 1 enhancement based on the way we'd use DCM. Whenever Alteryx opens, it should sync the Data Sources/Credentials from the Server. This is critically important when sharing these with more than 1 user when a password needs updated.

For example, DesignerA updates the password in the source system, and then updates the password in their Designer DCM settings. In order for this new password to get synced to DesignerB, 2 things have to manually happen: DesignerA would need to sync the new password to the server, and then DesignerB would need to sync the new password from the server. I can live with the first part where DesignerA needs to sync to the server. It's just part of the password update process. The second step though seems perilous. DesignerB should get the new password without having to do anything; as things currently stand, DesignerB will have the old password until they manually intervene and sync the password. Imagine a scenario where it's just DesignerB, but hundreds of people who would all have to sync their credentials. 

I also think this idea makes sense in light of the way Data Connections currently work (pre 21.4) where a similar sync happens automatically every time alteryx opens.  

My request is to allow navigation to specific System settings without having to click through the entire process to get to the specific section of the settings you want to change.

At the moment containers either expand and overlap other tools, or you have to leave space for them (defeating the original purpose of using them). Is there a way we can have the containers expansion shift the workflow so the others tools shift down / right to account for this expanision?

Note: This idea doesn't strictly fit into any given category as it involves enabling support for something that affects numerous aspects of Alteryx's already existing spatial features.

I live in Australia. As do a large number of your users. Like me, many of those users use Alteryx to process spatial data. There is only one problem; we live on a roving continent. Every year our continent shifts ever so slightly but over time that shift becomes significant. For this reason we have our own continental system of spatial coordinate projections. It's called the Geocentric Datum of Australia or GDA.

Since 2000, the official Australian geodetic datum has been GDA94.  However, according to the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM), because the coordinates of features on our maps, such as roads, buildings and property boundaries (and so on), are all based on GDA94, they do not change over time. This is why they have since adopted a new datum: GDA2020. This has now become the standard for mapping in Australia, bringing Australia’s national coordinates into line with global satellite positioning systems.

A more detailed explanation of this can be found on the ICSM's website: What is changing and why? | Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (icsm.gov.au).

Of course Alteryx supports the more global WGS84 standard, which like GDA94 is a fixed datum. But there is up to a 1.8 metre discrepancy between GDA94 (and WGS84) and GDA2020. For spatial analysis projects that don't require metre accuracy that's not a problem. But imagine you are building a bridge, plotting the lanes of a road or programming a GPS enabled tractor. That 1.8 metre discrepancy between the real world coordinates and the projection is enough to cause problems. 

And it is. Which is why we request that Alteryx include support for GDA2020 in its existing selection of spatial projections.

This will enable spatial datasets configured in GDA2020 to not require conversion and thus risk corruption or error. This includes providing the ability to configure GDA2020 as the spatial projection in the input tool and all spatial tools.

Doing so would go a long way to supporting your ever growing Australian user base and maintaining Alteryx's position as a trusted software for processing spatial data.

There is an extensive need from customers to be able to create emails but not send them (right away at least). This would be an enhancement to the email tool to allow for checking a box to say "Save in Draft" and if that box was checked the send email functionality would not be called but the email would be created. 

Report text tools currently only give the option to allign left, right or center. Would be great if we could have the option to have a true 'Justify' option also as it makes chunks of text look so much cleaner

I was setting up a rather large set of repetitive filters and formulas and when I got done, I wanted to select the output of each tool all at once to drag them in to a Union tool. I think it would be great if you could hold the control key to select multiple outputs to drag to the next tool at a given time. 

Would love to see an option to disable a specific Output tool (rather than the global "Disable All Tools that Write Output" option). I'm envisioning the inverse of the Email tool, where there is a checkbox to enable Email... rather, the Output tool could have a check box that would disable that output (and ONLY that output), similar/consistent with the "Disable All Tools" function. A "Disable This Output" check box. The benefits would be a quick way to make sure not to overwrite something in one output (but still getting all the good content in all the other outputs) rather than having to go through the multiple clicks of adding to a container and then disabling the container. Could have benefits for connecting with Action tools/interface toggles as well. It would likely need to contain the same/similar formatting in Designer to indicate it has been disabled, though maybe a slightly different color so you could tell it was disabled differently? 

(On a similar vein, would love to take this opportunity to bring up my favorite idea-that-has-not-been-implemented-yet-that-would-love-your-vote-and-attention, implementing a Warning that outputs are disabled when posting to Gallery...)

Cheers!

NJ

In the RecordID tool,  provide additional options for the creation of the ID, specifically allow for the ID to 'Intervals'. 

For example, Record ID every 10, meaning instead of creating an ID of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 .... you could create an interval of your choosing, the most obvious would by 10 or 100  thus your ID's would then be 10, 20, 30, 40 ....  or  100, 200, 300, 400, 500 ... etc. 

Dear Developers,

it would be great, if SSO would be possible for Salesforce connector. 

Our company is not so much in favor distributing log-in details for a service account. 

If there is already a solution in place, than perfect, but if not, I guess this functionality would be a lever to use Alteryx in our company.

Best Regards,

Johanna 

Please add support for Databricks' Unity Catalog

Currently, when selecting a Databricks-connection in the “Connect In-DB”-tool, and opening the “Query Builder”, only tables in the catalog named “hive_metastore” are listed. That is, Alteryx submits the following SQL query to Databricks:

Listing tables 'catalog : hive\_metastore, schemaPattern : %, tableTypes : null, tableName : %'

However, with Unity Catalog in Databricks the namespace is three-tier and there may be multiple catalogs (and not just the "hive_metastore" catalog), see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/databricks/lakehouse/data-objects#--what-is-a-catalog

I reached out to Alteryx support, which replied that you currently have a feature request for implementing this change (ID TDCB-4056) and they furthermore suggested that I post here.

Thanks in advance.