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Submission GuidelinesHello,
After used the new "Image Recognition Tool" a few days, I think you could improve it :
> by adding the dimensional constraints in front of each of the pre-trained models,
> by adding a true tool to divide the training data correctly (in order to have an equivalent number of images for each of the labels)
> at least, allow the tool to use black & white images (I wanted to test it on the MNIST, but the tool tells me that it necessarily needs RGB images) ?
Question : do you in the future allow the user to choose between CPU or GPU usage ?
In any case, thank you again for this new tool, it is certainly perfectible, but very simple to use, and I sincerely think that it will allow a greater number of people to understand the many use cases made possible thanks to image recognition.
Thank you again
Kévin VANCAPPEL (France ;-))
Thank you again.
Kévin VANCAPPEL
At the moment, at least for Postgres and ODBC connections, the DCM only supports a names DSN that must be installed on each machine running Designer or Server. However, the ODBC admin function is admin only within my company, which makes DCM more trouble than it is worth to use.
Connection strings work well in the workflows, have been implemented on the gallery before, and do not require access to the ODBC admin to implement. Could DCM please be improved to support native connection strings?
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
Hi all,
The SalesForce Input tool is great.. but has some really bad limitations when it comes to report.
I think there are 2 main limitations :
A - It can only consume 2000 rows due to the rest api limitation. There plenty of articles about it in the community.
B - Long string such as text comment are cutout after a certain number of characters.
Thanks to this great article : https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Salesforce-Input-Tool-amp-Going-Beyond... , I had the idea of going through a csv file export to then import the data into Alteryx.
I've done it using two consequent download tool. The first download is used to get the session id and the second to export a report into a csv in the temp folder. This temp file can then be read using a dynamic input workflow.
Long story short, I think Alteryx should upgrade the Salesforce connector to make it more robust and usable. Using the export to csv feature, this should enable Alteryx to be fully compatible with Salesforce report.
Regards,
Hello,
A few years ago, Alteryx was 4 released per year and now it's only 2 per year (in 2023, as of today, only one !!)
The reasons why I would the cadence to be back to quarter release :
-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.
-for partners, the new situation means less customer upgrade opportunities, so less cash but also less contacts with customers.
Best regards,
Simon
Currently - if someone has accidentally kept an excel file open on their desktop, Alteryx will fail to load this flow.
However, it would make more sense to open this file without read-lock as a dirty-read (equivalent of "Read Uncommtted").
This may require some interaction with Microsoft but would be worth pursuing because it prevents / eliminates an entire category of needless canvas errors.
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.
There is an extensive need from customers to be able to create emails but not send them (right away at least).
I'm in the banking sector and I have been seeing many banks using Alteryx and Alteryx server in their routines. Also, when it comes to sending automatic e-mails in this sector, its very risky. We need a "four eyes check" when dealing with clients information. Currently there is no workaround that could be applied to e-mail tool when used in Alteryx server as well.
My idea is to simply create a button "Save in draft" in e-mail tool to create an .eml format as output. This .eml can be read by outlook and thus, it creates a draft.
This also should be taken into account when dealing with drafts in alteryx server, so that any user can run the workflow and get the desired draft.
Thanks
Please consider adding a new setting to the Render Tool, so the users can select or deselect if an existing File should be overwritten (Otherwise throw an error, like the Output Data Tool does, when configured to create a new Sheet and that Sheet already exists)
Right now we can create Tableau extract files (.tde), but cannot read them into Alteryx -- this limits the partnership of these two companies.
Please add the functionality to import .tde files,
Best,
Jeremy
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
If a tool fails, there should be a way to customise the error message. Currently a way to do it: log all messages in a file, read that file with another workflow, then customise the messages (Alteryx workflow error handling - Alteryx Community). However, there should be a more convenient solution. We should be able to:
- Find/replace parts of a message.
- Specify, which tools messages to modify.
- Change the message type.
- Change the order of the messages in the results window, to prioritise the critical ones.
- Pick which messages cannot be hidden by "xxx more errors not displayed".
This would especially help for macros, as sometimes we have a specific tool failing within a macro and producing a non-user friendly message.
Alteryx hosting CRAN
Installing R packages in Alteryx has been a tricky issue with many posts over the years and it fundamentally boils down to the way the install.packages() function is used; I've made a detailed post on the subject. There is a way that Alteryx can help remedy the compatibility challenge between their updates of Predictive Tools and the ever-changing landscape that is open-source development. That way is for Alteryx to host their own CRAN!
The current version of Alteryx runs R 4.1.3, which is considered an 'old release', and there are over 18,000 packages on CRAN for this version of R. By the time you read this post, there is likely a newer version of one of these packages that the package author has submitted to the R Foundation's CRAN. There is also a good chance that package isn't compatible with any Alteryx tool that uses R. What if you need that package for a macro you've downloaded? How do you get the old version, the one that is compatible? This is where Alteryx hosting CRAN comes into full fruition.
Alteryx can host their own CRAN, one that is not updated by one of many package authors throughout its history, and the packages will remain unchanged and compatible with the version of Predictive Tools that is released. All we need to do as Alteryx users is direct install.packages() to the Alteryx CRAN to get our new packages, like so,
install.packages(pkg_name, repo = "https://cran.alteryx.com")
There is a R package to create a CRAN directory, so Alteryx can get R to do the legwork for them. Here is a way of using the miniCRAN package,
library(miniCRAN)
library(tools)
path2CRAN <- "/local/path/to/CRAN"
ver <- paste(R.version$major, strsplit(R.version$minor, "\\.")[[1]][1], sep = ".") # ver = 4.1
repo <- "https://cran.r-project.org" # R Foundation's CRAN
m <- available.packages() # a matrix of all packages and their meta data from repo
pkgs4CRAN <- m[,"Package"] # character vector of all packages from repo
makeRepo(pkgs = pkgs4CRAN, path = path2CRAN, type = c("win.binary", "source"), repos = repo) # makes the local repo
write_PACKAGES(paste(path2CRAN, "bin/windows/contrib", ver, sep = "/"), type = "win.binary") # creates the PACKAGES file for package binaries
write_PACKAGES(paste(path2CRAN, "src/contrib", sep = "/"), type = "source") # creates the PACKAGES files for package sources
It will create a directory structure that replicates R Foundation's CRAN, but just for the version that Alteryx uses, 4.1/.
Alteryx can create the CRAN, host it to somewhere meaningful (like https://cran.alteryx.com), update Predictive Tools to use the packages downloaded with the script above and then release the new version of Predictive Tools and announce the CRAN. Users like me and you just need to tell the R Tool (for example) to install from the Alteryx repo rather than any others, which may have package dependency conflicts.
This is future-proof too. Let's say Alteryx decide to release a new version of Designer and Predictive Tools based on R 4.2.2. What do they do? Download R 4.2.2, run the above script, it'll create a new directory called 4.2/, update Predictive Tools to work with R 4.2.2 and the packages in their CRAN, host the 4.2/ directory to their CRAN and then release the new version of Designer and Predictive Tools.
Simple!
Is it possible to add a search feature to the Summarize Tool that is similar to the search feature in the Select Tool? Selecting specific fields to summarize in small datasets is fine, but if I am dealing with a table that has 200 fields searching for a specific field can be cumbersome. Type in a few key letters to filter the available fields would be helpful.
The crosstab tool replaces any non-alphanumeric characters with underscores in column names. It would be helpful to keep the original values as column names (or to have the option to toggle whether or not special characters are replaced with underscores).
This is often an issue for reporting and for dynamically-populated app inputs (e.g. drop-down), where we need to retain the special characters.
For example, say I have the following dataset:
Currently, the crosstab tool produces this:
I would like this:
There are currently (somewhat cumbersome) workarounds such as adding an extra row with the original names, and then using Dynamic Rename to rename the columns, but it would be great to be able to use the data straight out of the crosstab!
It is my understanding that hidden in each yxdb is metadata. The following use case is common:
As an Alteryx Developer/Designer I want to know the source of a yxdb.
Ideally, I would know as much about the workflow (name, path, workflow version, AYX version, userid) as possible.
It would be awesome to be construct a workflow that would allow me to search the metadata of yxdb's on my client computers quickly.
Cheers,
Mark
In order to make the connections between Alteryx and Snowflake even more secure we would like to have the possibility to connect to snowflake with OAuth in an easier way.
The connections to snowflake via OAuth are very similar to the connections Alteryx already does with O365 applications. It requires:
With this an automated workflow using OAuth between Alteryx and Snowflake will be possible.
You can find a more detailed explanation in the attached document.
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
It would be nice if we can arrange some tools on the canvas neatly by one click and having them distributed evenly (horizontally/vertically).
See this picture which worth thousand words.
In short:
Add an option to cache the metadata for a particular tool so that it doesn't forget when using tool that have dynamic metadata such as batch macros or alteryx metadata engine can't resolve such as python tool.
Longer explanation:
The Problem:
One of the issues I often encounter when making dynamic workflows or ones that require calling external services is that Alteryx often forgets the metadata of what columns to expect. This causes the workflow to forget configuration of downstream tools when a workflow is first opened or when the metadata engine refreshes. There is currently the option to disable the metadata engine from automatically refreshing but this isn't a good option because you miss out on much of the value it brings.
Some of the common tools where I encounter this issue:
Solution:
Instead could we add an option to cache the metadata for a particular tool, this would save the metadata from the last time the workflow ran to within the workflows XML so that it persists when closed and reopened. Then when the metadata engine runs when it gets to this tool instead of resolving the metadata from the tool it instead uses the saved version in the XML. Obviously when it actually runs it would ignore this and any errors would still occur.
This could be an option in navigation pane of each tool. Mockup below:
This would make developing dynamic workflows far easier and resolve issues of configuration being lost when the metadata changes and alteryx forgets the options.
When I'm organizing my workflow, sometimes I want to move a whole tool container on the canvas. Currently, the only way to do this is to first find the header then select and drag this. When the ends of the container is off screen, it can be hard to know how much I wanted to move my container to get it where I wanted relative to the other tools around it. I feel like it would be nice to be able to select anywhere on the tool container and drag it around (possibly holding right click and dragging so that current tool selection capabilities aren't hindered).
In the (simplified) images below, you'll see that I want my tool container to vertically align just above the browse tool:
I can't currently see the top of the tool container to move it, though, so I must first navigate to that part of the workflow to select the header.