Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I'm a brand new user to Alteryx. I have Designer + Scheduler. I had read about the advantages of MongoDB. I went into the Scheduler System Settings and changed it to MongoDB to find that the service didn't start, among other issues. 

Come to find out, MongoDB is not supported for Scheduler-only installs/licenses. 

Therefore, I believe that the option to change the db storage for scheduler-only installs should be disabled. 

We have Alteryx running in AWS which seems to be a common setup.Our AWS instances are set-up with IAM roles which has been one of the security measures applied in order to finally allow our enterprise company to allow some development in the cloud. IT will not allow the sharing of Access keys to connect to S3.

• Would like to use the AWS S3 Tools from the connectors palette as the AWS CLI has limited ability to handle/report exceptions or issues with any detail. At the moment, we are limited on what goes into production as we are using CLI for what we can.
• Ideally, an option would be to add to the S3 Tools allowing the user to select IAM Roles rather than Key Access. Refer the screen attached.

Having an easy selection and filtering of data values is essential in big data environs as well...

I'm sure preparing such an in-db tool for Alteryx guys and gals will be pretty easy...

Looking forward to it...

I'd say that 95.437% of the Joins I do are straight Inner Joins.

So each of those times I have to remember to go down to the Select part of the Join tool and deselect all the fields I joined on the Right Side since they'll be duplicates.

I'd like a checkbox like below (defaulted to CHECKED)  to deselect all the joined fields from the right hand side. In the rare cases where there's a need I could uncheck it.

Deselect R join fields

TLDR: Add a parameter repeat (rep) to the Neural Network configuration panel, and probably other Predictive tools. This would make the tool return only the best trained model out of #rep.

I have done some research by comparing the R neuralnet function (from Neuralnet package) and the Alteryx Neural Network tool. I thought that the XOR example was a good one to evaluate a neural network system since it is one of the most basic non-linear tables.

• R Neuralnet function

The neuralnet function is able to train and predict the 4 configurations of a XOR table (see page 3 of https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/neuralnet/neuralnet.pdf for the test script).

However several attempts must be made. This is why the parameter

rep=5

is important, followed with

plot(net.xor, rep="best")

This way, instead of 1, 5 sets of initial parameters are randomly generated and 5 neural networks are trained independently. When plotting, only the neural network with the lowest error is plotted (I got 3% error). For XOR, around 5 tries seem to be enough to find a set of parameter that guesses the 4 situations of the table correctly.

Another parameter of the function is stepmax:

"The maximum steps for the training of the neural network. Reaching this maximum leads to a stop of the neural network’s training process."

This rules the max number of iteration for each single attempt viewed previously.

If one writes stepmax = 100 instead of rep = 5, the only resulting Neural Network usually does not have an average error below 5% (actually I get 49,7%).

• Alteryx Neural Network

The Neural Network tool in Alteryx has a parameter documented as follow

"The maximum number of iterations for model estimation: This value controls the number of attempts the algorithm can make in attempting to find improvements in the set of model weights relative to the previous set of weights. If no improvements are found in the weights prior to the maximum number of iterations, the algorithm will terminate and return the best set of weights. This option defaults to 100 iterations. In general, given the behavior of the algorithm, it is likely to make sense to increase this value if needed, at the cost of lengthening the runtime for model creation."

I tried this workflow with this parameter set to default value 100, and even greater values, and I cannot get an average error below 5% (I get stuck around 50%).

After reading carefully these pieces of documentation and testing, I can guess that this last parameter is the equivalent of stepmax. 

If this is right, then it would be practical to add an equivalent for the parameter rep to the configuration panel. This parameter seems more useful than rep to me. Maybe there is already a way to simulate this parameter; if that is so, please let me know, otherwise I am going to include an R script to my workflow.

porWYSIWYG - What you see is what you get...

WYSIWYG implies a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the end result while the document is being created.[3] In general, WYSIWYG implies the ability to directly manipulate the layout of a document without having to type or remember names of layout commands.[4]

Looking forward to have such a Reporting layout designer, embed all pictures, tables, graphs, legend, header, footer...

Just like in Qliksense and tableau...

Hi, I'm currently feeding about 4,000 URLs into the Download tool.  Some of these may be old websites that are no longer hosted.  As the records get passed, if the process runs into one of these (random, 1 in a 100 chance), the whole thing stops executing and errors out.

It would be fantastic if I could just tell it to skip any records that error out, instead of having the whole thing error out because of one dud website.  I don't know which ones are duds until I pass them through the tool, so there's no way to filter them out upstream.  Real Catch 22 here!

I have a coworker who's going to tackle this in Python instead, and he says he can put in a "try, except block" into his code.  His words, not mine, and I know nothing about python code...but given what I know about Alteryx, there must be a way to build this into the tool!

Thanks!

Hi,

Since the Geocoders create point data, having the spatial field recognized as a centroid can be helpful to the user. If it's marked as a centroid, it makes it easier for the user to differentiate between point vs polygon/line, especially if the user is already using polygon data in the module. If I do a Spatial Match or Join, I can have two fields called SpatialObj, which I have to track back to figure out which is which. If after combining, it showed Centroid for my geocoded points and SpatialObj for my polygon data. Kind of like you do for the Create Points tool, if I use that the field is called Centroid.

Thanks,

This is fairly simple/minor capability, but I do think it would save some time. Especially when developing back and forth between different layers of an Alteryx Environment.

Best,

dK

There are few workarounds for this task, but it would be really very easy if Data Cleansing Tool could delete Null Rows and Null Columns. After all its just a macro which can be modified and re-packaged into Alteryx Designer.

Currently, to delete a null row requires multiple columns validation for common Null attributes,

similarly to delete a null column every column has to be compared on a row-level and flagged for removal. Both of these approaches are clumsy.

Wouldn't it be so simple if Data Cleansing Tool gave such check boxes !!!

Currently there is a maximum amount that can be passed into the Dynamic Input, 1MB. I often hit this limit and it is infuriating.  If this was upped to 5MB that would solve a lot of my issues, but 50MB would be AMAZING.

Thoughts?

-Nick

I have a need to get Wave Analytics datasets as inputs into my Alteryx workflow.  The ultimate goal would be to take a Wave dataset, combine it with multiple external data sources, and then output it back to Wave as one master dataset.  This would be a HUGE win for our use with Wave and make a lot more possible.

Thanks!

Clustering your data on a sample and then appending clusters is a common theme

especially if you are in customer relations and marketing related divisions...

When it comes to appending clusters that you have calculated form a 20K sample and then you're going to "score" a few million clients you still need to download the data and use the append cluster...

Why don't we have an In-db append cluster instead, which will quicken the "distance based" scoring that append cluster does on SQLServer, Oracle or Teradata...

 Best

Hi alteryx can you please create a poll or an forms to fill or approval processes kind of tools . I know we have some analytics app tools but can we create something like google forms where we can easily create forms and get data outputs. Emails notifications for those forms and approvals .. etc ..

Not sure what detail needs to be added.  This is obviously a widely used RDBMS.

Hello,

When working with my company’s IT department, they do not allow employees to have admin rights to their computers. This becomes problematic when trying to use the CASS download and not being able to install it. Is there a way to get the CASS data install to be a non-admin like the Alteryx tool? This would be very helpful!!

Thank you

It would be interesting to have the ability to change the orientation of a tool container separate from the orientation of the workflow. For example having a vertical tool container within a horizontal workflow will help keep the workflow short enough to view on one page. Also it would look alot better to collapse and expand vertically in a horizontal workflow.

I think a lot of us have run into this problem at some point.  We are running a longer workflow and right at the end everything will stop with an error.  The problem is that someone has a file Alteryx is reading or writing to open in another program.  When this happens, it will stop with an error and the whole process will need to be started again from the beginning.  I think it would be great for Alteryx to be able to halt, alert the user of the problem, and give the option to retry reading or writing.

It would be great to be able to output a report to Adobe Illustrator (.ai).  This would allow us to refine the presentation, or hand it off to a graphics department to do that for us.  It would especially be great for the map reporting tool, as many GIS people finish maps in AI to give a more polished result.  This would allow Alteryx to compete better with Esri as far as map creation.

I can only really speak to map creation, but please comment if you have another use case.