Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I paste data into text input tool, then i have two choices 1) rename each field manually according to my data source 2) add the dynamic rename to take the headers from the first row.

The first way is time consuming and prone to mistakes.

The second way breaks the downstream configurations (workflow needs to be run first), and affects how the text input tool auto-detects the field types (all strings)

Text input would be improved with a button that automatically takes the first row and turns them into headers, as if i typed them in myself.

Thanks!

Text input scrolls left-right by entire column widths rather than by fixed pixel amounts that one would expect.  This is especially annoying when a column contains lots of text which makes the columns are huge.  The user is forced to maximize the window or detach it.

Map input allows the user to connect the Q anchor to a file browse in order to navigate for a Reference Layer.

Please allow functionality for the tree input tool to do this as well.

Thanks!

Hi all,

As per the post here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Dynamic-input-not-respecting-data-sort/td... - there are situations where you need to use something like a dynamic input to query data, but need it to be brought back in the order that you specified on the input stream.

The Dynamic Input too sorts the input stream deliberately, to check for duplicate queries so that it doesn't waste time bringing back duplicate data.

It would be great if we can extend the dynamic input tool to allow users to specify that they wish the data unsorted, and that they are OK with the consequences of possibly running the same query twice.    Even if this is a setting that can only be set through XML, it would still be helpful.

Many thanks

Sean

Hi all,

One if the most common data-investigation tasks we have to do is comparing 2 data-sets.   This may be making sure the columns are the same, field-name match, or even looking at row data.   I think that this would be a tremendous addition to the core toolset.   I've made a fairly good start on it, and am more than happy if you want to take this and extend or add to it (i give this freely with no claim on the work).

Very very happy to work with the team to build this out if it's useful

Cheers

Sean

I am on a forecasting project where we convert one vector of forecasts into another vector of forecasts by multiplying by a conversion matrix. This is very clumsy and fragile to do in Alteryx meaning we have to drop out to Excel. The ability to do very simple matrix multiplication in Alteryx would be very useful here and in other use cases. I realise you can probably exit to R and do the job, but for something so basic that shouldn't be required.

The relational representation of an mxp matrix is a three column table of cardinality mxp with columns { I , J , A }, where I labels the first index set with index i, J labels the second index set with index j, and A labels the numeric values with value a(i,j).  Given a second pxn  matrix { J, K, B } in relational form we should be able to multiply them to get a mxn matrix { I, K, C} in relational form where of course c(i,k) = sum over j in J of a(i,j)*b(j,k).

Vectors can of course be represented as 1x and x1 matrices. If you really wanted to go to town this could be generalised to array processing ala APL2.

I'm stealing this idea from Tableau's number formatting, it's a timesaver.

In the DateTime tool if I've initially selected a value besides Custom in the "Select the format..." list then when I click Custom rather than having the Custom textbox be blank I'd like to have it automatically populated with whatever formatting string I just selected. Here's an example screenshot:

It would be extremely helpful if you could add more parameters to the string functions to make them more powerful and useful. For example, adding a parameter into the get Word Function to match whole word only would be really nice in situations where you want to match the term VA, and not valley. Otherwise, you would end up building a regular expression to find what you are interested in when that may be overkill for the problem at hand.

It would be really nice to have a pane or some sort of panel that would pull-up the documentation for a given function, rather than hitting F1, and going straight to the online documentation. Even making it available offline would be incredibly helpful for those that want to work without an internet connection.

Hi all,

When testing a macro with interface tools in use - the value that is used if running in normal execution (hit the big play button) is 0 or blank, irrespective of the value set for default on the component.

e.g.

• put an up-down component on a canvas with a default value of 200
• Then hook it up to a formula box
• Then output the value 
• The value which is output is 0

Please can you change this so that the value passed through the interface tools in testing mode is the specified & configured default value?

Thank you

Sean 

It's not uncommon to start out with an InputData control, and then 2/3 of the way through you realise that you need to change this to a dynamic input.

Could we add the capability to right-click on an inputData; and convert to Dynamic Input (just like you can on a TextInput to change it to a Macro Input)?

Originally posted here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/Input-Data-Control-Log-of-actual-workload-generated/m-...

Hi all,

Many people don't have access to SQL profiling tools to see what is ACTUALLY being run on the server, in order to be able to index the tables to optimize - So - it would be very helpful to understand the full set of transactions that are executed against a SQL server.   Tableau does this by having a performance mode, where you can see what queries were run and the time that each query took.

This would allow us to pump these through the SQL Database Engine Tuning Advisor (which takes a batch of SQL workload, and optimizes the DB for this workload through strategies such as indecies; partitioning; statistics; etc.

It may take a while to make this available in the UI, is there any way in the shorter term to make this available in a log file somewhere that we can unpick?

Many thanks

Sean

Originally posted here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/Input-Data-Tool-Can-we-control-use-of-Cursors/m-p/5871...

Hi there,

I've profiled a simple query using SQL Server Profiler (Query: Select * from northwind.dbo.orders; row limit: 107; read Uncommitted: true) and interestingly it opens up a cursor if you connect via ODBC or SQL Native; but not by OleDB - full queries and profile details are on the discussion thread above.

However - in some circumstances a cursor is not usable - e.g. https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/Error-SQL-Execute-Cursors-Not-supported-on-Clustered-C... because SQL doesn't allow cursors on columnstore indexed tables & columns

Is there any way (even if we need to manually adjust via the XML settings) to ask Alteryx not to create the cursor and execute directly on the server as written?

Thank you

Sean

(originally raised as discussion : https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/Input-Data-Tool-Record-Limit-control/td-p/58718)

Hi all,

When using a record limit on a database query - the actual query being executed on the server depends very much on the connection type (Native SQL; OleDB; and ODBC).    However, for all 3 of these, it seems that the record limit is being enacted on the client side, not on the server.   What I mean by this is that when I take the exact queries that are being run by Alteryx on the server (by looking at a SQL Profile trace on the server), and run these in a query window, you can see that the row-limit is not occurring in SQL, but in Alteryx.

(to test this, I ran several queries with and without the record limit; profiled them using SQL profiler; and the profile trace was identical either way)

Aside from putting "Select top(100) from..." in all the queries that that we create,  or using in-DB queries for every simple query - could we instead have an option to force the row limitation down to the server on a regular InputData tool, so that we can take advantage of the server's ability to optimize?

Thank you

Sean

I really like the Directory tool.  Its very handy, especially in combination with the Dynamic Input.

But... I'd like to see other object (files and folders) attributes, like object level security (who has read, write, full, etc), last user to access, and user that created.

That has bugged me for years.

Hi, I've noted that there is not url-decode function in Alteryx. I guess I'm the first one to need that, so I'm posting this idea here. I think it would not be a big deal to do so if there's a url-encode function. 

Thanks. 

Idea: Support PLSQL Blocks  DECLARE/BEGIN/END syntax would be very helpful in the Output data tool .

This should allow either running multi-step SQL statements or calling stored procedures.

Rationale: Sometimes you need to run extra code or stored procedures after the data has been processed. It is also be much easier sometimes to re-use legacy code than try to recreate as a complex Alteryx macro with a bunch of R code.

The tool already allows calling procedures in SQL Server, but not supporting this in ORACLE is a big challenge for us.

Alteryx needs to package SAP, JD Edwards and ADNIS and BPCS connectors as part of it's native offering. This will increase the value proposition of Alteryx designer from just data blending to full self service ETL. Most of the large organizations have data extraction challenges and will experience business user empowerment and big productivity gains if native connectors and data extraction across major ERPs is enabled. Some of these productivity gains can in turn be used to make a business case for Alteryx designer licenses.