Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

The Alteryx icon image on the Windows tab at the bottom of the screen should change or change color when running and when a module has finished running. I got this idea from Teradata SQL Assistance. When the query is finished the little icon (which is sunglasses) changes from red (running) to green when complete. 

Would it be possible to add the capability to import or build a CSS for reporting in a future release, I am sure I am not the first to think about having Style Sheets in reports so you do not have to define fonts, colors and all that HTML stuff to each output line. 

Alteryx S3 connector currently supports only SSE-S3 encryption. Current version of alteryx S3 connector does not use AWS Signature Version 4, so it fails to upload/download S3 objects which encrypted using AWS KMS keys. This is much needed feature for S3 connector.

for the past 8 months I have been using alteryx and mostly working with the connect in db components , there are many issues which I am facing and i this this can be improved 

1. there is no such  flexibility of creating a table with the keys defined which is the most important pillar in database, also the options provided are limited , i.e. to create a new table , delete and append, drop table and recreate, 

now, there are many times where in we  need to update the tables based on the keys, which i find missing. Also how the option is defined is create a new table, next time if the job is run it states that the table is already created, for which we need to manually change the option in the next run.

 

2.which switching between in db and alteryx , if the records are more the alteryx lags completely and the job keeps running for hours , how can we achieve the flexibility  of alteryx designer if there is such bottleneck.

 

3.the flexibility that is provided with alteryx designer should also be given to in db components.

4.the parameters defined in the workflow can not be accessed in the in db  formula tools but can be used in the designer formula tools. this reduces the flexibility.

 

please look into the same

Currently, when creating scatter graphs you are unable to order the plots based on a sub-group of the data (ie the legend). It would be nice to have the ability to pick which part of the legend is displayed first, above the other data plots. Could we also have the option to take the 3D element off the scatter graph plots?

 

Thanks,

 

Oliver

It would be great to get a random x number of records or x % of records for every grouped field in the sample tool.

 

Right now, the sample tool is lacking the random % feature and the random % tool is lacking the group by feature.

Just like the File Geodatabase, Esri has an enterprise version for servers, in our case, Oracle. We would like the option to output to an Oracle GDB like we can to a normal Oracle DB. This would greatly assist in our process flows.

I have no idea how many people are using the .Net API to build custom tools, but found an issue with its assembly scanning.

 

It doesnt pick up classes implementing IPlugin in an abstract base class. Can be worked around by moving the interface onto the concrete implementation but think it should pick up any concrete class implementing the IPlugIn regardless of whether on the class itself or a base class.

how to share Custom Tool Palette (along with Macros) with other users. 

 

For eg, I have created a custom tool palette named "Adhoc Analysis" with few macros; something like attached.

Now, how to make sure that all my user base can have same palette in their local alteryx designer. 

 

After some research, I did found that I could share macros with them by putting all relevant macros on Alteryx Server, and users could then pick the macros from there. 

 

Although, I wanted to suggest this as an Idea for future releases, it would be great to have an option or way, on how to share this with users in their local designer without much hassle.

 

Not sure, if this is something worth exploring from Alteryx development team side. But thought of suggesting to community if this could help others.   

 

Thanks for your help. 

Ravi Sharma

Lets say we have data for 3 different regions coming from input file/DB. Asia, LA and EMEA region data are all in one file.

 

After the transformation, checks which were needed, now I want to output my results per region. 

Due to user access to data, we have designed 3 different folders - one for each region.

 

So, Asia region output should go to --> ASIA Folder, and similarly for rest of the regions. 

 

Currently, there is no option to dynamically select and change the output folder path in output tool. 

 

It would be great to have a way to be able to choose output folder based on a field value.

Hi,

 

So I was working on a project which uses the "Download" tool. I needed to measure precisely the response time for each record so I set up a "timestamp" value using the DateTimeNow() function before the actual download. After download was complete, i tried to measure the response time by using the DateTimeDiff() function. However, using this method, i was not able to get a precise (up to a millisecond) performance reading since the DateTime format gets rounded to a second. 

 

It would be great to have a way of precisly measure the time taken for each record to go through a tool or a set of tool and having that value be a part of the output file

We were browsing the Alteryx Gallery recently and thought it would be great if the Alteryx Gallery was in Connect, or more like Connect - with certified macros/workflows and voting ability, making it easier to find the most popular macros and how many people are using them.

 

PS - I didn't see either Gallery or Connect available as labels 😕

I got the requirement to read the file with same structure from different path and different sheet, so I worked and identified a way to achieve this requirement.

 

Step 1: List the files that are required to read from the different path and create it Excel with the file name and respective path.

 

 

Step 2 : Create batch Macro give control parameter as filepath and mention the correct template.

 

 

Step 3 : Create a workflow add source input and Map Source file i.e. list of files with path.

 

 

Finally you can see the all the data are merged together write in your output as single file. You can additional transformation if you want process any business logic further and write in output.

Note: Adding additional file name source path will be enough for additional file processing.

 

 

 

 

For example, Input Data Tool can output a list of sheets name from excel files.
Our client would like to output a list of sheets name by Google Sheets Input Tool as like excel files.

Would be nice if in Designer customer's may want to upload and reference  a " DATA DICITIONARY - METADATA REPOSITORY file when working with various input source to transform data . 

Organizations that are mature in their data governance strategy implement special software that extracts, manages and provides access to data dictionary of data assets in multiple databases such as  ERWIN to maintain schema for enterprise. 

Within DESIGNER access to a file METADATA REPOSITORY held in DESIGNER customer may easily select a list of columns  fields or attributes from that file to manipulate data elements using DESIGNER and provide all the relevant information required they wish to massage the data.

Possible Attributes that may be in data dictionary file:

Table name

Column Name

Data Type
Foreign Table

Source

Table Description

Sensitive Data

Required Field

Values

This might be a dumb ask, but I run into this alot. I have a workflow that has over 1000 tools and is super long. I would like to be able to to either right click and lock the connection sting so i can let go of the left click , scroll down to the tool, and then click on it to make the connection. Also, it would be nice to have the ability to right click on a tool and click a button "Connect to last used connection" as i sometimes join to the same table multiple times. Lastly, I just thought it would be cool if we can defined tools that are connected to the most so when i right click on another tool, i can open a drop down and select one of the most joined to tools, without even having to click on the original.

When building out a large workflow, I'd say one of the bigger challenges I come across is being able to quickly navigate the canvas to a certain spot. In these types of workflows, my personal way of keeping things organized is creating sections of my workflow in different Tool Containers and naming them with a short description.

 

Here is what I picture helping out a great deal in navigation. Create a drowdown somewhere in the ribbon on top (would not want another sidebar or floating window that takes up needed space) that simply lists out every tool container in my workflow by name. When a tool container name is selected, the view jumps to that tool container in the window pane. Another option in terms of the interface might be to add a keyboard short that gives a popup "tool container search" window. Begin typing a tool container name, and it would jump to the first result it sees as a match. Then just hit escape or click outside the popup to continue your work. 

 

I think this would help immensely in being able to jump to a particular spot in the workflow without having to drag the overview or scroll around until you are able to find it. I included mock-ups for each version I mentioned.

 

 

 

 

 

Alteryx has different behaviours for conversion errors depending on the type of conversion desired. When converting from string to date data type, a conversion error will generate a NULL value. When converting from a string to a numeric data type, a conversion error will generate 0. Why the different behaviours? There is a lack of harmony here. 0 is a valid value and should not be the generated value for a failed string to numeric conversion. It should be NULL.

 

When I perform data type conversions, i do not apply them directly to the source field and then cast it. If there is a conversion error, then I have lost or corrupted the source information. Rather, I create a target field with the desired data type and use a formula to apply a conversion, such as datetimeparse or tonumber. Finally, I do a comparison of the source and target values. If the datetimeparse generated a NULL then I can PROGRAMMATICALLY address it in the workflow by flagging or doing some other logic. This isn't so easy to do with numerics because of the generated 0 value. If I compare a string "arbitrary" to the generated 0 value as a string then clearly these do not match. However, if I compare a scientific value in a string to the converted numeric as a string, then these do not match though they should. My test of the conversion shows a false positive.

 

I want a unified and harmonised conversion behaviour. If the conversion fails, generate a NULL across the board please. If I am missing something here and people actually like conversion errors to generate 0 please let me know.

Hi,

 

Please provide users the option of downloading course videos and transcripts. If it is already there, please let me know.

 

Regards,

Meenakshi