Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

 In my use of the Data Cleansing I want all the fields to be cleansed. Selecting the ALL choice selects all the fields, however if new fields are added later they are not automatically added. Perhaps the addition of a UNKNOWN choice as in the SELECT tool.

Thanks!

For some workflows I see the value of concentrate a high number of formulas in a single Formula Tool, specially when you have a considerable number of simple and independent formulas. This makes future changes to the workflow easier, since you (and other in your team) know where exactly to find the formulas in a workflow. But as higher the number of formulas in Formula Tool, more difficult is to find a specific formula in the tool.

My suggestion is to implement a sort option - so you list the formulas/columns alphabetically - and/or a filter option - bringing the relevant formulas/columns as you type. 

Since I am relatively new in the Alteryx world,I am not sure if there is an alternative for that (officially or unofficially speaking).

Thanks. 

I am in a corporate environment where our proxy settings are centrally managed and I do not have the ability to change them locally.

Our proxy requires authentication to access the Internet.

Many applications that read the system settings for proxies have a way to let the user enter her credentials, either in a configuration dialog beforehand or with a pop-up for each connection.

Having at least one of these options would save me a number of steps I must currently take manually, out side of Alteryx.

I cannot get an exception on the proxy for my IP address or MAC because that violates our security policy. I am sure I'm not the only one in that situation.

A request, to have a screen shot auto generated as like tableau have.

When we want to share/document the workflow, people has to use third party tools to get the screen shots. I believe its worth to have a screenshot as thumbnails, like tableau has as part of the twb files.

I'm sure we can do this with snipping tools, but i believe its worth to auto-generate an thumbnails and have as part of the alteryx files when user save the document as like tableau does.

thanks

arasu.b

I have had multiple instances of needing to parse a set of PDF files. While I realize that this has been discussed previously with workarounds here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Can-Alteryx-Parse-A-Word-Doc-Or-PDF/ta-p/115...

having a native PDF input tool would help me significantly. I don't have admin rights to my computer (at work) so downloading a new app to then use the "Run Command" tool is inconvenient, requires approval from IT, etc. So, it would save me (and I'm sure others) time both from an Alteryx workflow standpoint each time I need it, but also from an initial use to get the PDFtoText program installed.

 Hi there,

When working through a question with our team on how Excel & MS SQL represent dates, we did a quick test and confirmed that SQL and Excel are both storing dates & date-times as a number (technically the offset from a fixed date) which really helps for things like BI applications where a fact table may store a very large number of dates on each record (entered date/time; updated date/time; transaction date/time; etc)

However, when we look at the same in Alteryx, it seems to be storing these dates as plain text (see screenshot below) - meaning that instead of an 8 byte field for every date and datetime; which can be compressed using offset logic like in Parquet, these appear to be represented as a 19 byte field for date-time.

Would it make sense to change the internal representation to a number to make date-offsetting and processing easier (all date-logic then becomes simple addition / subtraction instead of string manipulation)?

Note: You can see this in the screenshot below.   the date field has 10 bytes; and the date-time has 19 bytes (where both of these are stored and represented in MSSQL in 8 bytes in total)

Hi all,

Based on the thread here https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Support-for-unsigned-int-database-type/m-... - there would be value in natively supporting the Unsigned Int data type in Alteryx.   

This idea was raised by @jgreene.

Note: this does appear to be directly supported in the core OCBC library (as long as it's supported by the ODBC driver for the specific database in question), so hopefully this won't be a huge lift:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/odbc/reference/appendixes/sql-data-types

@jgreene- would you mind adding any further information about the DBMS you are using which supports unsigned int, and any other info that may help the team to develop and test this (e.g. any link you can find to an available ODBC driver for this database etc?)

Thank you

Sean

Hi there,

Similar to @aselameab1 - I was having trouble with using the Linear regression tool because it was giving error messages that were not explanatory or self descriptive.

@chadanaber identified the issue - that a specific field only had one unique value which was causing the regression tool to fail - however the error message provided gives no useful or helpful indication that this is the issue.   You can see that the error message below is pretty tough to understand.

Could we add an item to the development backlog to add defensive checks to the predictive analytics tools to check for conditions that will cause them to fail, and rework the error messaging?

I've attached the workflow with the sample data that replicates this issue

Many thanks

Sean

Hi all

It would be helpful to have the possibility to work with placeholders in zip file input:

1. placeholder for zip file itself    c:/data/*2017.zip

2. placeholder for the files in the zip file  *raw.csv

It would make it easier to automate daily zip files with files with the same structure in the zipped file.

Kind regards

Steffen

Hi All,

It would be great if Alteryx 10.5 supports connectivity to SAS server.

Regards,
Gaurav

Hi there,

Apologies if Alteryx already does this - but I'd be curious to see if it would be possible to automatically add items to your favourites bar based on usage.

To test this, I've been doing a lot of macro work over the last few days, and given the frequency of using the Macro input and Macro output, I'd expect that they would have elected themselves onto my favourites list.

Again, apologies if the designer already does this

Sean

Our company is implementing an Azure Data Lake and we have no way of connecting to it efficiently with Alteryx.  We would like to push data into the Azure Data Lake store and also pull it out with the connector.  Currently, there is not an out-of-the-box solution in Alteryx and it requires a lot of effort to push data to Azure.

I would like the functionality to configure my own installation media for my companies environment. For example, I want send new users to a link where they can install Alteryx designer that automatically turns on phone home data with our gallery information and installs any company wide macros that are relevant for the users. Then I would like to be able to push any periodic updates to all the designers in our company. For example, if Alteryx comes out with a new version that I want to deploy or if I come out with new macros that I want to deploy I can deploy across all users easily from the server. Obviously the ability to roll back updates would be needed as well.   

Disabled shouldn't mean hidden.

I find the Disable All Tools that Write Output option very handy but sometimes when I have the tools disabled I want to be able to check the file name of the output or perhaps change it. Disabling the tools blanks out the configuration window, so you can't see the destination or make adjustments.

I would prefer the tool to be disabled but I still want to be able to adjust the configuration.

Hi there,

Could we please add a simple date function which allows you to construct a date from the basic inputs (rather than having to go through date-time-parse).

Example:

Function CreateDate(Year as integer; optional month as integer; optional day as integer; optional hour as integer; optional minute as optional; optional second as integer) as DateTime

Examples:

• CreateDate(2017) = 2017-01-01 00:00:00
• CreateDate(2017, 4) = 2017-04-01 00:00:00
• CreateDate(2017,04,05) = 2017-04-05 00:00:00

We have the ability to cache data during the initial data pools. Great! That saves us a lot of time for manipulating! But what about using In-Database functions? Or a Dynamic Input tool with lines and lines of varied SQL to be run (Caching only works for one line)?

INTRODUCING THE CACHE DATA TOOL! Where you can place it in strategic places of your workflow to be able to re-run and apply different scenarios without having to wait a LONG TIME for your workflow to start over! Place it right after your In-Database Data Stream Out so you can pick up from that point every time! Put it at the very end if you're trying to figure out the best output for your data! When you're done? Switch it off, or remove it!

This tool would be EXTREMELY helpful for me.

During my time with Alteryx, I've largely been able to accomplish all of my data processing jobs using the in-database toolset.

One exception is when it comes to window functions/multi-row formulas. When window functionality is needed, an Alteryx approach ends up looking something like this:
- Stream data out of database to an intermediate table

- Run a pre-written window function over dataset

- Store results into another intermediate table

- Load intermediate table into separate Alteryx workflow to continue further processing

While it may be possible to use a self-join as a workaround, it results in a bottlenecked, inefficient process. The same could be said for streaming the dataset out of database to use the non-in-database multi-row formula built in to Alteryx.

If anyone knows of an existing solution, please let me know - otherwise I believe many users would greatly benefit from this added functionality.

Currently, when multiple tabs are created in the Interface Designer, Alteryx will require the user to click through all tabs before running the app.  Many times, extra tabs are there for advanced settings that may confuse the average user.

I propose a check box in the Tab Configuration to allow the tab to be a "background, or silent" tab, that is not clicked through in the process of running the app.

The one single feature I miss the most in Alteryx, is the possibility to restart the workflow from wherever I want by using a built-in cache functionality. I have used the 'Cache Dataset V2' macro, but it really is to inflexible and really doesn't make me a happy Alteryx user. I would like to se a more flexible, quicker way of working with cached data.

On a single tool in the workflow I want to be able to set the option to:

• Enable cache
  This would enable me to always use cached data from this node when possible
  
  
• Run to this node
  Run from start OR from node with enabled cache to this node.

There should be lots of workflow options regarding the creation/deletion of cached data. Examples:

• Enable data cache on all nodes
  This would enable functionality to always use cached data on all nodes in the workflow
  
  
• Enable data cache on end nodes
  This would enable functionality to cache data on all 'Run to this node'-nodes.

...and so on. These are just a few examples, but there should be lots of options and shortcut keys revolving the cached data functionality in the workflow.