Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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!

Please add ablity to globally, within a module, forget all missing fields.

Would love to have the ability to connect S3 to alteryx using the AWS IAM role instead of needing an AWS access key/secret key.

IT will not hand out the Access/secret key so it would be great to connect to S3 without needing a password.

Hello,

According to wikipedia :

A partition is a division of a logical database or its constituent elements into distinct independent parts. Database partitioning is normally done for manageability, performance or availability reasons, or for load balancing. It is popular in distributed database management systems, where each partition may be spread over multiple nodes, with users at the node performing local transactions on the partition. This increases performance for sites that have regular transactions involving certain views of data, whilst maintaining availability and security. 

Well, basically, you split your table in several parts, according to a field. it's very useful in term of performance when your workflows are in delta or when all your queries are based on a date. (e.g. : my table helps me to follow my sales month by month, I partition my table by month).

So the idea is to support that in Alteryx, it will add a good value, especially in In-DB workflows.

Best regards,

Simon

Alteryx Server is great, but very costly.  Having the ability to install the Alteryx engine without the Designer, thus allowing you to share Workflows/Apps with users directly.  This could be licensed on a per user basis as well, but a reduced cost.

This also allows for some more advanced workflows that do not work in the Gallery.

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

At the moment containers either expand and overlap other tools, or you have to leave space for them (defeating the original purpose of using them). Is there a way we can have the containers expansion shift the workflow so the others tools shift down / right to account for this expanision?

We all love seeing this.  And, it's fairly easy to fix, just go find the macro and insert a new copy.  But, then you have to remember the configuration and hope that it was simple. 

With the tool that's there, the XML still contains the configuration, all that's missing is the tool path.    It would be great to be able to right click and repair the path from the context of the missing macro.

Who needs a 1073741823 sized string anyways?  No one, or close enough to no one.  But, if you are creating some fancy new properties in the formula tool and just cranking along and then you see that your **bleep** data stream is 9G for nine rows of data you find yourself wondering what the hell is going on.  And then, you walk your way way down the workflow for a while finding slots where the default 1073741823 value got set, changing them to non-insane sized strings, and the your data flow is more like 64kb and your workflow runs in 3 seconds instead of 30 seconds.  

Please set the default value for formula tools to a non-insane value that won't be changed by default by 99.99999% of use cases.  Thank you.

I would like to suggest creating a fix to allow In-DB Connect tool's custom SQL to read Common Table Expressions. As of 2018.2, the SQL fails due to the fact that In-DB tools wrap everything in a select * statement. Since CTE's need to start with With, this causes the SQL to error out. This would be a huge help instead of having to write nested sub selects in a long, complex SQL code!

Currently the install of AIS is tied to a specific version of Designer. However due to the feature changes being brought to AIS it would be great to be able to upgrade the AIS install separate to the version of Designer.

It might be that this is only possible for a certain number releases, due to underlying dependencies such as python version, but it would be great for example that I could get the newer AIS features without needing to upgrade Designer (which is set by IT policy).

When email body gets imported using latest version of the Outlook 365 tool, this tool removes the new line separators from the message body, which makes it difficult to parse relevant information out of the message body. New line separators are there prior to message being imported into Alteryx as can be verified when importing same message using different tools (for example, Python or Power Automate). Without new line separators it is not possible to accurately parse message body using Alteryx. Please add the enhancement to the Outlook 365 tool so that it doesn't remove new line separators from the message body.

This limitation of the Outlook  365 tool has been discussed in the community 

Outlook 365 Input - Separate Body lines - Alteryx Community

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?

...and now for probably the most trivial request in a long time, but also one of the most annoying things (for me anyway)..........

When viewing a browse window, it's so darn awesome to be able to sort and search.  However, it would be even awesomeer (yes, I just made up a word) if when you actually conducted a sort or search, you could make your selection (for sorts) or type in your criteria (for searches) and simply press the "Enter" button on the keyboard and  have it do the same thing that selecting "Apply" with the mouse does.  This is common Windows functionality and I think should be easy to implement.

Please add official support for newer versions of Microsoft SQL Server and the related drivers.

According to the data sources article for Microsoft SQL Server (https://help.alteryx.com/current/DataSources/SQLServer.htm), and validation via a support ticket, only the following products have been tested and validated with Alteryx Designer/Server:

Microsoft SQL Server

Validated On: 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2016.

• No R versions are mentioned (2008 R2, for instance)
• SQL Server 2017, which was released in October of 2017, is notably missing from the list.
• SQL Server 2019, while fairly new (~6 months old), is also missing

This is one of the most popular data sources, and the lack of support for newer versions (especially a 2+ year old product like Sql Server 2017) is hard to fathom.

ODBC Driver for SQL Server/SQL Server Native Client

Validated on ODBC Driver: 11, 13, 13.1

Validated on SQL Server Native Client: 10,11

• ODBC Driver 17+ is not mentioned, even though it was released in February of 2018. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/connect/odbc/windows/release-notes-odbc-sql-server-windows?view...
• SQL Server Native Client is deprecated. It is being replaced by Microsoft OLE DB Driver for SQL Server. However, there is not a mention of Microsoft OLE DB Driver for SQL Server. The latest version of this is 18.3.0. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/connect/oledb/release-notes-for-oledb-driver-for-sql-server?vie...

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: 

• Tenant URL 
• Client ID 
• Client Secret 

1. Get Authorization token provided by the snowflake authorization endpoint.  
2. Give access consent (a browser popup will appear) 
3. With the Authorization Code, the client ID and the Client Secret make a call to retrieve the Refresh Token and TTL information for the tokens 
4. Get the Access Token every time it expires 

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.

A common problem with the R tool is that it outputs "False Errors" like the following: "The R.exe exit code (4294967295) indicted an error"

I call this a false error because data passes out of the R script the same as if there were no error. As such, this error can generally be ignored. In my use case, however, my R tool is embedded within an iterative macro, and the error causes the iterator to stop running.

I was able to create a workaround by moving the R tool to a separate workflow and calling it from the CReW runner macro within my iterator, effectively suppressing the error message, but this solution is a bit clumsy, requires unnecessary read/writes, and uses nonstandard macros.

I propose the solution suggested by @mbarone (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Boosted-Model-Error/td-p/5509) to only generate an error when the R return code is 1, indicating a true error, and to either ignore these false errors or pass them as warnings. This will allow R scripts and R-based tools to be embedded within iterative macros without breaking.

Our company has a need to link a new data source in Athena.  We have been able to establish a connection using the input functionality however the connection is so slow it is unusable.  We need to have Alteryx build an In Database option for Athena to allow us to link our data lake to Alteryx.  

when you render out to an excel file, the excel file is created as a new file.  You cannot render to an existing excel file.

I'd like to see this functionality.  I have a client who has a workbook with multiple formatted sheets and they'd like to render an addiitional sheet of formatted data out from Alteryx into the existing workbook.