Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

The overview window is useful with large workflows. Clicking once centers the workflow on the desired location. I think it would be great if you could double click and it would center on that location as well as zoom to the "Normal" zoom level. Quite often when working with large workflows you are zoomed out and it would be helpful to quickly be able to go to a section of the workflow and automatically be at a level where you can see the the connection progress (without having to zoom in enough times to see it.)

I'm using Alteryx with an Hadoop Cluster, so I'm using lots of In-DB tools to build my workflows using Simba Hive ODBC Driver.

My Hadoop administrator set some king of default properties in order to share the power of the cluster to many people.

But some intensive workflow request need to override some properties. For instance, I must adjust the size of the TEZ container in setting specific values for hive.tez.container.size and hive.tez.java.opts.

A work-arround is to set those properties in the server side properties panel in ODBC Administrator but if I have many different configuration, I will have a lot of ODBC datasource which is not the ideal.

If I could directly set those properties in the Connect In-DB tool, it would be nice.

Hi there,

I noticed that here: https://help.alteryx.com/current/DataRobotAutomodelTool.htm it is mentioned that the number of workers can be set, and that the default is 2. However, this option seems to be removed, and the default seems to be max.

In a short workflow, this might not be necessary as the information related to each tool is spelled out in the progress windows.  However, in a complicated and lengthy workflow, tracing such msg can be a tedious task. In addition, using a tool with multiple outputs and only one output is selected while the residual outputs may be used to validate the result in the selected output; for example, joint tool where left or right output should be zero, a visual queue could be a quick way to alert operator on any potential problem.  Certainly, a browse tool can be added but in a big workflow, couple with a large data set, it might be a drain to the system resource. What if there is a tool that would activate a visual alert, like a light bulb, based on a preset condition to tell user that something is wrong and perhaps additional work needs to be done to either remedy or to account for the residual data. As in the case of a joint where 100% match is desired, any unmatched row would require an update to the reference list which maybe an additional adhoc process outside the current process. Certainly, an additional steps can be added to first explore the possibility of unmatched data and to update the reference list accordingly.  The workflow would in hold until 100% match is achieve. This would require additional system resource in order to hold; especially with large set of data and lengthy workflow.  If the unmatched situation rarely occurs, just a lightweight visual queue that 'pop' while allow the process either to break or to go through might be a sensible solution.  Just a thought.

Workflow Dependencies is a great feature. It would be even better if you can save several configurations so that you can switch between them with 1 click only, saving the effort to copy and paste. For example:

Something similar to the Field Configuration (Field Type Files) for Select Tool.

Another option is you save several dependencies there so that you can choose them in the drop-down list of Input and Output tools.

This would facilitate sharing and deployment.

In the Configuration section of the Formula tool, the “Output Column” area is resizable.  However, it has a limit that needs to be increased.  Several of the column names I work with are not clearly identifiable with the current sizing constraint.  I do not think the sizing needs to be constrained. 

Currently you get an "Unexpected error" if you try to connect to a table with numeric fields, the solution now is to make a custom query and cast all numeric fields as string and then use a select tool to make it a double.
But to make things easier for everyone, the support for numeric fields is needed.

(It would also be great if we could connect to views without having to use a custom query....)

I find this page very helpful to understand how each tool works:  Alteryx Tools

It would be really great if Alteryx also provides a working example for each tool. For an effective hands-on experience....!!

My organization is considering a move to a Microsoft Azure platform but requires support for Bring your Own Encryption (BYOE) or Bring Your Own Key (BYOK). As such, leveraging alteryx on this data lake would require this level of support.

I would like to see Alteryx support this in the future, ensuring that we are able to leverage the power of alteryx designer within this platform.

Please test/certify Teradata 16.2 for designer, server, scheduler, and Gallery applications.  

I would love to see a multi-output filter for cases where I want to route records to different places for processing based on the value of a single field. 

For example I want to filter each letter to a different destination:

I would love to see a single tool that can send each letter to a different destination. See the attached screenshot for a concept of what this could look like. 

After the upgrade to Alteryx 2018.4, the publish to tableau server tool no longer has the feature to get the authorization header to make subsequent calls in the workflow.This feature was present in the older versions of the tool i.e Publish to tableau server 1.09,1.08.1 but not in the new version 2.0.0

I think this feature should be present in all the versions of the publish to tableau server tool.

Cheers

If you have a field length of say 10 in a Select Tool, then you use a Left Join tool and change that length to say 4. This turns that field red - as it should.  Then add a Select tool after the Union.  It should say 4 in the second Select tool.  But instead it says 10.  If it was changed to 10 (and it wasn't) then the field s/b red.

Hi All,

While using the Join tool, I have ran across the following which I believe if included as part of Alteryx vanilla Join Tool version would be helpful -

1) Joining two data sets on Null values should be optional or should be removed. Generally Null means the value is not known so it seems like a logical error to treat two unknown values as same, unless specified otherwise.

2) Compress whitespaces, I have come across data sets coming from two entites which are all same except for the whitespace. So I think it would help to have an option wherein multiple whitespaces are compressed into one.

3) Case sensitivity/insensitivity - This is quite common for users to convert into upper case or lower case the columns on which Join condition are based. But IT developers end up coding more and at times creating new fields just for joining purpose.

4) Null matches non null - At times the requirement is such that if the join succeeds on a particular key column, null and not null values should be considered a match (but not two non equal non null values).

5) Removal of junk characters - There should be some functionality to remove junk characters from the columns on which joins are performed.

All/Any of the above points can be made available as an additional option in conjunction with the settings available today.

Thanks,

Rohit Bajaj

Hi All,

It would be a given wherein IT would have invested effort and time building workflows and other components using some of the tools which became deprecated with the latest versions.

It is good to have the deprecated versions still available to make the code backward compatible, but at the same time there should be some option where in a deprecated tool can be promoted to the new tool available without impacting the code.

Following are the benefits of this approach -

1) IT team can leverage the benefits of the new tool over existing and deprecated tools. For e.g. in my case I am using Salesforce connectors extensibly, I believe in contrast to the existing ones the new ones are using Bulk API and hence are relatively much faster.

2) It will save IT from reconfiguring/recoding the existing code and would save them considerable time.

3) As the tool keeps forward moving in its journey, it might help and make more sense to actually remove some of the deprecated tool versions (i.e. I believe it would not be the plan to have say 5 working set of Salesforce Input connectors - including deprecated ones). With this approach in place I think IT would be comfortable with removal of deprecated connectors, as they would have the promote option without impacting exsiting code - so it would ideally take minimal change time.

In addition, if it is felt that with new tools some configurations has changed (should ideally be minor), those can be published and as part of
promotions IT can be given the option to configure it.

Thanks,

Rohit Bajaj

So, best practice is to add annotations - so how many times have you seen an annotation that says 

"This filters for column y" and then it's been changed to something else in the meantime.  

Alteryx provides some default annotations, but wouldn't it be amazing if those metadata fields were available in an easy way to include in your own annotations

I imagine this working like so:

On an input tool:

"The file {filename} comes in from Joe in accounts every Tuesday and is currently {rows} big."

Filter tool

"This filters out the salaries above 100k with the formula {expression}"

Join

"I join using the {fields} fields rather than the typical key because the key isn't well populated"

Union

"I combine {IncomingNames} sets"

Formula

"The expression {expression1} calculates the exposure then {expression2} converts to bps."

Input, SQL Server

"The data source {databasename} is owned by Joe Soap in Investment"

Suddenly it makes sense to use annotations, and they don't lie (as easily) and mislead you into believing something other than the inherent logic, but with flexibility to select which bits of the metadata of the tool make sense to you.

Alteryx must have this functionality under the hood with the auto annotation, and this just provides better flex for that.

It would be great if we could change the name of a variable upstream it follows through in formulae etc.

In SQL, obtaining partial sums in a grouped aggregation is as simple as adding "WITH ROLLUP" to the GROUP BY clause.

Could we get a "WITH ROLLUP" checkbox in the Summary Tool's confg panel in order to produce partial sums?

(This was initiated as a question here.)

Here is an example of without rollup vs. with rollup, in SSMS:

(Replacing "NULL" with the phrase "(any)" or some such, and we have a very useful set of partial sums.

I haven't needed to do this for over a year, but I just tried in 2018.4 and the functionality is not there any more 😞 

I'm trying to open an Excel file and customise the SQL used to read the data.

I've found this in other posts:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/How-do-I-get-row-range-in-Excel-format...

then I found this one 😞 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Input-Tool-2018-1-Excel-Range-Feature-Remove...

Hopefully this feature will be re-instated soon 🙂