Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

As of Version 10.6, Alteryx supports connecting to ESRI File GeoDatabases from the input tool but it doesnt support writing to a geodatabase.  This is something we would really like to see implemented in a future version of Alteryx.  Those of us working with ESRI products and/or any of the ESRI online mapping systems can do our processing in Alteryx and store large files as YXDBs, but ultimately need our outputs for display in ArcOnline to be in shapefile or geodatabase feature class format. Shapefile have a size limit of 2 GBs and limitation on field name sizes. Many of the files we are working with are much larger than this and require geodatabases for storage which are not limited by size (GDB size is unlimited, 1 TB max per feature class) and have larger field name widths (160 chars).  Right now, we have to write to one (or many) shapefile(s) from Alteryx, then import them into a GDB using ArcMap or ArcPy.  This can be an arduous process when working with large amounts of data or multiple files.

The latest ESRI API allows both read and write access to GDBs -- is there a way we can add this to the list of valid output formats in Alteryx?

This idea is an extension of an older idea:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/ESRI-File-Geodatabase/idi-p/1424

Right now, logging of workflows is either on or off and when on is directed to a single location.

Current logging setting

I think it would be useful to have control over logging in the Runtime settings for a workflow.

Either as an enable/disable checkbox that uses the logging directory (above)

Disable Logging with check box

Or as a more fully featured option where logging output folders could be specified:

Disable Logging Full Featured

We're currently using Regex and text to columns to parse raw HTML as text into the appropriate format when web scraping, when a tool to at least parse tables would be hugely beneficial.

This functionality exists within Qlik so it would be nice to have this replicated in Alteryx.

Obviously, we need to retain the ability to scrape raw HTML, but automatically parsing data using the <td>, <th> and <tr> tags would be nice.

In the following page there is a table showing the states and territories of the US:

With Qlik, you can input the URL and it will return the available tables in tabular format:

As this functionality exists elsewhere it would be nice to incorporate this into Alteryx.

Pet Hate... When i re-enable a container, it opens up the container... 

Would be great if the default is do not open on re-enable... 

cheers

As Tableau has continued to open more APIs with their product releases, it would be great if these could be exposed via Alteryx tools.

One specifically I think would make a great tool would be the Tableau Document API (link) which allows for things like:

- Getting connection information from data sources and workbooks (Server Name, Username, Database Name, Authentication Type, Connection Type)

- Updating connection information in workbooks and data sources (Server Name, Username, Database Name)

- Getting Field information from data sources and workbooks (Get all fields in a data source, Get all fields in use by certain sheets in a workbook)

For those of us that use Alteryx to automate much of our Tableau work, having an easy tool to read and write this info (instead of writing python script) would be beneficial.  

It would be great if there was a way for the Text to Columns tool did not drop the last empty when using Split to Rows.

For example, if I had the data:

Notice that each value has two commas (representing three values per cell), and If I configure to split into rows on the comma character, what would you expect the result to be:

Result A:

OR

Result B:

OR

Result C:

I would expect Result C if I selected "Skip Empty Fileds", and that is what happens if I select that option.

But If I do not want to skip empty fields, I would expect Result B, but what I get is Result A where the last value/field is dropped/skipped.

What would it take to Result B as the output from the Text to Columns tool?

The regular filter tool is great because I get the true and false returns. When doing ad-hoc analytics it would be super helpful if the date filter did the same thing.

In the example below, I had to create an "IF" statement that returned a T/F value and then fitler out based on the output of that formula.

We are running into errors on our scheduler if we have multipe workflows with the Publish to Tableau server macro running at the same time. The macro writes to a local yxdb file with a fixed naming convention and is locked if another workflow is using it at the same time.  We like to see if the cached filename TableauServer.Selection.ServerSite.yxdb can be made somehow unique.  

Error experience: 

Talking with support this is a known issue and needs Macro enhancement.

In the previous tools the information lab had build for publishing to Tableau server, they had the incremental TDE refresh option available. I would like to see that included in the Publish to Tableau Server Macro. We often just want to add previous day data to a YTD data extract without running the full data set from our Datawarehouse. The full set takes long and a daily increment / add only would take a couple minutes.

There may only be two of us, but there are at least more than one 🙂 I noticed someone else also was running into difficulty getting Alteryx to produce a csv or flat file with the header names excluded. There's a workaround to use the dynamic rename to and pull the first row of data into the header field, but it would be simpler if there were an option not to export field names.

Thanks!

Storing macros in a central 'library' and accessing them via the "Macro Search Path" is great for ensuring that everyone is using the same code.

It would be great if the Alteryx installation process prompted for this information. In that way, a new user would automatically have access to the macros.

I would love the ability to double click a un-named tab and rename it for 'temp' workflows.

eg - "New Workflow*" to "working on macro update"... 

Reason:

1. when designer crashes it is a huge pain to go through auto saves with "New Workflow*" names to find the one you need
2. I work on a lot of projects at once and pull bits of code out and work on small subset and then get destracted and have to move over to another project. With mulitpule windows and tabs open it gets confusing with 10 'new worflow' tabs open.
3. Allows for better orginaization of open tabs - can drag tabs into groups and in order to know where to start from last time.

In the same way In-DB generates SQL, might it be possible to have an In-PowerBI and generate DAX?

Working for an education company, it would be a huge value for us to be able to have the US school districts available in the spatial sweet of apps, so I could take all of the US schools that are customers and map them to their School Districts in a polygon map.

Writing SQL to set primary keys in Alteryx before outputting the data is tedious, right?

I propose that you guys could incorporate my macro as a tool (referenced here:http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/Variables-used-in-Input-Path/m-p/38199#M2604).

It sure is a lot faster than going through this process: http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Create-Database-Table-Primary-Key-in-Alteryx/...

It might be useful to have an option in the drivetime setup to have an option to exclude toll roads.

Note from one of our customers:

All our pharmacy images are mainly tiff format only.   Since we don’t have the options TIFF to PNG or JPG converter in the BLOB converter tool  in Alteryx.

We are not able convert and display the image from alteryx to PDF or Report display tool in Alteryx.

As our images are critical components of our Reporting options .  This impact us to  use this tool for the below use cases and we are not able move forward on this activity with Alteryx Tool.

Hi,

As per our project, we need to publish the image into a PDF file which will be downloaded from web URL. when we download the image from web URL that will be saved as TIF format in our local machine. This TIF format is not being supported by Alteryx.

The tool needs an enhancement (to support TIFF) which can be used for converting tiff format to other  format OR directly tiff image should be usable in the report.

Thanks,

Raju Miyapuram

As mention on this post here I would love the ability to change the map provider to any other map service (Mapbox, google, some other paid option). This could be achieved by adding a "Map Severs" option in the default configuration and where you put in the map server details.