Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

In the Table/Query edit window, the datatable "frame" needs to do a better job of vertically autosizing to the window - it overruns the vertical space and then, if you have a lot of fields in your table and you want to see and/or select the fields in the table, you have to adjust the parent window's scrollbar to see the fields.  I think it would be better to shrink the table's window and use the table window's scrollbar because the table fields update as you scroll so it's easier to follow.

Some Alteryx tools, like Select, update when a field name or data type is changed upstream.  Sometimes it causes an error, but often Alteryx can self-adjust and be OK.  However, other tools such as Union and Summarize, don't recognize the change - they don't self-adjust or throw an error until runtime.  It would be great if these other tools (there must be others besides Union and Summarize) could recognize changes at design time.  Even if they just threw an error, it would be better than current state.

Is it possible to have a Sum(Column) or Total(Column) functions in formula tool? it will make the calculations much better as we don't need to use "Sum tool + Append tool + Formula tool + Select tool" or "couple of formula tools and then a select tool".

Sometimes when you make changes to a filter tool or some other tool's configuration and immediately click on another tool on your workflow, the chanegs you made to your first tool won't register.  The only way to get them to register is if you click the canvas afterwards.

Context:

 

We have several workflows, chained together and orchestrated with CReW runner and conditional runner macros, several of which have run command events.

 

Each developer on our team, when running these workflows on their local workstation during development and testing, must remember to change or disable certain events in several workflows to prevent unintended shenanigans in production.

 

Since we collaborate on- and version our workflows in Git with a branching model and automated deployment to production, each developer must also remember to revert their changes to- or re-enable these events, before pushing their changes to our shared origin.

 

This is a cumbersome and annoying part of our local development workflow, and a potential risk (forgetting to disable or re-enable these events could be disastrous).

 

Suggestion:

 

Allow developers to define logical conditions for triggering run command events.

 

This would allow us to dynamically enable run command events, based on the environment in which the workflows are run.

 

There exists a separate feature request for environment variables, which would be super powerful in combination with this feature request, for obvious reasons.

When scoring data if you have values in predictor fields not seen in the data that was used to build the model the score tool will not score the record.  Makes sense but it would be nice to know how impactful the issue is.  Please provide a count of records not scored for these reasons as well as a count of records not scored because of exceeding the limit in the configuration tab of the score tool. and a count for any other reason a record is not scored so we have a clear understanding of how many were scored and how many were not and why.


 

Copy & paste from my post here.

 

The Python SDK offers a possiblity to automatically install Python packages through pip when installing using the requirements.txt. Some changes to the virtual environment of the tool might not be covered by this: For example, downloading and configuring language models for spaCy cannot be solved through the requirements.txt alone (similar for training corpora for NLTK).

 

So, as an idea for future versions of the SDK: Allow us to specify a Python script that is run when a tool is installed. This way we might be able to set up the environment, load additional tools etc.

While trying to debug data parsing, I end up with browse tools all over the place and it makes the pallet a mess and time consuming to organize.

It would be much nicer to just have a little corner of all icons to have a sub icon or something I can click on to see output.  Multi output could be a little more tricky ... so better yet, maybe have small browse icons on the connectors you can click on for results of that feed?

Then have a menu option to turn all off/on.

Hi Alteryx, 

 

I am not sure if there already is an easy solution to sharing workflows between people using different language settings in Alteryx, so here goes.

 

My colleague is using the German version of Alteryx and both I and our server is using the English version of Alteryx. When he shares a workflow with interface tools, all connection strings disappear. This is due to the references in the script behind Alteryx are different. So in the German version, the connection is supposed to connect to a tool called "Aktion", but for the English version it needs to connect to a tool called "Action". The same example with "Frage" and "Question". It is funnily enough only an issue if at least one of the connection tools is an Interface tool. If it is not Interface tools, then the original connection remains as if it auto-detects and changes the language.
The solution as is now is opening the Alteryx flow with a text editor and search for the German word, e.g. "Frage" and replace it with "Question". After saving and opening with Alteryx again, it works. However, we would like to avoid this little detour into the text editor. So, if it is possible for Alteryx to auto-detect and adjust the language for Interface tools as well or if it is possible to adjust the settings regarding language for a specific flow/macro, then this would be great. 

 

Please let me know if another solution is already available. 

 

Best regards, 

Jeanette

It would be handy to have a tool that mirrored another specified tool in the workflow.  I frequently use the same regex or filter configurations in multiple parts of my workflow.  If I could just update one of those tools and have every other one where I want the same logic applied to automatically update, that would make things easier. 

 

Users would just have to enter the tool ID of the tool they want mirrored.  

I collaborate with a team using Git. We commit all of our work automatically with the exception of the Alteryx Alias file. It must be moved manually into the repository and then other teammates must move it out of the repository manually into their local folder and overwrite the old file. This is not an enterprise-friendly solution. If we could configure the location of the Alias file in Designer, we could set it to live in the repository. That way, everyone could automatically have the latest file with tracked changes. Please create this functionality. Thank you.

I have the Show Properties Window selected, but it is not showing up on my screen. At first I thought it was just hidden and that I could just pull it back from being hidden, but I can't find it anywhere. 

Thanks! 

The actual Mongo output tool does not allow to specify field type (except for the primary _id field).  The tool just assumes that all fields are string.  Many of our CSV files incorporate string representation of ObjectId (ex: "56df422c08420b523aa00a77"). 

 

When we import those CSV we have to run a an additional script that will convert all the id into ObjectId fields.  Same thing with the date -> Mongo Date.

 

If the tool would allow us to do this, it would save us a billion time across all our ETL processes.

 

Regards,

 

Currently SharePoint List Input tool can only pull out Date/DateTime values in UTC

DateToLocal formula can be converted back to local time but it has the issue for Date Only values.

It will be great if Alteryx allow user to select to pull Date/DateTime values in UTC or Local Time.

Hi,

 

When you create a data model in excel you can create measures (aka KPI). These is then something you can then use when you pivot the data and measure would dynamically be updated as you segment the data in your pivot table.

 

By example, let's say you have a field with the customer name and a field with the revenue, you could create a measure that will calculate the average revenue per customer (sum of revenue / disctintcount of customer)

Now if you have a 3rd field in your data that inidcates your region, the measure would allow to see the average revenue by customer and by region (but the measure formula would remain the same and wouldn't refer to the region field at all)

 

Excel integrates well with PowerBI and currently these measures flow into PowerBI.

 

While we have a "Publish to PowerBI" in Alteryx I haven't seen any way to create such measures and export them to PowerBI.

 

Hence I still need to load to Excel to create these measures before I can publish to PowerBI, it'd be great to avoid that intermediate tool.

 

Thanks

 

Tibo

 

Like the ability to create data tables for reporting purposes, makes life a lot easier.  I would like to suggest the ability to be able to define the height of each row in the table.  There is a lot of wasted space between the rows and becomes challenging when you are trying to work with getting everything on one page or keeping the table contained within a box on the report.

Not sure if this has been submitted... or if this option is already in a newer version.

There should be an option, after correcting an issue/error within a workflow for users to start again at the error point instead of running the entire workflow again.

This option will help users to streamline the process of building workflows and avoid wasted time spent waiting for large complex workflows to complete or error out.    

A suggestion for the designer product...

 

When one right clicks on tab showing a workflow, an option should come up to duplicate workflow/macro/etc.