Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I will try to make this short but the back story is a bit long.

I was recently tasked with scraping a website requiring repeated call to the URL with about 10,000 different queries. Pushing all 10,000 at the Download tool caused intermittent DownloadData to be returned with HTML from what appeared to be a default fallback help page.  Not what I needed.  I suspected the site may have seen all the calls in rapid succession as a DDoS attack or something, so I put a Throttle tool in line to lessen the burden on their server.  It reduced the failed calls, but there was still more than I found acceptable, requiring pulling out the failed queries and repeating the same throttled processing.  Putting time between each record was what I needed.  And then I found this Wait/Pause Between Processing Records  Just what I needed.

 

Now the constructive criticism.  I hope I don't offend anybody.

The macro does the job using a simple ping statement inside a grouped batch macro, pinging until a selected time interval has passed.  It does this repeated pinging for every record.  That can add up to a lot of pings especially if the time interval is rather large and a lot of records are being processed.  Then DDoS popped into my head.  The same issue that led me to find this very solution.

So, I started thinking how could I accomplish this same wait between records and iterative macro seemed plausible, seeing that loops can be used in code to do this very thing.

 

I have attached the macro I came up with.  Feel free to check it out, critique the hell out of it, and/or used it if it will solve any problem you might have.  I only ask that you keep the macro intact and give credit where credit is deserved.

 

Thanks for your time,

 

Dan Kelly

 

When I save records out of a browser tool, an info window appears when the file is finished saving. Please add a hyperlink to that window that will open the newly saved file. This should work the same way as the hyperlink in the Output message window.

Similar concept to how when you right click on a folder, computer icon, or file in windows. When you right click on any of these things you are able to pull up a properties link/tab which gives you relevant information and path of the file location.

For this particular idea the properties tab will give information on the Alias, such as server type, connection type; ie microsoft  provider or oracle provider, etc.

This would be helpful not only to go back and understand why you choose that connection type, but also when training others.

Thank you

Currently In tools like the select and join you have the ability to sort the field order by ‘Field’. As I understand if this sorts the fields by ASCII order from the smallest to the largest character that you can display.
 
The English-language ASCII sequence is consistent with the order shown in the following:
blank ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ? @
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z[ ] ˆ_
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z { } ~
 
I would find it very useful to have the ability to use a dictionary sort in these tools.

I ❤️ Alteryx but sometimes I miss some of the abilities Tableau has to visualize the data output while designing.

 

When working with data containing many fields, I find myself changing the order of columns, running the workflow, and repeating... over and over until I get the right "look".

 

I know you can right-click and drag in the configuration pane of the select tool but I was thinking that it would be great if we could also do the same in the results pane and see the changes live.

When processing multiple files using wildcard character, Alteryx workflow fails when there is empty file. Skipping zero size file option would help. Else, I have to write a batch macro and process each file separately.

Hello all,

 

It would be awesome if Alteryx was able to accept Lat/Long and be able to tell you what timezone that location was in and be able to do time analysis from there.

 

Thoughts?

 

Thanks,

Nick

I have found out a minor usability bug from v 11.0.5.26351.

 

Feature occurs if I output data from Join tool so that some or all left outputs are unselected:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now when using the output of the left stream in another join there occurs a small bug affecting workflow:

In the rightmost join tool Alteryx does not recognize right away that there should be multiple columns, A, B and C coming from the left output. This can be solved by going out of the tool and getting back, but this has a minor impact on the workflow.

 

 

 

Hi All,

Currently the FUZZY MATCH tool supports only Latin characters. It would be great if this tool could also support other characters, such as Hebrew letters and signs.

 

Thank You!

This would be very useful for testing changes in complex workflows.

 

In Many of our tools,Before processing any file We create backup and move it to some backup with the datetime stamp.

Can we have such option like "CreateBackup" with timestamp in input and output tools?

I'm glad that there is a Date filter function but I was wondering whether it could be changed?

 

I like how the ordinary Filter function has a true and a false output and I was wondering whether the Date Filter could have the same?

Try to create an oracle 32 bit connection.  Type in something wrong in the descriptor or user id or password.  You get a silent failure with no underlying notice about where you went wrong.  

 

You can get meaningful error messages from other database types, I got meaningful errors for ODBC connections to mysql and sql server while poking at this.  

 

Granted, it's only useful for jerks like me who don't type things in correctly and still have 32 bit Oracle instances to get to but somewhere down the chain the Oracle client is telling you that the user id was bad or the tns name couldn't be found or whatever, but you never get that metadata pushed back up to the user.  

This is pretty straightforward:

The join tool right now does only inner joins, requiring the use of the union tool to emulate outer joins.

By itself it works fine, however when having workflows involving a large number of joins and unions with lots of data in it performance is severely impacted, leaving to situations where Alteryx Designer slows down massively even with extra CPU/RAM available.

 

Thank you and regards,

Marco Zara

Apologies if this has been posted before, but couldn't find it.

 

In extended multi-workflow projects I output both yxdb files for later workflow use and xlsx files for human use to simplify support and allow non-Alteryx users to follow my workings.

Intuitively, I do this by copying and pasting the output file and then changing the type on the pasted output tool.

The behaviour on the copied output tool is not as expected if you change the file type without re-launching the File selector dialog.

 

I expected that changing the File Format should blank the file name browse, or change the file name to match the new FIle Format selection..

May I suggest on input data of YXDB files the ability to turn off/on spatial objects within the configuration tool to speed up load times when working through or testing a large module.

Thank you

I hope this request will be easy to implement.

 

One of the handy features I really like about Alteryx's standard Join tool is the way you can select and rename fields right in the join tool.  It would be great if this feature could be added to the IN-DB join tool.  Whenever I perform a join in DB, I ALWAYS have to add a select tool after it since you always want to de-select one of the redundant fields that the join was based on i.e. (ID and R_ID). 

 

Behind the scenes, I'm sure the select feature would still have to be handled as if it were a separate select tool, but it would just be convenient if the user interface could combine those two features.

I love the new global search option for introducing new users to functionality and seeing related community posts, but I also primarily use the search bar to grab tools and drag them onto the canvas.  The global search can slow down this functionality by waiting for search results to load and covering up the canvas.  This is particularly problematic if I have another window up side-by-side with Alteryx (e.g. SQL developer, Excel, Tableau, etc.) to view results or debug.  

 

We can see in this instance in 11 that I have a very small sliver of canvas visible.

 

 

Whereas in 10, there was still plenty of canvas during the search operation.

 

Granted the menu goes away once you start to click and drag, but having half of my canvas covered is still not ideal.  I also seem to have issues with the list refreshing and not being able to grab a tool at times.  

 

Another great enhancement would be to keep the global search in place for the search bar and add customizable keyboard shortcuts for tools similar to AutoCAD aliases.  This would keep the full search with help functionality in the bar, while providing users who have less of a need for help documentation with a means to add tools without clicking through toolbars.

 

Each license key can only handle up to 300 installations. For big companies like us in PwC, this is a struggle because we distribute software via SCCM and each territory needs to create a special script to handle this limitation. We have lots of folks using Alteryx so it would be great if you guys can find a way to remove this limitation or provide us with an easier and more efficient way to deploy the software to a huge amount of users world-wide. Thanks!