Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I would like to see either the option to create a Venn Diaram within the current chart tool or an entirely new tool specifically for Venn Diagrams.

I often work with data from multiple sources and would like to better understand how much of my data is in multiple sources and how much is only from a single source. A great way to view this is with a Venn Diagram.

Please add the ability to interface with Oracle Siebel CRM. Preferably, this would be a built-in connector similiar to the SFDC Connector.

Hi All,

I think it would be good to have the ability to pick a connection and drag and reconnect that to another tool.

Following are some of the areas where it might come handy

1) In case a tool is there which is having good number of connections and we want to move all connections to a new tool.
In current scenario, I end up deleting my existing connections and then re-establishing those to the new tool.

2) In case there is an existing connection which is separated by a good distance on the canvas and we need to move one side of the connection to a tool near to the existing tool.

At the moment, I am making use of select tool to save me some effort for above cases, in case of scenarios calling for reconnection, I generally put a dummy select tool and reconnect existing connections to select and then delete the existing connection from tool(to select tool) and repoint connection from new tool to the select.

Thanks,
Rohit

Please include IBM DB2 as an in-Database option. Currently, my primary use of Alteryx is for copying DB2 tables into Teradata for use on that server. Copying large tables and particularly joining several tables and copying the results to Teradata is too slow in Alteryx.

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....!!

Hello,

I work for a company with circa 250K employees. We are in the process of shifting all documents over to OneDrive and I've noticed that when I have an Alteryx workflow that uses inputs stored on OneDrive the connection can be very intermittent. I use the UNC file naming protocol for my input/directory tools, but more often than not I need to run a VBA script that accesses OneDrive before Alteryx tools will connect.

There's a couple of posts on this community about this, but nothing in the ideas board. I believe the SharePoint connector is being updated for v11, but nothing for OneDrive.

I'd like there to be better integration to OneDrive for business and SharePoint Online please.

Thanks,

John.

I think it should be done ASAP.

Hope this is fairly self-explanatory.

I'd like to be able to create presets for Summarize tool.  Instead of having Group By, Sum, Count, Count Non Null, etc on top of the libraries of functions, put them into their own category.  Users could then create a Favorites and the functions that they use the most would be stored in that section (editable by user).

Hi All,

I believe the following would help improve the functionality of Select Tool.

The idea is to have a defaulting option for each of the field in the Select Tool (which I believe should be a light weight Tool i.e. not adversely impacting performance and gives best exhaustive picture of all columns flowing through a (/particular point in ) pipeline).

Following are some of the cases where defaulting might come handy -

1) Fields which are supposed to hold monetary data - instead of Null, one can put 0.00 to help roll up summary properly.
2) Fields which are supposed to hold dates (say expiry date) - instead of Null, one can put some enterprise standards like 31-12-2099 to avoid mixing Nulls and 31-12-2099.
3) Fields which are supposed to hold purchase quantity/number of employees/number of merchandise - instead of Null, one can put 0 (and not 0.00) again to help with roll up summary.
4) Fields which are supposed to hold Currency - instead of Null, one can put USD.
5) Fields which are supposed to hold dates (say this time create date) - instead of Null, one can hardcode actual date, or an additional feature to put Now() kind of functions.

At present one of the options of achieving same might be to put a Formula Tool and to code whatever is desired inside the Formula Tool.

Benefits of having the functionality inside Select Tool would be -

1) It would be more user friendly and call for faster build to just write '0.00' or 'USD' or '31-12-2099' as compared to writing IF IsNull()... statements.
2) Inside Formula Tool, user needs to pull desired fields from the drop down and hence exhaustive view of all fields passing through pipeline is not available.

Pain in selection of fields from drop down and writing actual formulas might be aggravated with the number of columns increasing and might be more prone to human omission related errors.

Thanks,
Rohit Bajaj

Please add a configuration to the RedShift bulk load to EITHER use access keys or an IAM EC2 role for access. 

We should not have to specify access keys when we are in an IAM enabled environment.

Thanks

Teradata has a feature called query banding where a group of queries or more commonly a database session can have additional metadata tagged onto all of the individual queries. The Teradata workload management engine can use information provided in the query band for use in prioritizing query execution and resource allocation.

With normal input tools, the query band information can be populated in the "Pre-SQL" with a query such as:

SET QUERY_BAND = 'org=Finance;report=Fin123;' FOR SESSION;

However, with the In-DB tools, there is no concept of pre-SQL, and no great way to set the query band for the In-DB queries Alteryx submits. We would want to set the query band at the workflow level for performance prioritization and resource allocation monitoring purposes. 

Best regards,
Ryan

During the design phase, we make some experimentations and create tables with Alteryx.

But, sometimes, after this phase or after a mistake, we need to drop those tables.

We know that it's possible to write a drop table statement in Pre-SQL or Post-SQL but it requires SQL skills and it could be done only if you write in a table.

It will be great if we could drop a table directly in the Query builder of the Input tool by making a right click on the table in the discovery tree.

Extension : It also be great to have the same thing in the HDFS browse.

My users need the same functionnality In-db as the in-memory tool "Field Summary".

The purpose is to discover the data : distribution, minimum, maximum, count,valid, unique, ...

In the in-db join, add the possibility to make left-except or right-except join in addition to the 4 available options.

A function to generate relevant Random Mockup data to replace existing data or create new test data sets.

Insert into fields mock data for First Name, Family Name, Email Address, Country, Regular Address, Payment amount and information, etc.

This would be easy to code and could be used to easily replace existing fields with made up fields or jumbled up fields or numbers e.g. payment amounts randomised to a similar size and shape.  There are a number of internet sites that already provide this service but it would be so much better to bake this directly into a tool that allows you to generate random datasets for testing and anonymisation of existing data for demos etc.

This would make users of Alteryx much more productive and allow them to preempt datasets and allow much more rapid creation of solutions.

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.

If you copy a text box named ClientCode to another workflow, the name of the box will be reset to text box(#) in that new workflow. That can be a snag if the workflow the text box is contained in is deployed to gallery as an app that is ran via the gallery API... the API parameters will be looking for a text box named ClientCode but is now named text box(#). This happens almost in the background without the developer knowing they have renamed the text box and the ES eventually failing. This can be annoying; it would be great if the name were inhereted.