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Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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Featured Ideas

Multi-Fill Tool

Please consider a new Multi-Fill tool, not for Apps, but for regular workflows, manually run or scheduled.

Similar to the Interface tool-combination of the Text Box & Action (Update value) tools, this Multi-Fill tool would enable the user to update, for example, the User Name and Password in one place for multiple Download tools. It could also be used to update other tool variables like Filter, Sort, Unique, etc.

Just like there is search bar for Select Tool, there should be one for Data Cleansing tool also.

Hello All,

 

I believe there needs to be a new tool added to Alteryx. I am frequently encountering cases where I will have 0 data point feeding a workflow stream that causes my workflows to fail. Because of this, I am having to put in fail safes to keep this from happening.

 

There should be a tool that if there is no records that are passing into it, anything after that tool will not fail.

 

For an example, within a workflow I am using a dynamic input that will pull a dynamic file. The file is not always there and the workflow should be able to run if that file is there or not. If the dynamic tool and other tools would process 0 records without failing this would also solve the issue. 

 

I would be nice to have a tool that will  block off the work stream if there are 0 records passing through the tool. 

When you have a complex workflow and you need to identify what happens to a specific field throughout a LONG workflow, it would be great to have the paths, connections, etc highlighted.  

 

If the field is modified in a tool (formula for instance), the tool gets highlighted in orange.  If it just passes through a tool, it is highlighted in green and a tool where it gets dropped is colored red.

 

This will help in identifying which tools modify a field of interest as well as identify tools which "deselect" a field and cause it drop out.   I spend a lot of time tweaking workflows developed by other analysts, so this will greatly speed up troubleshooting and assessment time. 

 

 

 

 

In the dynamic input tool,

Where you “Read a List of Data Sources”, there should be a radio button below the “Action” field, to   

 

“INCLUDE FIELD OF DATA SOURCES”,

 

Then you’d have an output field with the isolated name from which the data was sourced. You wouldn't be required to "include full file path" then parse out the sheet the data came from. 

Hi currently if you use the cross tab tool and the names of the new fields should have special characters they end up being replaced in the new headers with underscores "_", and then need to be updated in someway. It would be great if this was all done in the tool. In other words the new headers have the special characters as desired

Hi is it possible to look at alteryx workflows being run when a file has been dropped into a file or somehting along those lines? I.e an external activty has taken place

Hi,

 

Due to our setup, we need to have the path defined as Environment variables, so they will point to different paths in case a user opens the WF locally or the server is running it.

 

The issue is that the path of dependency does not accept the windows defined variables:

 

alteryx relative path with environment vars.pngalteryx relative path with environment vars defined.png

 

Thank you!

I know that the container title/label should or can be short, and as much descriptive as possible. Also, adding extra comments inside the box helps to a more detailed explanation on regards what process is run inside the container. Visually, if I collapse the container, the "Short" title given can't be of much help.

Could it be possible to enhance the "caption" for the "Container" title? I mean to allow to type 2, 3 or more lines of text?. This will make the Container title more descriptive and visually will allow to have the containers collapsed but with a reasonable amount of text that describe (as much as possible) what happens inside the container.

 

At the moment, If I type certain amount of text, the container expands according to the length of the text 

 

Below is the typical container Title 

Normal Container Title.JPG

 

 

Below is the current situation if a person would like to give a bit of more description in the "Container" header (The container expands)

 

Extra Text in Container_CurrentProblem.JPG

 

An dream would be to have the workflow with all containers collapsed and with titles that tell you what they do (see image below)

 

 Ideal Alteryx Containe.JPG

 

I think it would be great to have a tool that allows you to update a dataset with another dataset. For example, this could be used in updating an archive table on a daily basis as data changes. Having a tool available that streamlines this data operation would be helpful to simplify workflows.

 

In the tool, you would be given the option to select your primary key fields, which are the fields used to identify records. Additionally, you have the option to perform an insert, modify, or delete operation, according to the primary key fields that you choose in the configuration.

 

Obviously this is something that anybody could create a macro for if they wanted to. But it would be nice to have a tool in place so that we dont have to worry about it. I think this would be a nice use case to bolster Alteryx usage as a data engineering tool for relational database management in particular.

This can be a simple add on to the sample tool or possibly a separate tool. This would give you the ability to select which row the Header row(and use field values for header) and/or data starts. This is particularly useful if someone has extra rows with report titles and information, etc. This tool could also select rows to skip, ie blank rows in matrices or rows that do not contain data. 

There should be a quick way to delete all unwanted tools for specific output/browse tool in workflow. This would be useful when we have huge multiple cross connect workflow. By deleting all not requited tools, it would make it easy and faster to test as segregated.

The ability to output to Amazon Workdocs via a special Output tool would be very helpful for anyone looking into using Workdocs for personal or professional purposes.  This is similar in functionality to the OneDrive connector.

Hi - Please delete this if it perhaps exists already in a newer version.  (I am on 2022.1 and don't see this functionality.) 

 

I would love to see the ability to right click a tool that isn't in a container and be able to add it to an existing container.  Currently I drag it over and drop it into the container then move it back to where it was.  Inevitably I misalign the tools and spend time getting it linear again. It would be cool if based upon the choice made in the right click, it would bring the assigned container around the tool in its existing location.

 

OR

 

Perhaps within the config of the container you could choose tool #s to add to the container?

 

Anyways this isn't a huge need but it would be nice to see that additional functionality for people that spend a disproportionate amount of time aligning and distributing their tools HORIZONTALLY.  (Nobody cares about the people that do vertical workflows.)

 

 

container idea.png

 

 

 

 

Hi,

Add to the feature where you can open a workflow to show how to use a tool.  Allow a user (and share this within an organization) to add a tool template workflow to a tool so one can open the template workflow and then copy the tools in the template into the workflow being worked on.  There are instances where we use the same tool combinations like for dynamic file naming and output.

 

Regards.

I think the scheduler should include another frequency otpion of every other week.  Let's say I want a workflow to run every other Monday, there is currently no simple way to do this.  There are some workarounds but they are not ideal and include some additional manual work which defeats the purpose of having the scheduler. 

Maybe this pointless but my guess is that memory usage could be as important as processing time and is probably a simple addition to the performance profiling feature.

There are times where new versions of Alteryx come out, but there are situations where you cannot keep the Desktop and Server versions in sync.

 

As an example, at his time of the year, we are getting ready for year-end and al the workflows located on the server have been tested and signed off on. Now there is a new version of desktop with new features, but advise everyone to stay on the current version in case we need to make a fix. Typically, if we updated Designer desktop and try to publish the server -- you will get a versioning error.

 

I propose that when saving to the server, I can choose the compatible version and Designer/Server can let me know if there is any features I am using that will not work. If I don't use any features from a newer version, the workflow will publish.

 

So, let's say my server and Designer are at version 2022.1 and I decided to download version 2022.2. Typically, if I open and make any change with the new version -- I would get an error saving to the server - even if I am not using new features. However, what I am saying is that there is an option asking me what version I would like to save the workflow to the server as and I can choose 2022.1. Designer or server can check if I did or did not use any incompatible features, and if not, can save to the with the appropriate version.  

 

Thanks,
Seth

This is a low priority one, but I constantly find myself wanting to do this and it seems to be both an easy fix and something which should exist anyway.

I have ten input tools, I want to be able to highlight all, right click and select "add all browses" or something similar. 

That's it. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing deeply insightful, just something that would brighten up my day and maybe save a bit of time.

 

Thanks.

The function isnumber(<arg>) (in formula-like tools) does not do what I would expect from it:

It returns whether the data format of the argument is numeric. It does not return whether the argument actually represents a number (even though it might be a string).

Currently, you would have to help yourself by something like

REGEX_Match(<arg>, "^[+-±]?\d*([.,]+\d*)?([eE][+-]?\d+)?$")

which is quite clumpsy.

 

From my perspective, the right setup would have been:

  • isnumber(<arg>) returns whether the argument is a number (even if it might be of type string)
  • isnumeric(<arg>) returns whether the argument is of a numeric data type

I understand if the functionality of isnumber(<arg>) needs to be preserved. Then, a new function could be called isfloat(<arg>): "Is the argument something which could be converted to a float?" That would still be misleading but better than nothing.

 

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