Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Have been using Alteryx GA component and found some issues, apart from the setup teething problems I was having.

So thought I’d let you know , in case it’s just not me who is suffering…

We do a fair amount of marketing for our Private business and like to measure conversion of the pipeline.

I’ve been looking at Lead -> Account -> Trade

Have been drilling into lead data with little source identifiers which are appearing in a NULL bucket..

When using Alteryx

I noticed that the Profiles for my id do not appear fully in Alteryx via the drop down..

It picks up QA profile data instead of the live profiles and does not show the whole set ?

Tableau works correctly showing the complete set of GA profiles

I don’t have the full set of profiles…

Maybe config related but why bring in some profiles and not others when I can access fine from GA directly and via Tableau ?

Trying to set these profiles and config files seemed problematic – reset to default removes the 4 config files, when you run again it doesn’t create them.

Had to keep a copy of these and put them back in manually or cpy an old widget and run a new one up from that …

Resetting the profile and saving caused other errors to appear related to the Tokens…

Found that annoying and a waste of time… immature (arghh) !

I think the Alteryx implementation is immature and not as good as Tableau and you have more work to do…! But may just be me !

Can you help improve it as I’d like to pull and blend reliably via Alteryx and do this for a range of dates to avoid sampling data

I do love the product but love this a little less than anything else …

I’d also love to be able to pull from Tableau data sources into Alteryx as we have all of our history in Tableau server

Has anyone else wanted the same ?

Obviously you can store to TDE but want the reverse… to pull from Tableau server

To navigate through XML document you need several parse tools to drill down to an element because you can only use element names

It would be nice if you case use an xml path (xpath) because of the rich syntax.

With xpath, we could specify ship_to/address/city or bill_to/address/city

This idea is concerned with suggesting values based on text box entry in an analytic app. This would be an autocomplete within the text box interface based on matches to a list of connected values. For example, if someone was posting "805 Wells Road" it would expand the text box window and supply potential matches to click on.

Quick and dirty photoshop image below:

You know how when you pull a new tool onto a canvas where you already have a workflow it wants to auto connect to the closest tool where it lands? While this can be useful it causes major issues when it moves the entire workflow you had in place. What makes this more frustrating is when it does this and you can't undo everything it did. Sometimes I spenda lot of of time fixing what it messed up. On top of which the tool it connected too was wrong!

Like I said it can be useful, but the adjustment of the entire workflow is HIGHLY unneccesary.

Could you PLEASE adjust this feature to auto connect without moving the entire module?!

Thank you 🙂

Hi,

Two things:

Can there either be more space between the Active Documents button (where all open modules are listed out) and the Close Document button (I'm not a fan of this, I use the close button next to module name) or make the Active Documents button a lot bigger (same size as Close Document button)? I've closed a few modules accidently trying to get to module list.

Also, there was a switch and now the Active Documents shows in alphabetical order, instead of the order they fall in on the canvas, which makes it hard to find modules that have your generic New Workflow#. Can you either switch Active Documents back to show display order or switch the canvas display order to rearrange itself into alphabetical order, that way the order they fall in on the canvas is the same order they show in in Active Documents (making it easier for people like me that remember order over name)? 

If you can't do any of these, could you at least add a Left & Right button so a user can just click thru open modules regardless of the module name (like you have on the toolbox)? 

Thanks!

Below is a list of DBMS rankings as of August 2016

(for an updated and longer list see: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking)

I personally look for; HBase, Splunk, MariaDB, Couchbase, Amazon Dynamo, CouchDB connections...

This is the screen when trying to access HDFS through Alteryx:

When publishing a workflow that contains the user ID and using Kerberos, one would need to login to the Alteryx server and run the MIT Kerberos Ticket Manager.

It would be a great enhacement to add the possibility to allow the users to use the keytab file to authenticate alongside the existing authentication.

So, if one checks "Use Kerberos", there would be an option text box that would allow the user to select the keytab file. That would ensure that the ticket is always valid and there is no need to login to the server to renew the kerberos ticket every day manually (!).

[-t keytab_file]

Ref: https://kb.iu.edu/d/aumh

http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/krb5-devel/doc/user/user_commands/kinit.html

Does anyone have any workarounds?

When connecting to a database (Oracle or other) with an Input tool, Alteryx gives you the ability to select a table from a list of available tables in the database. The Output tool has you type the table name in. What if you want to write to an existing table but type the name wrong by mistake? You could unintentionally write to a table that doesn't exist or write to the wrong table . I think it would be valuable for the Output and Write Data In-DB tools to have the option to pick from a list of available tables in the database just like the Input tool.

Extension: It would be great if Alteryx could compare the meta data of the data stream coming into the Output tool and the meta data of the database table itself to see if the data that will be written to the database table misaligns with the configuration of the database table. In other words to prevent the following from occurring: I was replacing the .yxdb output of a large process to output to an existing Oracle table instead. Alteryx successfully deleted the entire contents of the Oracle table, but when it began to write records, it errored because the field lengths of the Oracle table were not long enough. This wouldn't be a big deal except that the workflow takes 20 minutes to run and the database tables were wiped before the error was fully realized! I've heard that other ETL tools warn you against data that may violate the configuration of the database table that you're trying to write to.

Thank you for listening!

The Formula tool has lower case, upper case, and title case. But I often need to change multi-word notes text to sentence case, where only the first letter is capitalized. Instead of having to write a special formula, it'd be nice to have a sentence case function.

this is lower case

THIS IS UPPER CASE

This Is Title Case

This is sentence case

I want to connect to Salesforce without Security Token.

Salesforce doesn't need Security Token when we set Login IP Ranges.

Actual Condition:

1. In Salesforce, I set Login IP Ranges like below so that Salesforce doesn't require Security Token.

2. I could connect to verify custom object definition viaSalesforce Input without Security Token

3. When workflow rub, Salesforce Input shows error message.

Thank you for considering our request.

A problem I'm currently trying to solve and feel like I'm spending way too much time on it..

I have a data set which has some data in it from multiple languages, and I only want English values.  I was able to get rid of the words with non English letters with a little regular expression and filtering.  However, there's some words that do contain all English letters but aren't English.  What I'm trying to do is bring in an English dictionary to compare words and see which rows have non English words according to the dictionary.  However, this is proving to be a bit harder than I thought.  I think I can do it, but it feels like this should be much simpler than it is.

It would be great to have a tool that would run a "spell check" on fields (almost all dictionaries for all languages are available free online).  This could also be useful also just for cleaning up open text types of data where people type stuff in quickly and don't re-read it! 🙂

Would it be possible to add some additional options to the running total, in particular average (max, st dev. may be useful) to the running sum tool or create a rolling average tool where you can group by multiple fields and have a rolling window for the last x rows, which you select?  I know this can be done in the Multi-Row formula and with the moving summarise tool tool (http://www.chaosreignswithin.com/2014/12/moving-summarize.html), however the former is capped by 10,000 rows and alteryx crashes on my mac when trying to click on the multi-row formul tool with 6000 rows.  Also it takes a several hours to analyse 1 file, and would like to have a solution to do this on a daily basis. Also I need to be able to so a rolling average over the last 11,999 rows, as this would be the last 20 minutes of data using a 10Hz GPS unit. This would be a great tool I think.

Currently, in order to change the header and data justification to CENTER, one has to select the "Column Rules" button for each column configuration. In a large report (25+ columns), that means selecting each time. It would be more efficient to have the header justification in the Default Table Settings style editor. There is already a setting for font, font size, bold or itallic, text color and background color. I have never created a report for someone where they did not want the headers centered. The workaround is to only feed one column through, then to change the column rules for that column and the Cynamic or Unknown Fields. This works fine, but when I have a report that creates an Excel workbook with 5+ tabs, it gets annoying. It's even more time consuming when I have a report tab, that I need to create sub headings for, so there are multiple report tools for one Excel tab.

I find it a little strange that we need to utilize a different set of tools (the In-DB tools) in order to achieve push-down optimization. This is not the case, for instance (as far as I know), in SPSS, perhaps others.

My request is to automatically push logic to the database layer if and when it's possible to do so.

In order to maintain operation similar to existing, it could be implemented as an overall workflow setting (on or off) such that leaving it turned off would result in tools continuing to behave as they do today.  Turning it on simply enacts a process of combining as many tools as possible into SQL that is pushed to the database server, and assumes whatever permissions are necessary to make that happen; (e.g. ability to write temp tables or etc...)

Thanks!

I am currently using alteryx to generate pdf reports and noticed there is no option to have multiple row headers. In my line of work i cant skip this as the end users insist on having it like they have always had it.

I definitely think this should be available as many of us like replicate canned reports which are otherwise in excel and hence see the need for such an option.

The following might give an example of the multi row header,

Also the ability to merge certain columns to create the above effect should be available.

We regularly copy and paste SQL code from MS SQL Server Management Studio into the SQL Editor in the Input Data tool in Alteryx Designer. We normally format our code using tabs for indentation to make it clear and easier to read. However, these tabs trigger an error similar to: "Error opening table: Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 11.0: Incorrect syntax near 'FROM'.\42000 = 102".

This code runs perfectly in Managment Studio. When I delete the tabs, the code works, but is much more difficult to read. It is generally standard in SQL editors that tab characters are considered "white space," along with spaces and CRLF.

Please allow tabs in the SQL Editor.

I will be using TS Model Factory tool for running ARIMA quite extensivelty and understand that existing tool does not allow for model customization options. I will really appreciate if we can have customization options which helps to specify order of AR or MA components like it can be done in ARIMA tool.

Thanks!

As I'm sure many users do, we schedule our workflows to run during non-business hours -- overnight and over the weekend. Our primary datasource (input tool) is a remotely hosted database that our organization doesn't maintain (and hence cannot monitor the status of). If the database were to timeout or if our query were to overload it's resources, our scheduled Alteryx workflow would (attempt to) continue to run for an unknown amout of time. We would like the ability to cancel a scheduled workflow if it has been running for a certain amount of time in order to prevent this.

The Text Box tool has a tickbox allowing a multi line "answer" to be supplied for the question.

But it does not allow you to easily setup the question as multi line i.e. with carriage returns

Please allow the ability to enter multi line text for the Question of the Text Box Tool.

At the moment, I force carriage returns to happen, by entering a bunch of space characters in the "Enter the text or question to be displayed" box of of the "Text Box" tool. This is obviously not ideal.

Example of desired layout for App question:

example showing how entering a bunch of spaces can be used to force a carriage return: