Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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:

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 

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

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

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.)

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.

When I run a Standard Workflow in the Designer, I can continue to work on other workflows, I can even run two workflows in parallel.

In contrast, when running an Analytical App in the Designer, the entire program is blocked and neither another workflow can be edited or run.

I propose to allow access to the Designer GUI also when running Analytical Apps.

Greenplum is a new in-db capability; which our company has started using frequently. GP is a distributed database, across many nodes, much like how Redshift and other new database technology works.

In order to properly use these databases the Alteryx tools MUST have a way to distribute our tables across the nodes how we desire. Currently the tools for In-DB will distribute by the database default (almost always taking the first column in the table to distribute) which has terrible affects on performance. The work around has been to run SQL outside of the Alteryx tools to run ALTER TABLE DISTRIBUTE BY statements for all tables; also this cannot work on TEMP tables as those tables are created and deleted at the end of the workflow.

The idea I want is an additional option for Distributed DB's to choose the distribution column OR choose the "RANDOMLY" option for distribution of tables [DISTRIBUTED BY statement]. This would make my DBAs very happy and make it possible for me to run even more challenging requests to my system.

This should be for all tools where formulas can be written and should work for all formulas as well, but I will give you my specific pain point as a easy to understand example.

When I write any formula where I am using CONTAINS, i am always thinking through the issue and writing the formula at the same time so I think [Name] contains "Test"

and I write [Name] and have to go back and add the CONTAINS before it, but when you do that instead of automatically wrapping itself around the field it does this:

Contains(String, Target)[Name] 

Can we get an enhancement that sees if you are writing a formula up against a FieldName it will automatically "ingest" the field name into the syntax and leave you with something like this:

Contains([Name] , Target)

That will leave all the other variables which still need to be completed, but it will save time of having to clean up the text of the formula itself.

****Hopefully this makes sense.  If you need me to expand on this, let me know.  Otherwise hopefully other folks feel my pain and can add their commentary in here as well.

Thanks

I am a big user of the browse tool and the filter option within the browse tool. In many cases I filter on multiple columns at the same time as I'm sure many users do. I am suggesting the following 2 enhancements to filter functionality in the browse tool:

1. After applying some filters, although I can see the filter icon activate at the top of the tool, it is difficult to know at a glance which columns have filters applied without clicking on every column heading and examining the filter settings. In the event a column is filtered, a filter icon could be provided at the top of the column to easily identify filtered columns, removing the need for users to memorise filtered columns.

2. After applying multiple filters, if a user clicks onto another tool with the workflow or anywhere else on the canvas - even accidentally - all filters will be removed and the user will need to reapply them. In my view it would make more sense to make the filters persistent, or at least give users the option of doing so. Doing so would be a big time saver.

In a previous lifetime I spent a lot of time developing data processing workflows in Microsoft Access before moving into Alteryx as my primary data processing tool. Although Alteryx is, on the whole, vastly more feature rich than Access, Access has a couple of very simple features which Alteryx could integrate into the Browse tool to significantly improve its usability. In particular, I am suggesting the option to add a totals/summary row to the browse tool to calculate basic statistics for columns on demand. 

Attached is a screenshot of a totals row for a dummy table in Access. As you can see, a user can select from various summary statistics including sum, average, count etc. 

Almost every day I export data from the browse tool to Excel multiple times, simply to calculate column totals. A totals row in the browse tool would remove a major source of reasons for me to export to Excel and would significantly increase the browse tool's usefulness.