Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

This error may be encountered and replicated when you are using an image in the reporting "Header" tool where the path contains an "&". Yes this is rare, but possible and sometimes you want to keep the path, but can't update the path name. If you select the image in a path with an "&", then you'll get an error similar to the following:

Error: Report Header (36): The Action "Update Image Tool" has an error: ParseError: Unterminated entity reference, 'D' at line 2 and column 19
while processing "Action_UpdateRawXml"

A discussion began in 2016 on this topic:
Solved: Insert Image in Report Header: ParseError: Untermi... - Alteryx Community

One of my favorite features of Alteryx is the in-line browse in the results window, as well as the descriptive log, highlighting record counts into and out of tools.  As I develop bigger and longer-running workflows, I would love to be able to save off these results to provide my QA analyst with a "cached" version of a run without them having to run it themselves.  Providing them not only with a well-documented workflow, but with a complete data flow would be tremendously helpful in getting work checked.  Our current process is to pass workflows off, and encourage the QA analyst to run them with the "Disable all Tools that write Output" option checked.  While this is not an issue for smaller workflows, it is inefficient for larger ones, and also can cause some difficulties with access logistics like missing or inconsistent connection aliases.

I have seen some requests asking for saving of browse results (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Save-Browse-Results-Until-Next-Run/idi-p/1827), but these primarily seem to be geared at data caching for further workflow development.  My aim is to save the browse and results statuses of a completed workflow for the purpose of QA.

Note: I posed this as a question in the Data Preparation and Blending forum, but didn't receive an answer so thought I would propose it as an idea.

In working with a user who was having issues with workflows hanging, I found that the ‘Select Records’ tool seems to requires an inordinate amount of CPU Utilization.  To fix this, I rewrote the ‘Select Records’ macro to avoid using the ‘Dynamic Replace’ Tool.  What I found is that this not only significantly lowered CPU usage, but also runtime.

Hi,

Can we please make the TS Model Factory customisable to both ARIMA and ETS? I understand that currently it is using auto.arima for R, it would be nice to add the option to customise p,q,P and Q.

Thank you.

It would be great if the deselecting of fields in a select tool updated the output window(before next run) as a "review" to make sure you are removing what you expect and/or you can see other items left behind that should be removed. This would also be useful for seeing field names update as  you organize and rename.

Often I join tables w/o pre-selecting the exact fields i want to pass and so I clean up at the end of the join. I know this is not the best way but a lot of times i need something downstream and have to basically walk through the whole process to move the data along.

Hi Team,

I have searched through the ideas board but couldn't find one relating to my current request so here's hoping that this can be implemented in future releases.

I have been playing around with Knime and find one feature very useful that you could build in.  Knime use the concept of a metanode, where you can collapse a bunch of tools (nodes in Knimespeak) into one single node and I believe that this can be a very useful feature.  For example, in some of my workflows, where I text mine using regex, (depending on the circumstance), I will have a bunch of regex tools to parse one string (see screen grab below).  In such instances, it would be great if all the regex tools can be collapsed into one meta-tool.

As recommended by HenrietteH at Alteryx to submit as a suggested future enhancement.

I have Oracle 11 and Oracle 12 clients on my machine. With Toad, I can toggle between either client's current home, but it appears that is not a feature in Alteryx. So now I am unable to execute ETL jobs off my machine or server because Alteryx gets confused. Currently, the only remedy I can think of is having 11 client uninstalled, which can cause dependency issues if I need it in the future.

When the Business Match (US) tool is used with a valid US Business Insights license, it yields low matched results of roughly 30 to 40%. Currently, it only matches on business name and address. It will be beneficial to also provide an ability to match with the business telephone number to provide better results. I understand that there are license restrictions in doing so, but the firmographic data is not very useful unless there is a good yield in matched results for DNB data.

I would love to be able to double-click on an input or output file and have the file open. Second to that would be a clickable hyperlink to the filepath that could be used to open the file, or a "go to" button or something. Anything would be better than my current process of copying and pasting the filepath into an explorer window.

The language options have been so helpful for our Global team; is a Korean language option under consideration for Designer & the online training courses? 

I have a workflow that outputs to several files at once. If one of those files is open, an error is returned (of course).

It would be really great if Alteryx could still save any failed files down into a different folder or with a different name such as V2. 

In the DateTime tool, you should be able to specify AM PM.  Some other programs I use would do this with an 'a' at the end.  Here is an example of what I think it should be

MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm a

Maybe I am missing something and this is already doable, but so far I haven't found a clean way to do it. 

Hello Alteryx Comunity! Recently, i was working on a project to generate a database with information such as size, last access date and fullpath of a disk. I noticed that the alteryx component "directory" brings almost all that i need, but it doesn't bring the "size on disk" property. When a file is compressed, it becomes hard to know what is its actual size on disk. My idea for you is to bring one more collumn in the directory tool, which is the "size on disk" field. Thanks for the great work you did by creating the alteryx, it helps a lot in the job.

This may be too much of an edge case...

I would like to be able to feed a dynamic input component with a input file and a format template file, so make the input component completely dynamic.  This is because I have excel spreadsheets that I want to download, read and process hourly throughout the day.  Every 4 hours another 4 columns are added to the spreadsheet, thereby changing the format of the spreadsheet.  This then causes the dynamic input component to error because the input file does not match the static format template.  I would be happy to store the 6 static templates, but feed these into to the dynamic input with the matching input file, thus making the component entirely dynamic.  Does this make sense???

BTW, my workaround was to define six dynamic inputs, filter on the file type, then union the results:

The top screenshot shows the DateTime tool and the incoming string formats. It does not show examples. Please shows examples like the bottom screenshot. Thank you.

I have found that upgrading the Designer automatically overwrites the Alteryx service logon credentials.  Would be nice if you didn't have to remember to reset the service credentials every time you upgrade.

If you've ever had a massive workflow with many ins, outs, and tons of tools in-between, then you may have wanted to run just portions of the workflow for testing/development/troubleshooting. I know I have. I have a workflow that normally takes many hours to run in Designer due to the massive data volume. I was only interested in tracing a bug in one specific output and found myself deleting tools here and then, piecemeal, until I could be certain that only unrelated branches and tools were gone. I then ran the workflow and found the issue in less time. What I would have liked to have done is to right-click on the output tool and select from the context menu an option to "Disable unrelated" or even "Delete unrelated". I want to delete any tool that does not directly feed data into that output through any and all branches including Joins, Unions, etc. The same options should apply to right-clicking on any tool. Thank you.

The 'Make Grid' tool appears to occasionally scramble the order as shown by the 'Grid Names' I have highlighted. As its almost in order it gave a false sense of looking as though it was designed to be in 'GridName' order, so it was not obvious that it needed to be sorted. To make the tool more intuitive it may make sense to give the option to sort by 'GridName' or just do it by default.

Thanks,

Ira 

Hi, 

I am currently using Oracle Discoverer Tool which has option to drag or place an results column of a table or cross tab on to page items so that I can further filter the results. This helps the user to filter large results set without even downloading the output. I have attached a screenshot of current tool with page items.

Regards,

Sunil