Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I am aware that an Auto-Documenter tool is available in the Gallery, but that has not been maintained since 2020. 

 

It would be great if Alteryx could have that as an added feature to the Designer as an option for end-users to utilize. 

 

The breakdown of it can be done via XML parsing as such: 

<Nodes>: Configuration of tools

<Connections>: The tools used

<Properties>: Workflow properties

 

Right now, the current workaround is for users to export their XML, and the internal Alteryx development team has to build another workflow that reads the XML accordingly + parses it to fit what is needed. 

 

It would be better for Alteryx to build something more robust, and perhaps even include some elements of AiDIN which they are promoting now.

It would be really helpful to have a bulk load 'output' tool to Snowflake.  This would be functionality similar to what is available with the Redshift bulk loader.

Currently it takes a reaaally long time to insert via ODBC or would require you to write a custom solution to get this to work.

 

This article explains the general steps but some of the manual steps outlined would have to be automated to arrive at a solution that is entirely encapsulated within a workflow.

http://insightsthroughdata.com/how-to-load-data-in-bulk-to-snowflake-with-alteryx/

 

I'd say that 95.437% of the Joins I do are straight Inner Joins.

 

So each of those times I have to remember to go down to the Select part of the Join tool and deselect all the fields I joined on the Right Side since they'll be duplicates.

 

I'd like a checkbox like below (defaulted to CHECKED)  to deselect all the joined fields from the right hand side. In the rare cases where there's a need I could uncheck it.

 

Deselect R join fields

Extend the MongoDB tool to work with Atlas MongoDB instances.

The default data type for new columns used to be Double, and now it is V_WString.  Is this user-configurable?  I find that, at least in my work, needing a formula to output a Double is way more common than a V_WString.  I'm curious of other community members' thoughts here.  If there isn't a consensus, it would be great to have this be a user-configurable default.

How about a quick method of disabling a container.

 

Current state - Click on the container, pan the mouse all the way over to the tiny checkbox target in the configuration pane and click disable.

Future state - little icon by the rollup icon that can be clicked to disable/enable, differentiated by perhaps a color change of the minimized pane perhaps?

 

I know what you're thinking, "talk about lazy, he's whining about moving the mouse (which his hand was already on) 2 cm along his desktop and clicking"... but still what an easy usability win and one less click to do a task I find myself repeating frequently.

As mention on this post here I would love the ability to change the map provider to any other map service (Mapbox, google, some other paid option). This could be achieved by adding a "Map Severs" option in the default configuration and where you put in the map server details.

Dear Alteryx GUI Gang,

 

I'll create a container and then customize the colours, margins, transparency, border and then want consistency for other containers.  It would be nice to have a format painter function (brush) to apply the format of one container to another.  This of course could be extended to other tools like comments.  There might be a desire to apply this to more tools too, but the comments and containers would be my focus as they are almost always custom configured.

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

I noticed that Tableau has a new connector to Anaplan in the upcoming release. 

 

Does Alteryx have any plans to create an Anaplan connector? 

Hopefully this is the right place to post this and it hasn't been suggested already but I think it would be useful to add a numeric indicator to the formula tool to show how many formulas are being done with one tool. It would be useful when going back into or sharing workflows that a user would know more than one function is being carried out at that point. Currently I change the annotation to show how many but I think it would be useful if the icon changed dynamically. Below is a mockup of what I think it should look like.

Thanks,

Pete

 

When we industrialize our workflows, we often use a parameter file with a command like :

 

 

AlteryxEngineCmd.exe MyAnalyticApp.yxwz AppValues.xml

 

 

I would like to have the parameter file path with its extension as an engine constant, like we have the workflow name.

As a best practice, I'd like to automagically change any drive mapping to UNC when saving my workflows.  This applies to both local and gallery saves.

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

Configurable hotkeys/keyboard shortcuts would be awesome.  For instance, select/deselect highlighted fields or remove prefix are two commands that I use frequenctly but which are buried in menus.

Being able to assign hotkeys to favourite tools would be another time saver.  Imagine, ctrl-alt-F and a formula appears under the cursor!

Right now in order to pass a parameter to pre/Post SQL we need to make a macro as a work around.

It would be really great if this was a native capability for the output tool so we don't have to replicate all the output too fields as macro inputs

A client just asked me if there was an easy way to convert regular Containers to Control Containers - unfortunately we have to delete the old container and readd the tools into the new Control Container.

 

What if we could just right click on the regular Container and say "Convert to Control Container"? Or even vice versa?!

Hey all,

 

I don't know about you, but I have always had trouble hovering the mouse over the Results window pane trying to get the resize icon to appear. It seems like you need surgeon level precision to find the icon! 😷

 

I love Designer and want to see it be the best it can possibly be. I feel like increasing the clickable/hovering area for this resize would be amazingly helpful! 

Just wanted to see if we could get some community momentum going in order to get some developer eyes on this issue. 🙂

 

 Please help by bumping/upvoting this thread!

 

 -K

Migrated this from another thread. Some folks tagged from the original post :)
@cpatrickwk @caltang @afellows @MRod @alexnajm @ericsmalley @MilindG @Prometheus @innovate20 

For companies that have migrated to OneDrive/Teams for data storage, employees need to be able to dynamically input and output data within their workflows in order to schedule a workflow on Alteryx Server and avoid building batch MACROs.

 

With many organizations migrating to OneDrive, a Dynamic Input/Output tool for OneDrive and SharePoint is needed.

 

• The existing Directory and Dynamic Input tools only work with UNC path and cannot be leveraged for OneDrive or SharePoint.
• The existing OneDrive and SharePoint tools do not have a dynamic input or output component to them.
• Users have to build work arounds and custom MACROS for a common problem/challenge.
  • Some users have identified a work around for the dynamic input (See Community Post)
• Users have to map the OneDrive folders to their machine (and server if published to the Gallery)
  • This option generates a lot of maintenance, especially on Server, to free up space consumed by the local version when outputting the data.

The enhancement should have the following components:

 

OneDrive/SharePoint Directory Tool

• Ability to read either one folder with the option to include/exclude subfolders within OneDrive
• Ability to retrieve Creation Date
• Ability to retrieve Last Modified Date
• Ability to identify file type (e.g. .xlsx) 
• Ability to read Author
• Ability to read last modified by
• Ability to generate the specific web path for the files

OneDrive/SharePoint Dynamic Input Tool

• Receive the input from the OneDrive/SharePoint Directory Tool and retrieve the data.

Dynamic OneDrive/SharePoint Output Tool

• Dynamically write the output from the workflow to a specific directory individual files in the same location
• Dynamically write the output to multiple tabs on the same file within the directory.
• Dynamically write the output to a new folder within the directory

Hello all,

As of now, you have two very distinct kinds of connection :

-in memory alias

-in database alias

It happens than every single time I use a in-database alias I have to create the same for in memory since some operations cannot be realized in in-database (such as pre-sql or interface tools)

What does that mean for us :

-more complex settings operations/training/tests

-unefficient worflows that have to deal with two kinds of alias.

What I propose :
-a single "connection alias", that can be used either for in-db either for in-memory,

-one place to configure

-the in-db or in-memory being dependant on the tools you use

 

Best regards,

Simon

Hello all,

As of today, we can easily copy or duplicate a table with in-database tool.This is really useful when you want to have data in development environment coming from production environment.

But can we for real ?

 

Short answer : no, we can't do it in these cases :
-partitions

-statistics
-index

-any constraints such as primary-foreign keys

But even if these ideas would be implemented, this means manually setting these parameters.

So my proposition is simply a "clone table"' tool that would clone the table from the show create table statement and just allow to specify the destination path (base.table)

 

Best regards,

Simon