Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I have been going back and forth between output tool and render tool. The render tool works well when you want formatting. It's also great when you don't want an output created (when rec count=0) while output tool always generates a file regardless if there are records present or not. Output tool works well when you have a lot of fields but then you cannot easily control styling.

My issue is that I have a render tool connected to table tool. In the table tool everything looks neat; there's no wrapped text and no unnecessary white space (auto column width not necessary). However, with the render output, you don't know what to expect. Especially, when you have a lot of fields (30+) data gets truncated and column width is forcibly narrowed due to paper dimensions used in render tool. I skip letter and tabloid formats and now I have to mess with custom paper width (e.g.50) to get my reports looking right and when you have dynamic fields, this is not ideal. 

Would it be possible to make the paper size/width automatic in the render tool just like in the table and layout tool? Then this tool also doesn't negate what layout/table tools do so well.

I have a module that queries a large amount of data from Redshift (~40 GB). It appears that the results are stored in memory until the query completes; consequently, my machine, which has 30 GB memory, crashes. This is a shame because Alteryx is good with maintaining memory <-> HDD balance.

Idea: Create a way to offload the query results onto the HDD as they are received.

In the old charting tool, you could change the order of the series by moving them up or down. This feature has been eliminated from the new charting tool. I want sales percent to be the top bar, but despite which 'series' I put it in, inventory percent is the top bar, as the order appears to be alphabetic. It would be nice to have that option added back in.

In the new charting tool, you can adjust the number of decimal places for your series, which is great. Adding '%' as a suffix to the series label would be nice. There is an option to add prefix/suffix to the axis label, but not to the series.

Horizontal axis (x-axis) displays at an angle. Having an alignment option (center; vertical; horizontal; etc.) is preferable.

It would be nice if I had a workflow that had multiple paths to be able to run only one line of it.  This would allow me to only run what I needed so instead of having to run the entire workflow, I would be able to run up to a certain point and only run tools that are required to get to that point.  

Other tools that I have used allow you to determine where you are caching from so instead of always having to cache at the input, you could cache after a big join.  This would be great for efficiency as having to run everything through the entire workflow every time is innefficient and I end up spending a lot of time waiting for my workflow to go through the same tools.  

For the purpose of debugging a workflow, I often filter just one customerID or any other ID to analyse the workflow.

With the Browse tool (ctrl-shift-B) you can just double click a cell and copy the value of it. This is not possible in the result tool, it would be nice if that would become possible.

Thanks,

Hans

It would be great if you could create default settings for the Tool Containers. As workflows become larger, I use containers a lot. But once I have 10-15 containers, I have to set all of them to have a Transparency of 1 and a margin of None. While the changes don't take long to make, it would be nice if they could be preset.

I'd like to be able to disable a tool container but not minimize it so I can still see what's in there. Maybe disabled containers could be grayed out the way the output tools are when you disable them. We would still need to retain current features in case people like it that way, but it would be nice to choose.

With SSIS, you can invoke user precedence contraint(s) to where you will not run any downstream flows until one or more flows complete.  A simple connector should allow you to do this.  Right now, I have my workflow(s) in containers, and have to disable / enable different workflows, which can be time consuming.  Below is a better definition:

Precedence constraints link executables, containers, and tasks in packages in a control flow, and specify conditions that determine whether executables run. An executable can be a For Loop, Foreach Loop, or Sequence container; a task; or an event handler. Event handlers also use precedence constraints to link their executables into a control flow.

Hey guys!!

I was just thinking... they might not need to fully build out a python ide, but could still reach the same objective.

You should be able to keep a python file on its own and call it in r.  By doing this, you might be able to have the json/xml handling of python with the visual/stats power of R while it being nicely bundled in your workflow.  This uses base functions in r and does a good job turning a pandas dataset to an r dataframe you can move along your workflow.

You could always just use this same idea to write a file somewhere and once it's written, your workflow will continue.  If you do, the code is literally 1 line in r...  Anyway, let me know your thoughts! 🙂

Will this work for your organization?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/using-python-r-windows-7-subhash-jaini?trk=hp-feed-article-title-publ...

@AdamR_AYX,

Limit conversion warning allows for a minimum of 1 message.  Can we set the minimum to 0 to completely ignore the message?

Perhaps we can allow warning messages a similar function as ERROR messages and allow the designer to Ignore, Warn or Cancel?

ConvError: Imputation (441): Tool #104: No demand: 0.200000000000031 had more precision than a double. Some precision was lost.

ConvError: Summarize (456): Data&colon; 0.360000000004675 had more precision than a double. Some precision was lost.

End: Designer x64: Finished running FP Model - Marquee Crew v3.yxmd in 32.3 seconds with 16 field conversion errors and 4 warnings

Thanks,

Mark

Field Summary is a great tool, but would be nice to have a count and count not null on it.

Would save an extra select for parsing text files in correct format for dates and times.

It would be super helpful if there were a way to

1. have an active list of all inputs/outputs that, if the links were changed, would update the connection for every occurance of that input/output in the workflow

2. a similar list of formulas that could could simply reference in a formula tool, so if you have to change the source formula, it's automatically updated in all the linked occurrances of that formula.

In the designer it would be nice if the projection of a .shp file could automatically be read by its corresponding .prj file.

Both of these can be partially accomplished with the output of the directory tool:

- List Directories - Summarize unique list of directories from the directory tool output

- Exclude Paths - use filter tool to exlude files or directories based on patterns

 However, here are some scenarios that aren't addressed cleanly:

- Directories are not listed unless there is a file contained within.  The tool is called Directory, but it only lists files.  The directory has to be non-empty to be listed.  An option is needed to either list files and/or directories (including empty optionally)

- I can't figure out whether the file specification is a wildcard expansion only or supports regular expression for inclusion/exclusion. I see in the File Browse tool that you can list multiple formats e.g. Text Files (*.txt)|*.txt|All Files (*.*)|*.*.  Here is a use case where this is required.  Our network shares have Windows file restore snapshots stored in a ~snapshot directory.  We don't want the directory tool to traverse this directory (because it literally takes hours to scan), but there isn't an elegant way to exclude it.  If you filter it from the directory tool output, it's already scanned it. What we've done is generate the top-level directory list outside of the tool and fed it into a macro that has a directory tool (with sub-directory scanning enabled) inside. 

- Another way to address this specific scenario woudl be to have an option to exclude traversal of "hidden" folders.  But a more generic approach is ideal.

There is a great functionality in Excel that lets users "seek" a value that makes whatever chain of formulas you might have work out to a given value. Here's what Microsoft explains about goal seek: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-Goal-Seek-to-find-a-result-by-adjusting-an-input-value-...

My specific example was this:

In the excel (attached), all you have to do is click on the highlighted blue cell, select the “data” tab up top and then “What-if analysis” and finally “goal seek.” Then you set the dialogue box up to look like this:

 Set cell: G9

To Value: 330

By changing cell" J6

And hit “Okay.” Excel then iteratively finds the value for the cell J6 that makes the cell G9 equal 330. Can I build a module that will do the same thing? I’m figuring I wouldn’t have to do it iteratively, if I could build the right series of formulas/commands. You can see what I’m trying to accomplish in the formulas I’ve built in Excel, but essentially I’m trying to build a model that will tell me what the % Adjustment rate should be for the other groups when I’ve picked the first adjustment rate, and the others need to change proportionally to their contribution to the remaining volume.

There doesn't really seem to be a way to do this in Alteryx that I can see. I hate to think there is something that excel can do that Alteryx can't!

Currently we resort to using a manual create table script in redshift in order to define a distribution key and a sort key in redshift.

See below:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/tutorial-tuning-tables-distribution.html

It would be great to have functionality similar to the bulk loader for redshift whereby one can define distribution keys and sort keys as these actually improve the performance greatly with larger datasets

One of the common methods for generalization of different types of normal and beta distributions is triangular.

Though Alteryx doesn't have a function for this, even excel doesn't have this but

• SAS (randgen(x, "Triangle", c)) and
• Mathematica (TriangularDistribution[{min,max},c]) like tools include one.

Can we add something like randtriangular(min,mode,max)?

I have my solution attached, but this will ease the flow...

Best