Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I periodically consume data from state governments that is available via an ESRI ArcGIS Server REST endpoint. Specifically, a FeatureServer class.

For example: http://staging.geodata.md.gov/appdata/rest/services/ChildCarePrograms/MD_ChildCareHomesAndCenters/Fe...

Currently, I have to import the data via ArcMap or ArcCatalog and then export it to a datatype that Alteryx supports.

It would be nice to access this data directly from within Alteryx.

Thanks!

This request is largely based on the implementation found on AzureML; (take their free trial and check out the Deep Convolutional and Pooling NN example from their gallery).  This allows you to specify custom convolutional and pooling layers in a deep neural network. This is an extremely powerful machine learning technique that could be tricky to implement, but could perhaps be (for example) a great initial macro wrapped around something in Python, where currently these are more easily implemented than in R.

Very confusing.

DateTimeFormat

- Format sting - %y is 2-digit year, %Y is a 4-digit year.   How about yy or yyyy.   Much easier to remember and consistent with other tools like Excel.

DateTimeDiff

- Format string - 'year' but above function year is referenced as %y ??   Too easy to mix this up.

Also, documentation is limited.  Give a separate page for each function and an overview to discuss date handling.

Would it be possible to add the capability to import or build a CSS for reporting in a future release, I am sure I am not the first to think about having Style Sheets in reports so you do not have to define fonts, colors and all that HTML stuff to each output line. 

Alteryx S3 connector currently supports only SSE-S3 encryption. Current version of alteryx S3 connector does not use AWS Signature Version 4, so it fails to upload/download S3 objects which encrypted using AWS KMS keys. This is much needed feature for S3 connector.

The Field Summary tool is a very useful addition for quickly creating data dictionaries and analysing data sets. However it ignores Boolean data types and seems to raise a strange Conversion Error about 'DATETIMEDIFF1: "" is not a valid DateTime' - with no indication it doesn't like Boolean field types. (Note I'm guessing this error is about the Boolean data types as there's no other indication of an issue and actual DateTime fields are making it through the tool problem free.)

Using the Field Summary tool will actually give the wrong message about the contents of files with many fields as it just ignores those of a data type it doesn't like.

The only way to get a view on all fields in the table is using the Field Info tool, which is also very useful, however it should be unnecessary to 'left join' (in the SQL sense) between Field Info and Field Summary to get a reliable overview of the file being analysed.

Therefore can the Field Summary tool be altered to at least acknowledge the existence of all data types in the file?

I have run into an issue where the progress does not show the proper number of records after certain pieces in my workflow. It was explained to me that this is because there is only a certain amount of "cashed" data and therefore the number is basd off of that. If I put a browse in I can see the data properly.

For my team and me, this is actually a great inconvenience. We have grown to rely on the counts that appear after each tool. The point of the "show progress" is so that I do not have to insert a browse after everything I do so that it takes up less space on my computer. I would like to see the actual number appear again. I don't see why this changed in the first place.

Currently, when creating scatter graphs you are unable to order the plots based on a sub-group of the data (ie the legend). It would be nice to have the ability to pick which part of the legend is displayed first, above the other data plots. Could we also have the option to take the 3D element off the scatter graph plots?

Thanks,

Oliver

It would be great to get a random x number of records or x % of records for every grouped field in the sample tool.

Right now, the sample tool is lacking the random % feature and the random % tool is lacking the group by feature.

Just like the File Geodatabase, Esri has an enterprise version for servers, in our case, Oracle. We would like the option to output to an Oracle GDB like we can to a normal Oracle DB. This would greatly assist in our process flows.

Please extend the Workflow Dependencies functionality to include dependencies of used macros in the worflow too. Currenctly macros are simply marked as dependencies by themselves, but the underlying dependencies (e.g. data sources) of these macros are not included.

We have a large ETL process developed with Alteryx that applies several layers of custom and complex macros and several data sources referenced using aliases. Currently the process is deployed locally (non-server) and executed ad-hoc, but will be moved to the server platform at some point. 

Recently I had to prep an employee for running the process. This requires creating aliases and associated connections and making sure that access to needed network locations is in place (storing macros, temp files, etc.). Hence I needed to identify all aliases and components/macros used. As everything is wrapped nicely by a single workflow, I hoped that the workflow dependencies functionality would cover dependencies in the macro nodes within, but unfortunately it didn't and I had to look through the dependencies of 10-15 macros.

I have no idea how many people are using the .Net API to build custom tools, but found an issue with its assembly scanning.

It doesnt pick up classes implementing IPlugin in an abstract base class. Can be worked around by moving the interface onto the concrete implementation but think it should pick up any concrete class implementing the IPlugIn regardless of whether on the class itself or a base class.

I can see that the Venn diagram is very nice for a new user to understand the Join tool (which is a super-great tool by the way).  But I would like to be able to close up the Venn diagram to give more room to see the variables listed below.

Thanks!
Susan

Under options/restore defaults, it would be nice if the canvass could be reset (I sometimes lose windows), but the favorites be left intact.

Thanks!
Susan

I have a very large geospatial point dataset (~950GB) .  When I do a spatial match on this dataset to a small polygon, the entire large geospatial point dataset has to be read into the tool so that the geospatial query can be performed.  I suspect that the geospatial query could be significantly speed up of the geospatial data could be indexed (referenced) to a grid (or multiple grids) so that the geoquery could identify the general area of overlap, then extract the data for just that area before performing the precise geoquery.  I believe Oracle used (uses) this method of storing and referencing geospatial data.

Hi,

So I was working on a project which uses the "Download" tool. I needed to measure precisely the response time for each record so I set up a "timestamp" value using the DateTimeNow() function before the actual download. After download was complete, i tried to measure the response time by using the DateTimeDiff() function. However, using this method, i was not able to get a precise (up to a millisecond) performance reading since the DateTime format gets rounded to a second. 

It would be great to have a way of precisly measure the time taken for each record to go through a tool or a set of tool and having that value be a part of the output file

This is not a terribly important thing, but in the formula tool, the nitty gritty details of the Expression almost never fit into the annotation space. It would be nice if the annotation by default just contained the names of the variables being derived.  So, e.g. if I'm deriving "CalcVar1", "CalcVar2", "CalcVar3" and so forth, the default annotation would just be:

This gives a much cleaner (by default) canvas.  The same concept applies to the MultiRow and MultiField Formula tools, perhaps others.  Just a thought and obviously not very important.  Thanks.

I see the mention of VR but has anyone talked about touch screen capabilities with Alteryx?  Would make even the tough projects more fun!

I find the concept of Batch and/or Iterative macros, when done specifically for the simple purpose of iteration, to be a fair bit of overhead. If we could extract the fundamental qualities of a loop and get that into an "Iteration Tool," it could become a well-used tool from the pallette.

Implementation Ideas:

• Assume that the iteration is over the rows of a given input data set.
• For the "body of the loop" allow multiple expressions, each of which iteratively assigns the i'th position of a given variable (which could be either existing or derived just like the Formula tool and it's expression).
• Allow referencing of the loop index variable from within expressions

An example problem this could solve is from: http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Looping-and-dynamically-changing-output/m-....  As discussed therein, the concept of "row dependent iteration" makes this difficult to solve with standard tools.

If the input data set from that example were sent into the proposed Iteration Tool... it would automatically loop over the dataset rows; and three expressions could be supplied in the Tool configuration to solve the problem:

VarE:   IF [i] > 1 THEN VarF[i-1] + VarG[i-1] ELSE VarE ENDIF
VarF:   VarA + VarB
VarG:   VarC + VarD

For implementation purposes, this would be logically equivalent to:

VarE[i]:   IF [i] > 1 THEN VarF[i-1] + VarG[i-1] ELSE VarE[i] ENDIF
VarF[i]:   VarA[i] + VarB[i]
VarG[i]:   VarC[i] + VarD[i]

 (so, basically, the i'th row is assumed unless otherwise provided in the expression syntax).

I hope this isn't too outlandish - I've tried to think through how this could be accomplished (1) as a tool that is not too fiendishly difficult for Alteryx to implement and (2) which would also be easy for us, the end users, to utilize.  Thanks!