Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

For heavy workflows (e.g. reading massive amount of data, processing it and storing large datasets through in db tools in Cloudera), a random error is sometime generated:  'General error: Unexpected exception has been caught'

This seems due to Kerberos ticket expiration and the related setting may not be modifiable by the Alteryx developer 'especially when GPO). Suggestion is to enhance the indb tools in such a way that they are able to automatically renew the Kerberos ticket like other applications do.

Br, Lookman

Map input allows the user to connect the Q anchor to a file browse in order to navigate for a Reference Layer.

Please allow functionality for the tree input tool to do this as well.

Thanks!

Hello All,

During my trial of assisted modelling, I've enjoyed how well guided the process is, however, I've come across one area for improvement that would help those (including myself) overcome any hurdles when getting started.

When I ran my first model, I was presented with an error stating that certain fields had classes in the validation dataset that were not present in the Training dataset.

Upon investigation (and the Alteryx Community!) I discovered that this was due to a step in the One Hot Encoding tool.

Basically, the Default setting is for all fields to be set to error under the step for dealing with values not present in the training dataset, but there is an option to ignore these scenarios.

My suggestion:

Add an additional step to Assisted Modelling that gives the user the option to Ignore / Error as they see fit.

If this were to be implemented then it would remove the only barrier I could find in Assisted Modelling.

Hope this is useful and happy to provide further context / details if needed.

Issue

Im troubleshooting a workflow with around 4,400 tools, breaking into separate workflows, and leveraging the crew macros to run the workflow sequence.  Well- I changed a few file names and have an interesting disaster where I need to go tool by tool to verify everything is properly configured.  

Solution

I used tool containers to group and label sections of tools to be organized, but it was becoming difficult to navigate the ocean of tool clusters.  So- I used blank comment boxes in the tool containers.  If everything works in the container, I made the comment box green.  If something is broken, I made it red.  From there, I made all of the red comment boxes green to make sure everything was diligently reviewed.  

New Cool Idea

Troubleshooting mode- make it easy to flip a lighthouse switch on the tool containers.  Colors are great for categories, but this makes it easy to focus or highlight containers with maybe a cool retro looking switch. 

Peace, Love, and Workflows....

Salesforce Input tool throws a conversion error if labels are longer than 40 characters:

Could the the size of the field be increased to whatever the the Salesforce maximum is, or at least be configurable from the tool configuration. 

Particularly annoying is that the conversion error cannot be ignored (as seen in the Union tool) but will continue to show the result as yellow in the Scheduler. We like to keep a green board! 

Using the Download Tool, when doing a PUT operation, the tool adds a header "Transfer-Encoding: chunked".  The tool adds this silently in the background.

This caused me a huge headaches, as the PUT was a file transfer to Azure Blob Storage, which was not chunked.  At time of writing Azure BS does not support chunked transfer.  Effectively, my file transfer was erroring, but it appeared that I had configured the request correctly.  I only found the problem by downloading Fiddler and sniffing the HTTPS traffic.

Azure can use SharedKey authorization.  This is similar to OAuth1, in that the client (Alteryx) has to encrypt the message and the headers sent, so that the Server can perform the same encryption on receipt, and confirm that the message was not tampered with.  Alteryx is effectively "tampering with the message" (benignly) by adding headers.  To my mind, the Download tool should not add any headers unless it is clear it is doing so.

If the tool adds any headers automatically, I would suggest that they are declared somewhere.  They could either be included in the headers tab, so that they could be over-written, or they could have an "auto-headers" tab to themselves.  I think showing them in the Headers tab would be preferable, from the users viewpoint, as the user could immediately see it with other headers, and over-ride it by blanking it if they need to.

It would be great if it was possible to output the top most influential features in producing the score for each individual entity/row when using the predictive and machine learning tools.

Similar to the way they work in DataRobot. Details here and here.

This would enable some simple interpretation of how a model came to an individual prediction and the most important features in that particular row/case.

With the Join Multiple tool, a connector line isn't colored correctly all the way to the input anchor.

I'm on version 2019.4

Example:  My Join Multiple has 4 inputs

When I click the output anchor on a Select tool that feeds into Input #1 in the Join Multiple, the connector is colored blue for only a portion of the distance to the Join Multiple tool.

Example: When I click the input anchor on the Join Multiple, the connector line isn't blue all the way to the prior Select tool.

Example of how the incorrect coloring can be confusing:

When the two tools are aligned horizontally, clicking the Select tool makes it look like it's not connected to the Join Multiple.

And clicking the Join Multiple makes it look like it's not connected to the Select.

Chris

Current insight tool can create dashboard but can not display content by user access control, for example: one insight dashboard has whole country's sales number. Would you please add an function to let different region's sales only see their own region data when log into this dashboard ? 

Thanks! 

I find myself constantly in a situation where I am building a workflow and need to add a browse tool or branch out from the main path to test some ideas or check something and it is very annoying having to run the whole process again, I know that there is the option to cache but it the criteria is very impractical because you can't cache at different points in the workflow easily.

It should be possible to add some tools like browse or output to a file without having to re-run the whole workflow again.

I keep making the same changes to the table tool rules, using the same formulas when I build new reports. For example, Row Rule 1: Font, bold; Background Color, green; Row Rule 2; Font, bold; Background Color, blue; Row Rule 3; Font, bold; Background Color, yellow. Each is based on a formula:  IsEmpty([Column Name]). I do this over and over and over again. The only thing that changes is the column name. It would be nice to have the Row Style Rules saved so they can be browsed to" or inserted.

Still waiting for the Default Table Settings to include "CENTER" in the header tab.

In the Union Field, we have the option to manually configure fields.  This is currently done horizontally, which makes it difficult to see every field (if dealing with lots of columns), if we could have a tick-box, and switch this to vertical, then we could use a view similar to the select field. 

Thanks

Sam7

There are currently 7 data types related to numeric values, including byte.  Simply and standardize the way Alteryx handles numeric values.  Condense the numeric data types to one and provide a way to control the decimal places by indicating how many are needed to the right of the decimal.  The current numeric datatypes are confusing and do not behave the same with the formulas functions, like Round.

Adopt the standard numeric functions seen across multiple tools and languages like Excel, SQL, etc;  like RoundUp, RoundDown, AbsoluteValue, Integer, etc.  

Similar to "Start here" dataflow, it would be useful to specify a path within the User settings to open a dataflow "template" file when the users do not have permission to add or replace "start here" dataflow.

Within our organisation, we are required to have the dataflow summary. We have prepared a dataflow to meet these requirements but currently unable to share it like "start here" template so that every Alteryx session opens the agreed datalow "template" file.

Hello, I noticed today when changing the database that my connection string is linked to that Alteryx Designer did not require my password to be reentered.  See below:  This is the initial state of the connection string:

Notice that the database ends in "...-dev" and there is an encrypted password embedded in the string.  So far, all that is fine because that's how I set it up.  However, I typed a different database to end in ...-dev-data-migrations" in the string (while keeping the same server) and expected to be prompted for the password again, but the connection was made with the existing password and I was not prompted to reenter it (see below):

While this is convenient, in my mind this represents a security problem because someone could set up an associate with a connection and only want them to be able to access that server, db connection, but might inadvertently be allowing them a connection to any other database in the same server that happens to share the same password. 

This is all the more risky considering it's standard practice to wipe out the password to a saved connection whenever there's a change to that connection.  These are standards in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studios, Oracle SQL Developer, and most likely many more.  I would even go so far as to say it's an industry standard to wipe the password whenever a change is made.  It's even standard with other elements of Alteryx Designer.  In the data sources quick connect window, you're unable to change the database after a connection was made to one database using SQL Authentication as is shown below:

Notice the existing user name and password combination only allows the one single database connection. 

I think it makes sense to change this so that the password is wiped out whenever any change is made to the connection.

recently loaded the new V11 and gettting used to it.  one immediate gripe is the new version of the Formula Tool no longer supports multiple field actions.  In the prior version I could change Data Types on many fields at once.  I could move multiple fields in a block at once.  there were a few other things but these are things I am sorely missing on my first use of V11.  I created about 20 fields in quick succession just getting names down and then going back and putting in formula which were variations on a theme.  When done I noticed the default DataType was V_WString and I wanted integer.  In the past it was no big deal because I could select the block or interspersed fields and then right click to change data type for all to the same data type.  it was very handy and now appears to be gone.  please bring these things back.

Could you please support Redshift as well?

https://help.alteryx.com/2018.2/PredictiveAnalytics.htm