Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

When building workflows, it would be nice to have "Save Workflow" and "Run Workflow" added to the right click menu when in the canvas.

Add to Right Click menu:

Save Workflow

Run Workflow

Hi, I'm new to Alteryx; we've had for just about a month. We started publishing our workflows to Tableau and it's working great.

One issue I foresee:

User credentials to the Tableau server are updated occasionally. When this occurs, I will have to update the credentials manually in each workflow. 

The number of workflows we are publishing is growing. Is there a way to automate this process? 

I will sometimes open "New Window(s)" from a single or multiple Browse(s), and arrange them on a second monitor to dig through a module I am unfamiliar with, or when building out complicated models.  It would be helpful if I could label these tempary new windows so that I don't spend to much time trying to remember which one is which.

User Story:  As a data analyst, I want to be able to easily edit my data's meta-data, so that down-stream actions can easily consume and export my data. 

Currently, you can do a bulk edit of your data's metadata, however, this has to be done using the Multi-Field formula. However, this solution is non-intuitive, and seems to run counter to the solution design of Alteryx, where each and every step is it's own module. 

A single module handling bulk and single column/attribute metadata transformations and editing would be (a) much more intuitive and (b) save analysts time of hand editing meta-data. 

cheers! 

Currently the only encoding method supported by Alteryx Avro format is deflate.  Please consider improving this to include google snappy approach.

This codec method is referenced in the Avro documentation for supported codex.

https://avro.apache.org/docs/1.7.6/spec.html#Required+Codecs

it would  particularly interesting to develop a WMS support in Alteryx.
To include other Maps like bing, google, HERE instead of CloudMade to display geo informations.

Mathias

In order to perform audit-trail logging - it would be valuable to have 2 new capabilities

a) environment variables which show the workflow name; filepath; version; run start date and time; etc.   For any worklows we build, we need to have a solid audit trail to be SOX compliant, so having this detail available as a data field to write and manipulate is essential

b) A logging component.   What would be great is a component that you can drop on a workflow, not connected to anything, which is able to trap the start; end; runtime; version; etc of a workflow; and commit this to any output data format (CSV or ODBC etc).   This logging tool would need to be able to capture the full runtime, so it would need to be the last thing that runs (which means it may need to exist in parallel to the main workflow in some way).    This is not currently possible with a complex workflow with outputs, because it's not possible to identify when the entire workflow ended; or the runtime (since output tools don't have an onward connector to pass flow-of-control to catch the final end-time)

Again, both of these are necessary to meet audit requirements for workflows and prodcution-quality ETLs for BI data warehouses.

It would be great to have an outbound connector on output tools for 2 reasons:

a) if this outbound connector can carry key results of the output process, this can be saved in an audit log.  For example - rowcounts; success/failure.   This kind of capabiltiy (to generate a log, or to be able to check the rowcount of rows committed to a database) is important for any large BI ETL process

b) this woudl also allow the process to continue after the output process and also act as a flow of control.   For example:

- First output the product dimension

- once done - then connect (using the outbound connector) to the next macro which then updates the Sales fact table using this product dimension (foreign key dependancy)

I would love the R tool editor to work like a standard text field....it might be better explained in this scenario.  Pretend the character text is a script youve written with the function being at the top.  Let's say you'd like to move the function closer to the script, look at the weird output.  This editor pastes text like we are pasting images.

The use case is that I like to break my code into mini functions that I work on in the r console with sample data.  Once it works, I post it into alteryx and experiment with it on a small sample, then a larger sample.  If I have to have a document for my overall r cost in notepad ++, my function, and the console, it’s a little nusance, especially since I usually have to go back and forth with multiple functions.  I am not askin for a full blown editor, I like my notepad ++ for that, just a text input that works conventionally. 

SampleFunction <- function(x)
{
print(x)
}

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

when you paste the function (or any other text in the middle, look at this funky output)

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
SampleFunction <- function(x)abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
{abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
print(x)abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
}abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Would be nice to make it so if I change from RowCount to index it all is linked together.

Something like a $FieldName$ which would automatically get substituted. 

Also nice in other formula tools, but most useful in places where name needs to be duplicated over and over

Assuming some source control or versioning is in place, a formal compare tool would be a nice addition. This would be useful for determining what is different between two versions of a workflow, and that knowledge is very useful when modifying a production process: when formally moving a new (modified) process into production, part of the checks and balances would be to run a formal comparison against the workflow being replaces, and ensure that all differences are accounted for.

This sort of audit is notoriously difficult when the differences are buried deep in the configuration settings of various tools within Alteryx.  I do see that the .yxmd files are XML based, so perhaps we could create our own compare tool based thereon, but it would be better (more trustworthy) to have one formally provided by Alteryx.  Thanks!

In Dec I had an issue where I could not uninstall or upgrade Alteryx. As part of troubleshooting and the eventual solution I had to manually delete any registry key related to Alteryx. As these were hundreds of entries this took a long time. It would be handy if Alteryx could provide a tool that cleaned the registry of all Alteryx related entries. Related: "Case 00088264: Unable to uninstall Alteryx"

Would be nice to have the regex tool allow you to drop original input field and report and error if any records fail to parse.

The SQL Editor window could have a better presentation of the SQL code; two issues observed

• First, that it's simply plain text without even a fixed-width font, much less syntax highlighting
• Second, if you type in some manually formatted SQL code (e.g. with line feeds and indentation), then click on the "Visual Query Builder" button, then click back to the "SQL Editor" button, all the formatting is lost as it is converted to one run-on line of code, which is very difficult to read.

I understand that going between the Visual Query Builder and the SQL Editor is bound to have some issues; nonetheless the "idea" is to allow a user friendly display in the SQL Editor window:

• Use a fixed width font, (should be trivial to implement)
• SQL formatter, implementation ideas can be found here: https://github.com/TaoK/PoorMansTSqlFormatter
• SQL syntax highlighting, implementation ideas can be found here: https://github.com/jdorn/sql-formatter

My "implementation ideas" are based on a couple minutes with google, so hopefully this is a very feasible request; my user base is very likely to spend more time in the SQL editor than not, so this would be a valuable UX addition.  Thanks!

The option to "Allow Shared Write Access" is only available under CSV and HDFS CSV in the Data Input tool. It would be very helpful to have this feature also included for Excel files.

I've been using Events a fair bit recently to run batches through cmd.exe and to call Alteryx modules.

Unfortunately, the default is that the events are named by when the action occurs and what is entered in the Command line.

When you've got multiple events, this can become a problem -- see below:

Events tab with all events called the same thing

It would be great if there was the ability to assign custom names to each event.

It looks like I should be able do this by directly editing the YXMD -- there's a <Description> tag for each event -- but it doesn't seem to work.

It would be useful to have a function or a tool to convert a number into a currency like excel.  Where it would add the $ before and you could choose to have commas and a period for cents.  

ex:  

Input:  15978423.89

output:  $15,978,423.89

of course, i'm sure there would be a need for other currency values besides the '$'.  

415978423.89

There is a lot of usage of calendar events in business world. Having a native sync and input functions for popular calendar formats like ical or google calendars will save a lot of time

The are a lot of SQL engines on top of Hadoop like:

• Apache Drill / https://drill.apache.org/
  Schema-free, low latency SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage
  It's backed up at enterprise level by MapR
• Apache Kylin / http://kylin.apache.org/
  Apache Kylin™ is an open source Distributed Analytics Engine designed to provide SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Hadoop supporting extremely large datasets, original contributed from eBay Inc.
• Apache Flink / https://flink.apache.org/
  Apache Flink is an open source platform for distributed stream and batch data processing. Flink’s core is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations over data streams. The creators of Flink provide professional services trought their company Data Artisans.
• Facebook Presto / https://prestodb.io/
  Presto is an open source distributed SQL query engine for running interactive analytic queries against data sources of all sizes ranging from gigabytes to petabytes.
  It's backed up at enterprise level by Teradata - http://www.teradata.com/PRESTO/

My suggestion for Alteryx product managers is to build a tactical approach for these engines in 2016.

Regards,

Cristian.