Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

XGboost regression is now the benchmark for every Kaggle competition and seems to consistently outperform random forest, spline regression, and all of the more basic models. For those of us using predictive modeling on a regular basis in our actual work, this tool would allow for a quick improvement in our model accuracy. And I think, from a marketing standpoint, having a core group of users competing in Kaggle using Alteryx would be a great way to show off Alteryx's power.

It is readily available as an R package: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/xgboost/index.html

I think we would all benefit from having IntelliSense within Alteryx. Just think about how much quicker writing formulas wold be or any time you need to reference your data within the various tools.

I've had the need to Find & Replace inside of a formula that I've written.  Would it be possible to have that type of functionality inside of the expression builder?

Does anyone else think that it would be useful?

When editing larger workflows, the "Find Tool" window is often a great help in terms of locating tools. However, having to close this window in order to make edits to the workflow is a bit inconvenient, especially when changing the sort method or using the search function. It would be great if users were allowed to edit the workflows and tools while still keeping this window open and maintaining the current settings.

It would be useful when building apps to be able to put interface tools in containers and disable them.  This would allow an app developer to show users multiple ways of having the app styled without having to have multiple app versions saved.  

I think there should be the ability to turn on and off the “Browse Everywhere” function.  I have found that my temp drive is filling up faster than it did before this most recent addition and, while I think Browse Everywhere is fantastic for QA, I don’t necessarily need it working in every workflow I run.

It would be extremely useful if most Alteryx tools had the option to output error records seaparetly. This functionality is already present in most other ETL packages, even freeware ones like Pentaho - Kettle. From its wiki: http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/EAI/.09+Transformation+Steps

http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/EAI/.09+Transformation+Steps

Step error handling allows you to configure a step so that instead of halting a transformation when an error occurs, the rows that caused an error are passed to a different step.

Would be nice if Alteryx had the ability to run a Teradata stored procedure and/or macro with a the ability to accept input parameters.  Appears this ability exists for MS SQL Server.  Seems odd that I can issue a SQL statement to the database via a pre or post processing command on an input or output, but can't call a stored procedure or execute a macro.  Only way we can seem to call a stored procedure is by creating a Teradata BTEQ script and using the Run Command tool to execute that script.  Works, but a bit messy and doesn't quite fit the no-coding them of Alteryx.

Hi all,

I was wondering if any of you have achieved "Transaction rollback" type of feature in alteryx.

Following is the usecase:

If a workflow that writes data into multiple outputs (could be relational tables / files) is failed half way through in writing to one of the outputs, is there an option to rollback the partially loaded data & reset the process to the original state (i.e., before the execution of the workflow)? (OR) does this needs to be done programatically?

There is a workflow level property - "Cancel Running Workflow on Error". This stops the execution but doesn't perform rollback.

Thanks,

Sandeep.

When giving a user a dropdown list, it is difficult to give them an option of the data in a specific column.  So if I have a "State" column, I would like to give the user a dropdown of all of the states currently represented in the table.  So if there was "Nebraska, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota", the dropdown list would give them an option to select Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota.  This could be useful on both List boxes and Dropdown lists.  Currently there is a workaround that lets you do it, but it is not a great solution because if there is a space (Like in South Dakota), it puts an underscore in it so parsing is required.  

Would be nice to select a bunch of consecutive fields, and cut them and paste them to a different area.  Currently, the only options are to Move to Top or Move to Bottom.  If you want to move somewhere in between, you have to scroll through the whole list.

Pre-v10, I could set a default tool for each tool palatte.  For example, for the Summarize tool pallate, I could make the Summarize tool the default (that already was the default, but you get the point).  I could then simply drag the tool palatte icon onto the canvas and the Summarize tool would be there.  Now, I have to navigate to the tool pallate and drag my tool on the canvas.  Yes, I know I could add it to my favorites, but screen real estate goes quickly after adding just a few favorites to the already defaulted favorites.  It would've been nice if this functionality wasn't removed with v10. 

I think it would be extremely helpful to have an in-DB Detour so that you could filter a user's information without having to pull it out of DB and then put it back in for more processing.  A time where this would be useful is if you have a large dataset and don't want to pull the entire dataset out of the DB because it will take a long time to pull it.  This would be applicable for filtering a large dataset by a specific state chosen by the user or possibly a region.  The Detour in the developer tools actually seems like it would do the job necessary, it just needs to connect to the In-DB tools.  

The excel driver (.xlsx) converts these values to 0.  If you use the legacy excel driver (.xlsx) it brings in the #N/A values.  This issue was reported in the community and I am forwarding it to the New Idea as a problem that needs to be addressed on behalf of @JohnDoe.

Hello! Almost all statistical softwares allow for the analyst to use either a pairwise or a listwise option when applying clustering techinques. This option affects only how the inner distance matrix is built, and after that whichever algorithm you choose is peformed. However in Alteryx [K-Centroids] by default does listwise, classifying only those records where the selected variables have no nulls.

Please consider adding this option!

PS: the difference is pairwise will build the distance between 2 variables depending on those records that have no nulls on both variables, while listwise will run the distance matrix after it has checked for complete non null records in all variables of interest (not one at a time distance calculation).

I often find myself combining data from different sources. It is external data I have no control of. One of the main problems I face is that columns are often named differently: 'this is a comment' in table1 is called 'a comment this is' in table 2 and 'comment' in table3.

The union tool is convenient for tables with few columns only: when the columns are many, moving them left and right is confusing and time-consuming.

I currently list and associate the column names in Excel, then use this as the basis to rename columns in Alteryx with a select tool, then do a union in Alteryx.

It would be extremely convenient and efficient if Alteryx had some kind of drop-down box to do this association. I have tehse steps in mind:

1) Alteryx tries to guess associations by column names (if two columns have the same name in two tables, they are associated to each other)

2) for the ones with no associations, rather than scrolling left and right as is now the case with the union tool, the suer would be able to choose from a drop-down list. This would make it evident that 'this is a comment' matches 'a comment this is', etc

The Listbox (interface macro) is currently populated statically when sourcing values through a Connected tool. Whatever, I configure in the macro is retained. When I use the macro in a workflow the LIstbox values are not updated when the fields in the connected tool are changed. This practically limits my capabilities to build a truely dynamic macro/app.

The Listbox should be able to show dynamically the fields coming in through the connected app.

Add in-database tools for SAP HANA.

Please star that idea so we can prioritize this request accordingly

It would be very useful to be able to search the field by typing the name instead of scrolling up and down looking for it among a few hundred fields.