Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi there,

As a beginner in Alteryx with experience in other analytics software, I noticed that there may be a very simple thing that I think could be adjusted which I feel could improve the experience of a beginner in Alteryx. Also happy to know if this is already possible.

When I was doing a introduction training, I noticed that a lot of the questions were regarding not being able to see the right output, regardless of the usage of the right tools & settings. Luckily, we were provided with a good trainer that immediately saw that there was a very simple reason for this: the 'output' button (sometimes called differently, for instance in a select it is called 'true' or 'false') was not selected. Instead people were looking at the input or something else. I can even imagine that some more advanced users have spend a few minutes wondering what was wrong until they realised they weren't looking at the output.

It seems to me to be a bit random when output or input gets selected, and as someone with experience in (preventing) addiction in the gaming industry, I know that the first experience is crucial for someone to get 'hooked' :-), and this small inconsistency seems to break the flow a bit. Could you make the default setting such that a tool shows the output rather than the input by default? A possible addition would be an option that switches a tool back to input every time a button gets deselected. From a programmers/data science perspective, that would also make a lot of sense.

Regards,

Charles

The older versions of the Publish to Tableau Server Macro had an option to Request an authentication token however the latest version does not.  Please return this option to the tool as it is very useful for constructing Rest API call scripts.

Thank you!

~ Eric Marowitz

Please allow a hover over that would show you the value of a variable in the formula tool. At times I get long formulas and it would be nice to see the values of each variable by just putting your mouse on top of it. Just show the first row like the preview. There is similar functionality in visual studio and it makes coding easier. 

Hi All,

I believe the following would help improve the functionality of Select Tool.

The idea is to have a defaulting option for each of the field in the Select Tool (which I believe should be a light weight Tool i.e. not adversely impacting performance and gives best exhaustive picture of all columns flowing through a (/particular point in ) pipeline).

Following are some of the cases where defaulting might come handy -

1) Fields which are supposed to hold monetary data - instead of Null, one can put 0.00 to help roll up summary properly.
2) Fields which are supposed to hold dates (say expiry date) - instead of Null, one can put some enterprise standards like 31-12-2099 to avoid mixing Nulls and 31-12-2099.
3) Fields which are supposed to hold purchase quantity/number of employees/number of merchandise - instead of Null, one can put 0 (and not 0.00) again to help with roll up summary.
4) Fields which are supposed to hold Currency - instead of Null, one can put USD.
5) Fields which are supposed to hold dates (say this time create date) - instead of Null, one can hardcode actual date, or an additional feature to put Now() kind of functions.

At present one of the options of achieving same might be to put a Formula Tool and to code whatever is desired inside the Formula Tool.

Benefits of having the functionality inside Select Tool would be -

1) It would be more user friendly and call for faster build to just write '0.00' or 'USD' or '31-12-2099' as compared to writing IF IsNull()... statements.
2) Inside Formula Tool, user needs to pull desired fields from the drop down and hence exhaustive view of all fields passing through pipeline is not available.

Pain in selection of fields from drop down and writing actual formulas might be aggravated with the number of columns increasing and might be more prone to human omission related errors.

Thanks,
Rohit Bajaj

Can a spell check option be included that will check the spelling in the comment tool text box and tool container captions?

Ideally a global check would be nice for the annotation section of each tool, especially if it can be determined if I changed the annotation from the default one on some tools.

Hello,

If I go to Options --> Advanced Options --> System Settings, why do I have to click [Next] button several times before I can get to the "Engine" tab at  the very bottom? Why not simply create a user-friendly UI screen where we could directly navigate to the section we desire?

Please improve the UI.

Thanks!

There should be a macro which could be used as read input macro for in-db tools.

Similarly, there should be a write macro for in-db tools.

If you copy a text box named ClientCode to another workflow, the name of the box will be reset to text box(#) in that new workflow. That can be a snag if the workflow the text box is contained in is deployed to gallery as an app that is ran via the gallery API... the API parameters will be looking for a text box named ClientCode but is now named text box(#). This happens almost in the background without the developer knowing they have renamed the text box and the ES eventually failing. This can be annoying; it would be great if the name were inhereted. 

If you copy a text box named ClientCode to another workflow, the name of the box will be reset to text box(#) in that new workflow. That can be a snag if the workflow the text box is contained in is deployed to gallery as an app that is ran via the gallery API... the API parameters will be looking for a text box named ClientCode but is now named text box(#). This happens almost in the background without the developer knowing they have renamed the text box and the ES eventually failing. This can be annoying; it would be great if the name were inhereted. 

This is more of an enhancement than a new idea.  When building an application and upon success using separate browsers to display the results, it would be nice to be able to give the browser windows a title.  Currently you see Browse (22) and Browse (38) etc.  My app checks a certain key value in multiple tables/files and presents the table results if found.  I need to rename the data to know which file the data is coming from whereas if the browser windows had a title, you would know from which file they represent.  The titles could be added in the interface designer (see attached)

During development it seems the syntax checker or whatever process runs behind the scenes after a tool is modified reviews the full workflow. 

Ex - Just from observation if I modify the file name in an output tool I don't see why it would rerun the full syntax check process.

This reduce the time waiting to continue development.

I just downloaded the new 2018.4 version of Desktop, and I feel like it's going backwards with the Window UI. I prefer to keep my Results window on a separate screen where I can review it side-by-side with my workflow. I have three large monitors, and I have no need to keep that window tabbed, or docked. 

With the removal of he 'Close' option, I no longer have a way of closing that window without putting back in a mode I do not want. 

When i first started using Alteryx, the results window acted the same as any normal Windows window, but over time I've lost the ability to quickly maximize the window AND now I can't even close it. One of the most critical windows is getting harder and harder to use.

Pretty please! 

When using horizontal layout the status messages can overlap those of other tools meaning % progress can't be read:

Status labels would be better placed above the tools, not to the right.

Good afternoon,

I work with a large group of individuals, close to 30,000, and a lot of our files are ran as .dif/.kat files used to import to certain applications and softwares that pertain to our work. We were wondering if this has been brought up before and what the possibility might be.

Good afternoon,

I work with a large group of individuals, close to 30,000, and a lot of our files are ran as .dif/.kat files used to import to certain applications and softwares that pertain to our work. We were wondering if this has been brought up before and what the possibility might be.

Yeah, so when you have 15 workflows for some folks and you've actually decided to publish to a test database first, and now you have to publish to a production database it is a *total hassle*, especially if you are using custom field mappings.  Basically you have to go remap N times where N == your number of new outputs.  

Maybe there is a safety / sanity check reason for this, but man, it would be so nice to be able to copy an output, change the alias to a new destination, and just have things sing along.  BRB - gotta go change 15 workflow destination mappings. 

Hi all,

I often feel like workflows can easily become overly cluttered with Browses, especially around Join and other multi-output tools. I need to see the output of most of the data streams, so I can't necessarily just delete the Browses and be done with them (as I'll like need to see them over and over again).

To solve this problem, Alteryx could potentially add a "nested browse" view or tool. I've attached a picture to show what I mean. This would unclutter the area right after multi-output tools significantly.

What are your thoughts? Have I missed any neat trick or functionality that can already do something like this?

Nested Browse View Idea

When saving my workflows to the gallery I'd like to see the description field be populated with the text I used during the last save. I like to add text here and it is frustrating to have to re-type it every time.

There should be an option to not update values with Null-values in the database, when using the tool Output Data, with the options:

• File Format = ODBC Database (odbc:)
• Output Options = Update;Insert if new

This apply to MS SQL Server Databases for my part, but might affect other destinations as well?