Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

In the Visual Layout Tool, is it possible to improve the naming capabilities?

Upstream in the workflow I named tables. 

However, in the Visual Layout Tool, Tables are listed as 1,2,3 despite the names assigned earlier. 

With several tables, it is difficult to keep track.

When i have a lot of columns in a database and I don't know the specific name of a column, it gets difficult to find it inside the select and summarize tool, for example. If you include a browser inside the most used tools, it would be easier to identify the columns and reduce time. Thanks for your time.

I have been working in some large files where I end up wanting to highlight several tools that are connected together, copy them, paste them and what to insert all at the same time in the same order into another section of my workflow and still have the tools around it connect the way things work when you are dragging in one tool at a time. This would save a lot of time of having to delete connections, drag tools out to make room for the ones I want to add and then reconnect everything back together again. I perform this sort of  thing on a regular basis and it adds time when I am trying to save time by connecting the same series of tools I was just using.

I like the concept of the Interactive charts tool but it seems overtly cumbersome to use when you are trying to perform simple changes to a line graph.  The chart tool was much easier.  I like the direction the interactive tool is going but I should not have to edit the tools xml to display point values on a line graph.

It would be great if the Drivetime could be increased to an hour - or even more.

Hello Team,

If we have the flexibility to add new formula any where in the formula tool not just at the bottom of the existing formula's that would be great.

Right now after development if there is change and an additional formula is required which will be input for existing formulas in Formula tool then effort to change is high, if we have the flexibility to add formula at any place in formula tool then the effort will be less.

Alternate Solution : Add one more formula tool before the existing formula tool and include the new formula but i

think if the formula tool has the flexibility to add formula anyplace possible that would be great.

Thank You,

Visali

In this blog post http://www.chaosreignswithin.com/2019/06/alteryx19-nashville-we-turned-it-up-to.html, Mark mentioned there is report of Runner macros not working correctly on Windows 10 Enterprise. So I decided to create test workflows to reproduce this error. I've attached 4 files, which you'll need to download and place in a folder to reproduce this error.

Here is the error I produced. The ListRunnerDriver.yxmd goes into an infinite loop.

Here is the state of the folder is when I aborted the ListRunnerDriver.yxmd.

I wasn’t able to reproduce this error with 1 child workflow, which isn’t how we use List Runner macro. So if you did your testing with 1 child workflow, you would not have seen an error.

After I added a 2nd child workflow is when the error occurred, which is how we typically use List Runner macro, more than 1 child workflows.

NB: I used only List Runner and Log Parser macros from the Crew Macros Pack. 

Steps to reproduce the errors:

1. Create a folder

2. Copy all attached files in say folder.

3. Open ListRunnerDriver.yxmd

4. Run ListRunnerDriver.yxmd.

5. Look for errors.

ListRunnerChild.yxmd and ListRunnerChild2.yxmd each are a simple workflow with 2 tools: Text Input and Output tools. They write to 2 different Excel workbooks. In this case, only the ListRunnerChild.yxmd produced an output.

When List Runner macro tried to run ListRunnerChild2.yxmd is when the infinite loop started.

The ListRunnerDriver.Log.xlsx has the messages, but in this case, with the infinite loop and errors, this output is never written.

Right now as far as I know you need to add each DB connection manually. This works... but is quite time consuming when trying to run tasks against a cluster of prod databases. It would be awesome to pass a JSON config file,example below, to the Alteryx Engine and have Alteryx create those connections upon parsing the file. This would save tons of time, and allow teams to share a central config file with consistent aliases across their clusters to ensure their app connections point to the same DBs across workflows. It would also make on boarding a breeze for new developers on team.

In version 2018.1 there was a known issue with the profile visualization for numeric data (y-axis wasn't in order). When that issue occurred, there was also a change to the box & whisker plot.

It used to be that the B&W plot was based on the Mean, but when the issue occurred it was replace with the Median.

It appears that the y-axis order issue has been fixed, however the B&W plot is still based on the Median. Since a B&W plot is always the same for a Median perspective (the Median is ALWAYS in the middle), a plot based on the Mean is much more informative of what the data looks like.

It would be great if the profiling visualization could be reverted back to using the Mean instead of the Median.

Sometimes, when I am working with new data sources, it would be nice to have a dockable pane that would allow me to view the schema of all of my connected data sources. That way I could rename fields and change data types as needed without having to jump from one select tool to the other to see how the schemas compare.

I would like to know the run time user for workflows in Gallery. Possibly changing the run time username in the gallery. I know we could include the credentials at workflow save to gallery but that means I have to open the workflow and change the credentials.Also, we could change the worker process to be run with certain credentials I will have to be admin to be able to do edit worker process setup.

Thanks

Simple idea: why not have a single installer that can install

• A non-admin Alteryx Designer and
• An admin Alteryx Designer

at the same time given the available security privileges...

I don't know if you already changed it in the 2019 version, but I'm still using the 2018.4 and the font used in the results view makes the total number of rows impossible to read.

Luca

Greetings All,

I recently came across a workflow that has hundreds of tools and I need change a "variable" within several filter tools. There is prob 30-40 filters and they vary in what they filter.  A find and replace feature would be awesome, or even a simple find function that shows were the variable is located within a workflow/tool. Could use user constants but these workflows were already made when I joined and it would be more difficult.

So a feature similar to the MS Word feature of search/find/find all/replace/replace all would be great for the actual variables with the tools.

When Alteryx Designer launches, the splash screen forces itself in front of all other windows. For the 1 minute it takes to load it prevents me from doing other things.

Please allow it to be in the background when another application is selected or able to be minimized.

My organization requires users to change their active directory passwords every so often. That's fine. That does create an issue with changing passwords on all workflows that contain a tableau server publish, but that's not the real issue here.

What's more annoying is that once that password is changed, the data source name and project is lost. When updating multiple data sources across workflows (or within the same workflow) this becomes quite cumbersome and annoying. 

I know there are limitations on the partner side as this is technically a tableau controlled thing, but is there anything that can be done here?

I often copy/paste chunks of workflow and paste it into the same workflow (or a different one).  It always seems to paste just diagonally below the upper most left Tool.  This creates a real mess.  I'd like to be able to select a small area within the work area and have the chunk of workflow I'm pasting drop there - instead of on top of the existing build.

Hello All,

I received from an AWS adviser the following message:

_____________________________________________

Skip Compression Analysis During COPY
Checks for COPY operations delayed by automatic compression analysis.

Rebuilding uncompressed tables with column encoding would improve the performance of 2,781 recent COPY operations.
This analysis checks for COPY operations delayed by automatic compression analysis. COPY performs a compression analysis phase when loading to empty tables without column compression encodings. You can optimize your table definitions to permanently skip this phase without any negative impacts.

Observation

Between 2018-10-29 00:00:00 UTC and 2018-11-01 23:33:23 UTC, COPY automatically triggered compression analysis an average of 698 times per day. This impacted 44.7% of all COPY operations during that period, causing an average daily overhead of 2.1 hours. In the worst case, this delayed one COPY by as much as 27.5 minutes.

Recommendation

Implement either of the following two options to improve COPY responsiveness by skipping the compression analysis phase:
Use the column ENCODE parameter when creating any tables that will be loaded using COPY.
Disable compression altogether by supplying the COMPUPDATE OFF parameter in the COPY command.
The optimal solution is to use column encoding during table creation since it also maintains the benefit of storing compressed data on disk. Execute the following SQL command as a superuser in order to identify the recent COPY operations that triggered automatic compression analysis:
WITH xids AS (
SELECT xid FROM stl_query WHERE userid>1 AND aborted=0
AND querytxt = 'analyze compression phase 1' GROUP BY xid)
SELECT query, starttime, complyze_sec, copy_sec, copy_sql
FROM (SELECT query, xid, DATE_TRUNC('s',starttime) starttime,
SUBSTRING(querytxt,1,60) copy_sql,
ROUND(DATEDIFF(ms,starttime,endtime)::numeric / 1000.0, 2) copy_sec
FROM stl_query q JOIN xids USING (xid)
WHERE querytxt NOT LIKE 'COPY ANALYZE %'
AND (querytxt ILIKE 'copy %from%' OR querytxt ILIKE '% copy %from%')) a
LEFT JOIN (SELECT xid,
ROUND(SUM(DATEDIFF(ms,starttime,endtime))::NUMERIC / 1000.0,2) complyze_sec
FROM stl_query q JOIN xids USING (xid)
WHERE (querytxt LIKE 'COPY ANALYZE %'
OR querytxt LIKE 'analyze compression phase %') GROUP BY xid ) b USING (xid)
WHERE complyze_sec IS NOT NULL ORDER BY copy_sql, starttime;

Estimate the expected lifetime size of the table being loaded for each of the COPY commands identified by the SQL command. If you are confident that the table will remain under 10,000 rows, disable compression altogether with the COMPUPDATE OFF parameter. Otherwise, create the table with explicit compression prior to loading with COPY.

_____________________________________________

When I run the suggested query to check the COPY commands executed I realized all belonged to the Redshift bulk output from Alteryx.

Is there any way to implement this “Skip Compression Analysis During COPY” in alteryx to maximize performance as suggested by AWS?

Thank you in advance,

Gabriel

I have a process that sends out about 1,500 emails. Every once in a while, it will get stuck at some Percentage and I will have to eventually cancel the workflow, figure out how many emails were sent, and then skip that many emails in order to avoid sending duplicate emails. The process of figuring out how many were sent is currently taking the % of the tool at cancellation minus 50%(since that is where it starts), Multiplying it by 2, and then multiplying that % by the number of lines to get the approximate line of data where it froze up, and then reaching out to individuals to see if they received the email to narrow down exactly where the error occurred. 

Example: 60% - 50%= 10% * 2 = 20% * 1249 = 249.8.

This has been pretty accurate in the past, but obviously is not ideal. Is there no way for it to show us how many were sent even if we cancelled the workflow mid processing of the tool?