Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

When attempting to connect to an oracle database, if the connection is unsuccesful, nothing happens so you just sit and stare and wait for the SQL window to pop up.  It would be helpful if there was an error message to tell you that the connection was unsuccesful.

I often find when building a big workflow that I need to cancel its running in order to tweak something, but I still want to know which element was making it slow/crashing the workflow.

What would be useful in this circumstance is for the performance profiling to work even on partially finished (e.g. cancelled) workflows. It could just display a message reminding that this is a percentage of things that have run so far.

Please provide an option to have a the caption of a tool container sent to log/results after all items within it have been processed.

This is an interface issue but I wish Alteryx can allow user to scroll across the ribbon toolbar (e.g. In/Out, Prep, Join, Spatial tools...) when the toolbar is active.

That is, for example, when I click on "Transform" and notice my tool is not there, I can quickly scroll my mouse to move to other toolsets. Microsoft Office is a best practice for this and I think this will make it much efficient to locate tools.

When using the Transpose tool I'm pivoting out networks names to column headings then I want to populate those fields with an "X".  To do this I have to first create a column first with an "X" in it and populated the various Networks columns with that.

How about another drop-down that says something like "I'll key the value I want to populate the fields with" and I can key "X" or "Y", etc.

It's possible I just don't know enough about the tool but I can't see how to do this other than my way.

Often when working on problems posed by other people, they provide a sample table of data.

Would love a trivial way to copy from the Community to Alteryx.

Example:

If I want to create the 'Clean Equipment ID" I would have to use a complicated RegEx expression. Wouldnt it be easier for the end-user to have a function to do so? Like Exclude(string,character)?

In this case it could be: exclude([equipment id],"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ") and if I wanted just letters it could be exclude([equipment id],"0123456789").

For most of our "Production" mode, we launch our apps with an xml file containing the parameter send to the app.

We would like to have the path of this file in the Engine Constant.

It would be very helpful to have a SOQL Edit textbox for the entire SOQL statement not just the WHERE clause.   This would allow us to select fields based on parent or child relationships to the table as well.

When working on the Weekly Challenge #108, I was trying to design a non-macro solution.

I ended up settling on the Generate Rows tool and was trying to find a way to generate rows until I had reached or exceeded the maximum density, however, I ran into an issue where I'd always have one too few rows, since the final row I was looking for was the one that broke the condition I specified.

In order to get around this, I came up with the following solution:

Spoiler

 

Essentially, I just set my condition to twice that of the true threshold I was looking for. This worked because I was always doubling the current value in my Loop Expression, and so anything which broke the 'actual' condition I was looking for ([MaxDensity]), would necessarily also break the second condition if doubled again.

However, for many other loop expressions, this sort of solution would not work.

My idea is to include a checkbox which, when selected, would also generate the final row which broke the specified condition.

By adding such a checkbox, it would allow users to continue using the Generate Rows tool as they already do, but reduce the amount of condition engineering that users are required to do in order to get that one extra row they're looking for, and reduce the number of  potentially unseen errors in their workflows.

The idea is the ability to skip tools in a workflow. Check the attached example:

Input (TRX_TABLE): Contains transactional raw data (unstructured & uncleaned data)
Filter (TRX_DATE <= 90 days from TODAY): It only filters the data 90 days old from today. Works as an incremental data loader
If the filter tool is NOT SKIPPED the workflow loads the filtered data (incremental behavior)
If the filter tool is SKIPPED the workflow loads all the data (full behavior)
This way I can quickly switch between both modes for testing & production environments

Hello, I am very new to Alteryx, so my suggestion might appear elementary for the veteran-users. From the standpoint of adoptation by less technical people (moving from Excel to Alteryx), would it be possible to take common scenarios of Fuzzy Matching and automate them?

For example, if you have 2 databases and you want to match and clean them up, you have to have close to 10 steps, with sorting, adding unique identifiers, joining, fuzzy matching, etc. Just look at your video named "Fuzzy Matching" or other videos for Tableau+Alteryx. They idea is basic. If you know most common use cases and you have already developed a methodology for how to solve these cases, why not have them as part of the tools library?

Also, when matching, for example universities, wouldn't it be easier if all those common, aka appearing many times, words were automatically suggested to be removed from the "match". Example: University A and Univeristy B are two different Universities, but they share the common word "University". While it's important that this word is there, it is not the reason to pair these two together. Maually going through and identifying and typing these common words is an extra step. It would be much easier to have a pop list of these common words and the count of records in which they appear, sorted by the count, and a check box to include or exclude the words.

Thank you,

Olga

Link to the Fuzzy Matching video. Check Minute 9:41.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlZiM2YSCCY&index=13&list=PLfSLx4WE4q52YoGEzJEBalfNou6jfRTF0&nohtml5...

Hi,

I am sure that I can't be the only person that would be interested in an output tool that allows categorical fields on both axes.  THis would allow you to visualise the following example and I would suggest that this was either similar to the heatmap with boxes or the colour / size of the entry was determined by a third numerical value - such as 'Confidence' from the table below.  THere might be ways to extend the idea as well as having a fourth parameter that puts text in the box or another number but it would be useful and not too hard I am sure.

Many thanks in advance for considering this,

Peter

It may just be me, but after I upgraded to 2018.2, the Table/Query edit window doesn't take up the full window when I maximize the parent window. 

I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this, maybe it's just me.  See attached.

Hi everybody! As you can read here I had the necessity to insert a macro (publish to tableau server) at the end of a self-made app.

I have actually found 2 different ways to solve the problem:

1) Turn the macro into an app and use 2 chained apps.

2) Copy and paste tools (normal and interface) from the macro to my app.

Both solution work, but both require some (quite a lot to be honest) editing and re-work that actually is already done. It's kind of like to re-invent the wheel!

A quick way to merge 2 configuration interfaces would be really usefull.

When in the flow of designing a workflow, I often accidentally click on the help ? Icon on the side bar of the configuration window, thereby launching a browser window, taking me out if Alteryx and interrupting my flow. Would love to have some UX indication, perhaps a different color, that clicking on this icon will redirect the user out of Alteryx.

I am parsing retailer promotions and have two input strings:

1. take a further 10%
2. take an additional 10%

I am using the regex parse tool to parse out the discount value, using the following regex:

further|additional (\d+)%

When the input contains examples of both options (i.e 'further' and 'additional'), the tool only seems to parse the first one encountered.

E.g if I state the regex string as:

further|additional (\d+)%

It only parses line 1 above

And if I state the regex string as:

additional|further (\d+)%

It only parse line 2

We have to run the full workflow at a time, if you can please think of something like partial running of the workflow and also while designing the flow if we add new tools, we have to run the entire flow again. 
Why can't it hold the intermediate data to avoid re-running the entire code.

Create a standardized Mailbox application that could bolt onto Alteryx Server, to handle incoming attachments from sources like a Service Desk (Service Now for example) and other applications.

Essentially anything that regularly exports data in the form of an emailed attachments to which Alteryx could, using a series of predefined user rules and a designated email address, put those attachments into various directories ready for processing by automated Alteryx workflows.

This would save a huge amount of time as people currently have to manually drag and drop files. At least the on board Alteryx designers here haven't been able to come with a solution. Would also save any messy programming around systems like Outlook and bending any security issues within those systems. Many, many other applications have this simple feature built in to their products, especially service desks. I believe there would be a huge benefit to this very simple bolt on.