Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

While manually entering expresssions in tools say for example Formula tool, if an error occurs, apart from the error definition displayed below, there must be auto correct options available depending upon alteryx interpretation. It must provide suggestions to rectify the error in the expression.

Such functionality is present in other softwares and it would be great if alteryx add this too.

In trying to work with varying content and rules for extracting information, the regex tool requires a literal string.

The functions can accept a workflow parameter but I needed to parse out the results.

For now, I have only a few patterns but looking to handle a more general case.  Thanks

It would be nice to have the expression box (found in formula tools etc.) and the join selection (found on joins etc.) as interface tools.

The new 10.6 leaves all this empty space to the right of the "Connect" field and "Options"/"Preview" fields. This means I have to drag out my tab way farther than I used to in order to see the same amount of information... Can you go back to having these fields stretch all the way to the right of the frame? When you have huge workflows, every little bit of space really matters.

Wasted Space!

Look at all that empty space!

I would love the to get back the ability to use WHERE clauses in the custom SQL to manage the data that gets imported from xlsx files. I can currently use the legacy driver but would like to have that added in for the current driver.

The file geodatabase reader is very cumbersome especially when navigating through a server directory. Can this be fixed or reworked?

It would be awesome if we could perform a 'create or replace' on an excel file with the output tool. The tableau TDE extract has an output option that says "Overwrite existing extract file (Create if does not exist)" If the excel file format option could have this same output option that would help out a ton!

The Directory Tool would be more useful if it could output the file extension as a separate field.

Currently excel files with top lines frozen do not read into Alteryx. This causes extra manual work, as a default setting for the output of one of my reports freezes the top line automatically.

Could the workflow name be retained when browsing for a YXZP save location instead of blanking it out as soon as you change folders?

Give the option in the tags properties to place the tag to the right of the tool. 

Have this be the default setting for Browse and Output tools or others that would normally be found at the end of a workflow. This allows the detail to remain and a cleaner view of the module.

When you have multiple workflows open in tabs and want to rearrange them, it's kind of hard to tell where the tab is. In Firefox and Chrome, as examples, the tabs move around as you drag - if you drag a tab left, the tab next to it will slide to the right. In Tableau, a line with an arrow appears in the location where the tab will be dropped. But in the Alteryx interface, the new location of the tab is not so obvious. A line or something at the destination point would be great!

Please ignore this post! I just discovered the amazing dynamic input tool can accomplish exactly this 🙂

This is no longer a "good future idea" but simply a solution already provided by AlterYX!  Thanks AlterYX!

Hello everyone. I think it would be incredibly helpful if all input tools (database / csv files / etc..)  had an input stream for data processing.  

This input stream would cause the tool to fire if and only if at least 1 row of "data" was passed into it.  This would work similar to the Email tool, as the input would simply not fire if no records in the workflow were passed into it.

By making this change, AlterYX could then control the flow of execution when reading / writing to database tables and files without having to bring in Macros or chained applications.

The problem with having to use batch macros and block until done to solve this problem is that it obfuscates your workflow logic, making it much harder for another developer to look at the workflow and understand what is happening.   Below is an extremely simply example of where this is necessary.

Example: any time you are doing a standard dimentional warehouse ETL.

Step #1: Write data to a table with an auto-incremented Key

Step #2: Read back from that table to get the Key that you just generated

Step #3:  use that key as a foreign key in your primary Fact table.

Without this enhancment you need at least 2 different workflows (chained apps or marco's) to accomplish the task above, however with this simple enhancement the above task could be accomplished in 3 tools.

This task is the basic building block of almost all ETL's so this enhancement would be very useful in my opinion.

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.

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").

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.