Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi,

Would be helpful to have an Input and Output Tool for ProjectOnline like the SharePoint and OneDrive Tools.

This way we can read the projects in a tabular form and automate our project management tasks.

Thank you.

In a controlled environment, there is a need to control promotion of assets to prod with basic controls to ensure that someone has tested, signed off, that it meets certain quality standards (like "no warnings", "no Run Commands", "all reports must have company logo on top left" etc).

However, at the moment there doesn't appear to be a promotion process in Alteryx to control this flow, so assets are copied across by an admin.   This is very manual and error prone (many times we've had the wrong assets copied), and it also means that this process is controlled in a workflow outside of Alteryx (e.g. A JIRA queue or similar).

Could we request that Alteryx look into a production promotion process, which allows the admin team to perform any required checks (including automated checks), and then pushes this into prod stamped with the designer's Kerberos rather than the sys admin?

Joint idea with @avinashbonu @DamianA  @BenBu

When you start using DCM - you may have existing canvasses which use regular old connection strings which you want to migrate to DCM.

Currently (in 2023.1.1.123) - when you select "Use Data Connection Manager" - it shreds the configuration of your input tool which makes it difficult to just convert these from an existing connection to a DCM connection

The only way to then make sure that you don't lose any configuration on the tool then is to use the XML editing functionality of the tools and copy across your old configuration.

Could you please add the capability to keep my current tool configuration, but just change from using a regular old connection string to using DCM?

Many thanks 

Sean

cc: @wesley-siu @_PavelP 

I will start off with a story. I have built a process to manage batch API requests. It's an iterative process that checks to see where the export is at by calling an API and then returning some status. It will run and wait and run and wait until the export is ready to be downloaded. However sometimes, the jobs don't finish and a status returns something like "failed" or "cancelled". When this is the case, I have my process (which is a little bit batch macro) kicks off an error message, using the nifty error message tool. After some time I noticed that it was a PAIN to go back and figure out which of my requests failed and I decided that I need to add some messaging around where this was failing, so I could do some easy auditing. So I go back into my tool and much to my chagrin, I cannot pass variables into the message section. I would expect it to have worked something like this:

"Record "+[#2]+" is not 'A'"

Can we please get a change to this. It would save a lot of time and energy if we could create a dynamic error message option.

TL;DR Please allow us to use formulas in the "If expression is true, display error message:" settings area.

My request is to allow navigation to specific System settings without having to click through the entire process to get to the specific section of the settings you want to change.

We have lots of tools that create new column(s) from the Inputs, e.g., Generate Rows. It'd be very nice if the new column(s) is/are highlighted in the Output. This makes it a lot easier for users when developing the workflow.

If a tool fails, there should be a way to customise the error message. Currently a way to do it: log all messages in a file, read that file with another workflow, then customise the messages (Alteryx workflow error handling - Alteryx Community). However, there should be a more convenient solution. We should be able to:

- Find/replace parts of a message.

- Specify, which tools messages to modify.

- Change the message type.

- Change the order of the messages in the results window, to prioritise the critical ones.

- Pick which messages cannot be hidden by "xxx more errors not displayed".

This would especially help for macros, as sometimes we have a specific tool failing within a macro and producing a non-user friendly message.

We are using silent Alteryx installation and would like to package license activation within the package. We do not want to expose Alteryx license key to the users to prevent them from sharing it with someone else. Requesting to add a flag/setting to allow admins to not display license key under Options>Manage Licenses.

Related request https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Is-it-possible-to-hide-the-serial-key-...

Currently the install of AIS is tied to a specific version of Designer. However due to the feature changes being brought to AIS it would be great to be able to upgrade the AIS install separate to the version of Designer.

It might be that this is only possible for a certain number releases, due to underlying dependencies such as python version, but it would be great for example that I could get the newer AIS features without needing to upgrade Designer (which is set by IT policy).

Currently the InDB tools require to select a DSN that is defined on your computer.

This makes any workflow which uses a DSN incredibly painful to deploy to the server, since the DSN needs to be created on every worker node and for a large server environment this can  mean creating DSN entries on 6+ worker nodes in prod plus prod server plus dev/UAT environment plus dev/UAT worker nodes.

Could we please change the InDB tools to default to DSN-less connections, where the connection persists the connection details in-line so that it can deploy to the server without a DSN setup (since all connection details are contained within the connection string)?

Thank you

Sean

CC: @rijuthav @jithinmony @HengHe @RajK @ydmuley @revathi @Deeksha @MPistone @Ari_Fuller @Arianna_Fuller @JoshKushner @samnelson @avinashbonu @Sunder_Sriram @Rahul_Thakur @Rahul_Singh

Many files I use are in .xlsb format. 

Would like to direclty query Hyperion Cube / Essbase data source directly - please propose functionality in next release or add a user macro to the gallery.  Thanks -cb

We see canvasses every day where dozens fields are brought into a canvas or a macro, but never used - and this just creates slowness for no good benefit.

Given that one of the selling features of Alteryx is the speed of processing  - could we look at three improvements to the Alteryx engine & designer:

• easiest: Keep track of every field brought in / created - and if they are not used in an output, then throw a warning at the end of the execution process
  • For example - you bring in fields a,b,c - you create field d and e during the flow in formula tools
  • Field d is never used as an input to any filters or formulae - and it doesn't appear on any output - so it's just waste
  • Field a and b are part of the output, so they are fine
  • Field c is never used at all - so that's just waste.
  • Field e is used to filter the records before output - so this one is fine.
  • So we've immediately found 2 fields that we can eliminate and make this canvas faster
• Medium: Ignore the unused fields in the execution engine
• Hardest: Tell the users that their field is unused in Alteryx Designer by doing a lineage analysis of the tools, just like software environments like Visual Studio do.    This may require a change to the engine & to designer 'cause we would need to make each tool capture the full detail of the fields that they know in their configuration in order to do this trace.

The Download tool allows for encrypted SFTP connections, but I recently discovered (the hard way) that the Alteryx capabilities are incomplete and the algorithms not fully up to date. Just adding an additional updated algorithm or two to the 4 available for message authentication would bring it up to date.

As back story, our firm has onboarded a new SFTP server, and all of a sudden my Alteryx SFTP workflows didn't work when I pointed them at the new server. After going back and forth extensively with the helpful folks at Alteryx, we discovered there's a gap in Alteryx's current capabilities.

Basically, the Alteryx download tool can use the old encryption algorithm and half of the new version, and half of the new version is like having half a bridge.

Up until 2017, SHA-1 was the most common hash used for cryptographic signing. Since then it's been slowing getting supplanted by SHA-2.

Alteryx can use SHA-2 for key exchanges, but not for message authentication (the HMAC algorithm). The internet seems to swear up and down that the old SHA-1 algorithm works just fine for message authentication, but I don't have the luxury of caring about that. All I know is that as of March 2019 the SFTP server I have to connect with has deprecated Alteryx's SHA-1 algorithm as being too out of date and only allows the new SHA-2 message authentication. 

Alteryx CAN use the up to date SHA-2 for key exchange (GOOD, halfway there!) but can only use (old) ways of doing message authentication that do NOT include SHA-2 (NOT GOOD!). Please add updated SHA-2 algorithms (hmac-sha2-512, hmac-sha2-256) to the HMAC mix too!

Many thanks,

Josiah

Hello - The Input Data tool allows you to import a list of sheet names, but it doesn't let you import a list of named ranges. I'm proposing the Input Data tool allows you to import a list of named ranges for as many Excel file formats as possible. Right now when I go to import say an xlsx or xlsm the Input Data tool allows me to select from a drop down of named ranges, so it seems the functionality is already there. I am not aware of a reasonable approach to getting a list of named ranges other than opening up the Excel file as XML, specifically xl/workbook.xml - however, I've ran into issues with this approach providing sheet names instead of named ranges (unsure why but I posted about this here https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/How-do-I-get-a-list-of-all-named-range...)

If we were able to import a list named ranges I think the benefits are obvious. The one that really stands out to me is that if you have a standard when creating named ranges (for example "prefix_name1, prefix_name2" etc... you could search for specific prefixes to find the named ranges available. In a large portfolio of models deploying such a standard the total universe of named ranges might not be known ahead of time except the prefix to search. I'm curious if this resonates with others.

Thank you

Hi there,

Just got a new 4k UHD monitor, and found that Alteryx Designer doesn't scale well in default settings in Windows.    Fonts are blurry but icons are the right size.

If instead you change compatabilty mode to allow the application to force scaling, then the fonts and icons end up all different sizes.

Could you change the fonts and icons to scale gracefully in Windows 10 to full 4k UHD HDR - especially on the large size monitors (30 inch plus)?

Shot 1: default mode - blurry text - badly scaled by Windows 10.    It's not easy to see here because the image is small - but all the text is blurry like a badly blown up BMP file.

Shot 2: Override Windows 10 DPI scaling and set to "Application" mode

You can see in the picture below that text is now super-sharp but the the play button; save button are all tiny; the fonts are different sizes (look in the properties tab on the left) etc.

I use the field name auto-complete feature whenever I can. One issue with it, however, is when there are parentheses in a field name. After auto-completing the field name, Alteryx highlights a portion of the field name after the first parenthesis. This is not ideal as I typically expect the cursor to be at the end of the field name so I may continue to type. In this scenario, unfortunately, I would begin to type over my field name and the expression gets messed up. 

For example, as shown below, I begin to type "st" and then hit the tab button to complete the field name in my expression.

In this case, because my field name has parentheses in it, however, some of the field name remains highlighted and the cursor does not go to the end of the right bracket, as one would expect.

If I were to continue typing at this point, the highlighted portion of the expression would get erased and replaced. 

Field names that do not contain parentheses continue to function correctly as shown below. 

Hello,

My issue is very easy to solve. I want to use the generic ODBC in memo for a specific base (monetdb here but it isn't important).

I try to ouput a flow in a MonetDB SQL database. As you can see, I only take very simple field types

However I get this error message :

Error: Output Data (3): Error creating table "exemplecomparetable.toto": [MonetDB][ODBC Driver 11.44.0][MONETDB_SAU]Type (datetime) unknown in: "create  table "exemplecomparetable"."toto" ("ID" int,"Libellé" char(50),"Date d"
syntax error in: ""Prix""
CREATE  TABLE "exemplecomparetable"."toto" ("ID" int,"Libellé" char(50),"Date de Maj" datetime,"Prix" float,"PMP" float)

Reminder : SQL is an ISO Norm. Default type should follow it, not the MS SQL configuration. Interoperability is key

Links to : for in-db
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Generic-In-database-connection-please-stop-i...

Issues constated : MonetDB
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Output-Data-date-is-now-datetime-makin...

Informix: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Alteryx-date-data-type-error-trying-to...


Best regards,

Simon