Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Would be nice to have a way to cache-uncache all inputs or a selected group of tools.  Caching and Uncaching workflows with many input tools or slow data-read tools gets to be a bit cumbersome.  Would be a nice QoL improvement :)

I looked around for something like this but didn't see a solution, so thought I'd recommend.  Please let me know if something like this exists already natively in designer desktop.

Hi all,

I think it would be great if Alteryx could send calendar invites in Outlook (and perhaps other calendaring systems) like it sends emails.

Currently the only way to accomplish this is to send it as an attached ICS file on a regular email.  

In my use case, rather than auto-populating a Shared Mailbox/calendar, someone has to go into the inbox, the email has to be opened then the ICS has to be clicked on to interact with.  

There are ways in Outlook to send an item like this but have it appear automatically without the end user ever seeing the actual invite.  (Our Company adds holidays and other important dates in this manner)

So basically I want this functionality available in Alteryx to do the same.  I have posted about it before in the discussions threads, but basically right now we enter our time in HR system, then have to manually enter the same info on our personal calendar in Outlook and any team calendar whether it be a SharePoint calendar, a group calendar in Outlook etc.

If Alteryx had the ability to send these types of invites, employees could enter the info in our HR system then Alteryx can get the data feed and automatically populate the other calendar (whichever type it may be).

Hopefully this gets some likes.  

Although this could also effect ANY formula, the RegEx tool does not support a flag for Multiline.  Often incoming data contains multiple lines of data and the user must replace new lines and carriage returns with a space or other delimiter in order to operate a regular expression on all of the data.

RegEx has a multiline flag (for Alteryx it would be a checkbox) that allows it to handle each line separately.

domain.com

test.com

site.com

if these are individual records, then \w+\.com$ works wonderfully,  if these are all contained in a single EXCEL cell, then you need to write to community to figure out what to do.

Cheers,

Mark

To help in adding tools quickly it would be useful to have some form of quick keys or maybe somewhat a combination (enhancement) of search bar / right-click. 

So here's the pic and a 1,000 words

And here's the blurb

The idea being that hitting a key whilst mouse is over the canvas would display the search bar at the mouse cursor position. Once you've selected the tool you want it hitting return[+shift] adds it to the canvas either:

• In a dragged (mouse down) state to help for final position and automated connections and then a final left-click to add to canvas or,
• Just add it at that position.

This would also speed up adding tools as you could include things like 'Recent' or 'Favorites'. I grant you that you could just incorporate this into the search dialog but save you a bit of eye movement. Don't get me wrong the search bar is great but it's the lots of drag-drop that can slow things down a bit. 

On the UNION tool, allow for deselecting columns that aren't relevant.  Leave the union exactly as it is, and you could go into the manual configuration. Align the columns just as you would in the manual configuration.  The addition would be that you have the behavior like you see in a join tool where you could deselect C1, C2, C3.... Cx. 

Too many times I have a union and there are fields I simply don't even want to bring in, but then have to add a select tool right after in order to remove them. 

Why Alteryx does not have an easier way (Drag, Drop, Click and Run) to calculate moving averages with a specified lookback? There are so many things that one has to adjust before calculating moving averages for a simple numeric column.

I understand that there is a CrewMacros called "Moving Summarize" which does that, but it has a limitation of a lookback period of 100. What if you have data with millions of rows where you need a lookback in 1000s then there is no easy solution to this.

Does anyone know that this configuration is in the making? Moving Average is bread and butter for analysts like me. I am urging Alteryx developers to build this tool asap. and it will bring lot of comfort to my troubled soul.

Maybe i am clearly missing something here, please enlighten me!

Thank you!

• moving or renaming a file after importing it
• deleting a file after importing it
• moving or copying a file after successfully exporting it
• writing a temporary file (i.e. batch file for RunCommand tool), then deleting it when finished

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

I really like that I can scroll -- using my mouse -- between the tool groups in Alteryx. Can this UX be added to scroll through my workflows? I usually have a bunch open, and this functionality would be awesome to have there, too! 🙂

PS: Yes, I know I can do Ctrl+Tab...but mouse scrolling is more efficient.

Hi there,

When creating a database connection - Alteryx's default behaviour is to create an ODBC DSN-linked connection.

However DSN-linked connections do not work on a large server env - because this would require administrators to create these DSNs on every worker node and on every disaster recovery node, and update them all every time a canvas changes.

they are also not fully safe becuase part of the configuration of your canvas is held in the DSN - and so you cannot just rely on the code that's under version control.

So:

Could we add a feature to Alteryx Designer that allows a user to expand a DSN into a fully-declared conneciton string?

In other words - if the connection string is listed as 

- odbc:DSN=DSNSnowFlakeTest;UID=Username;PWD=__EncPwd1__|||NEWTESTDB.PUBLIC.MYTESTTABLE

Then offer the user the ability to expand this out by interrogating the ODBC Connection manager to instead have the fully described connection string like this:
odbc:DRIVER={SnowflakeDSIIDriver};UID=Username;pwd=__EncPwd1__;authenticator=Snowflake;WAREHOUSE=compute_wh;SERVER=xnb27844.us-east-1.snowflakecomputing.com;SCHEMA=PUBLIC;DATABASE=NewTestDB;Staging=local;Method=user

NOTE: This is exactly what users need to do manually today anyway to get to a DSN-less conneciton string - they have to craete a file DSN to figure out all the attributes (by opening it up in Notepad) and then paste these into the connection string manually.

Thanks all 

Sean

We aren't getting a huge amount of help from support on this, so I'm posting this idea to raise awareness for the product teams responsible for the Salesforce connectors and the embedded Python environment.

This post from user Dubya describes the issue in detail:

I have a workflow with several salesforce tools in it, which works fine on my machine. But we need another alteryx user in our office to be able to access, run and maintain the workflow too, via their machine and copy of alteryx designer.

However we're finding that the salesforce inputs and outputs can only be authenticated on one machine at a time.

When the other new user opens the original workflow from the shared network location, the salesforce tools display an error "Salesforce Input (1): {'error': 'invalid_grant', 'error_description': 'authentication failure'}" and the tools fail to load any data. But we can see the full query in the tool and we can even set the custom query option and validate the query successfully, which suggests the source is being correctly connected to and queried, but we just cant run the tool.

The only way to run the tool successfully is to change the credentials and re-authenticate the tool. However this then de-authenticates the original machine, and when we open up the workflow on there and try to run ying the workflow brings back the same error.

We've both tried this authentication back and forth on our own machines and each time one of us re-authenticates, it de-authenticates the other, leading to it triggering the error.

Can someone help explain what's going on and how to fix it, as this doesn't bode well for our collaboration.

We're both running:
The latest build of version of designer 2021.2 (original machine also running desktop automation)
Salesforce Input Tool v4.1.0
Salesforce Output Tool v1.3.0

My response here identifies that this is a problem for our organization as well:

We're experiencing the same issue. It appears to be related to how the tool handles password and security token decryption. I've found that when you modify the related registry entry from "true" to "false", you can see in the tool's xml that the encrypted password and security token are still in there. I'm not sure what else is going on behind the scenes beyond that, but that ought to be addressable by the product teams handling the Salesforce connectors and the Python installation embedded in Designer.

The only differences in our environment compared to u/Dubya's are that we're running on 2020.4 and attempting to use Salesforce Input Tool v4.2.4.

This is a must have for anyone who needs the ability to share workflows among multiple users. This is part of a series of problems that these updated connectors have been plagued with since introducing them years ago, and no one at Alteryx seems to care enough to truly fix the problems. Salesforce is a core system for our organization, so having tools that utilize the latest version of Salesforce's APIs is very important to us. The additional features that the Input tool provides are welcome, but these bugs have to be sorted out in order for us to extract any kind of value out of them. If the "deprecated" Salesforce tools were ever to be removed from Designer while there are issues with the "new" connectors, we would have no choice other than to never upgrade Designer/Server again and be forced to look for another product to serve as our ETL platform.

Please, please, please address this.

Can we have a User Setting that allows the users to select if Alteryx should prevent the computer to go into Sleep or Hibernate mode when running a workflow?

Hi all,
Something really interesting I found - and never knew about, is there are actually in-DB predictive tools. You can find these by having a connect-indb tool on the canvas and dragging on one of the many predictive tools.

For instance:
boosted model dragged on empty campus:

Boosted model tool deleted, connect in-db tool added to the canvas:

Boosted Model dragged onto the canvas the exact same:

This is awesome! I have no idea how these tools work, I have only just found out they are a thing. Are we able to unhide these? I actually thought I had fallen into an Alteryx Designer bug, however it appears to be much more of a feature.

Sadly these tools are currently not searchable for, and do not show up under the in-DB section. However, I believe these need to be more accessible and well documented for users to find.

Cheers,
TheOC

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

When we edit formula tool, only first expression is expanded. I prefer all expressions are expanded as a default. When I want to shrink them, I want to 'expand all' icon like attached snap shot. This icon is toggled same as each expression's expand icon('expand all' <-> 'shrink all')

It would be very useful to be able to search the field by typing the name instead of scrolling up and down looking for it among a few hundred fields.

Currently if one wants to compare different alteryx files or different versions of the same file - one needs to compare the XML files. If you are not very familiar with navigating XML, this poses a risk as one may not be able to identify all changes.

It would be a great addition to Alteryx to integrate Alteryx with Git, Subversion, CVS, Mercurial, and GitHub as this tool is becoming the go-to tool for data processing for data analysts and even programmers.

This additional functionality to compare previous versions (diff) and also to merge alteryx workflows if two people are working on the same workflow, and also to easily see what changes have been committed/ made by other developers and when would make Alteryx a much more powerful tool and would open doors to other types of users, as essentially you can run anything through Alteryx.

When using the formula tool -- one of the nice features is that when you start typing in a function or variable -- the tool will show formulas/variables that begin with that letter and keep changing as you type in more letters. I believe this is called predictive typing.

However, this does not happen in tools like multi-row or multi-field where a user would have to search for functions and variables if they weren't sure what they are.

Can predictive typing be added to the multi-row and multi-field tools? If I want to take it further, any tool that allows a user to use the formula functionality should be able to see predictive typing. 

Thanks,

Seth Moskowitz

Hello Alteryx Community,

If like me, you've been developing in Alteryx for a few years, or if you find yourself as a new developer creating solutions for your organization - chances are you'll need to create some form of support procedure or automation configuration file at some point. In my experience, the foundation of these files is typically explaining to users what each tool in the workflow is doing, and what transformations to the data are being made. These are typically laborious to create and often created in a non-standardized way.

The proposal: Create Alteryx Designer native functionality to parse a workflow's XML and translate the tool configurations into a step by step word document of a given workflow.

Although the expectation is that after something like this is complete a user may need to add contextual details around the logic created, this proposal should eliminate a lot of the upfront work in creating these documents.

Understand some workflow may be very complex but for a simple workflow like the below, a proposed output could be like the below, and if annotations are provided at the tool level, the output could pick those up as well:

Workflow Name: Sample

1) Text Input tool (1) - contains 1 row with data across columns test and test1. This tool connects to Select Tool (2).

2) Select Tool (2) - deselects "Unknown" field and changes the data type of field test1 to a Double. This tool connects to Output (3).

3) Output (3) - creates .xlsx output called test.xlsx