Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi 

In all its simplicity, I would like to be able to group by Month based of dates:

To acieve something like this:

Hello all, just another little QoL suggestion!

There have been a few occasions recently where I've been adding some Report Text to a Rendered output and have needed to reference the current date. However, when building a quick formula to do this, I've first needed to add a dummy field within a Text Input tool so that the Formula tool doesn't error due to no incoming connection.

I know I can create a branch off from the main dataset and just use that, but for something simple like this, I find it cleaner to isolate and generate it in this way and so it'd be great if - for situations like this - the Formula tool's input anchor was optional (obviously only when using it to create new fields).

There are likely many other examples where you may want to build a simple workflow (or branch of one), starting with a quick field generated within the Formula tool itself. However, just thought I'd raise this with a scenario I've encountered a couple of times recently.

Cheers!

It would be great if I could see my save history in the debug menu. Currently it looks like this:

I'm not asking to be able to undo saves, I just want to be able to see where the workflow was saved within this menu so that I can easily see what actions have been taken since my last save. 

Currently, you have two choices for Auto Configure while working on workflows:

• Auto Configure switched on: After every change, the configurations (= columns) of tools are re-evaluated for the entire workflow (at least, this is how it feels like).
• Auto Configure switched off: Configuration of tools is only re-evaluated when pressing F5 (or when using the clipboard).

Pros and Cons of both:

• Auto Configure switched on:
  • Configuration in each tool is always accurate so that working on tools is straight forward.
  • Editing workflows gets annoyingly slow for complex workflows, especially when data sources from network locations or macros are used. Sometimes I have to wait a minute between two mouse clicks.
• Auto Configure switched off:
  • Editing workflows is faster (at least in theory).
  • I have to press F5 all the time (because I nearly always change output configuration of tools when working on workflows). Even after pressing F5, Alteryx does not always succeed in calculating the correct configuration of a tool.
  • Working with clipboard, loading, saving workflows is still slow.

I would love to have something in between all, kind of an intelligent Auto Configure with following features:

• F5 still starts full configuration evaluation.
• Configuration of input tools is frozen (unless F5 pressed) so that no network access is started during editing the workflow.
• Check for update of macro files is switched off (unless F5 pressed).
• After changing a tool configuration, either a flag is set that this tool was changed but no re-assessment of the workflow configuration is run (approach 1), or only downstream configuration is updated (approach 2). Whether approach 1 or 2 is started could be decided on various criteria: Number of downstream tools (or other measure of complexity), how many "change flags" according to approach 1 are already set, etc.
• If approach 1 was chosen: If you edit a tool which is downstream to another one for which the change flag is set, re-evaluate only the portion of the workflow between the previously changed upstream tool and the tool supposed to be edited.
• Using Clipboard should not invoke full re-configuration.
• Before saving a file, full re-configuration needs to be run (as already now).

This idea will add quite some complexity into the logic of Auto Configure but should have quite some potential to speed up editing workflows because network access and number of re-evaluated tools in each editing step will be reduced.

Hello all,

We all love pretty much the in-memory multi-row formula tool. Easy to use, etc. However, the indb counterpart does not exist.

I see that as a wizard that would generate windowing functions like LEAD or LAG
https://mode.com/sql-tutorial/sql-window-functions/

Best regards,

Simon

Variations of this concept have been discussed in community since 2016.  Alteryx is awesome right up to the point where we need to see our files in ArcGis Pro or ArcGis Online.  The shapefile is painful.  We have to rename every field in ArcGis Pro with over about 10 characters because all of the field names are truncated.  Yes- you can make a shapefile and a text file from Alteryx, then join in ArcGis Pro, but its a million clicks and its not a good solution.  Shapefiles are limited to 2GB, which is not great either, but the field truncation is super frustrating.

In fact- rather than making an output file, I bet it would be easier to make a tool that connects to the ESRI API.  Everyone gets stuck on passing the spatial field because its like a giant text field with all of the instructions to create a point, line, or polygon.

Does anyone have the software engineering chops to make this happen? :)

It would be cool if we could just drag the normal input tool and drop it on the Dynamic Input, so we could set the template, and save the clicker finger....  It would be even cooler if Alteryx didnt need a template, but thats a different story.  This seems like an easy attainable feature upgrade.  Keep rocking, Alteryx!

Hi Team,

Hope you are well. I am currently tasked with downloading the contracts from SAP for my analysis.

Is it possible to develop an app or automation which can go to SAP asks for user/Pwd and download the contracts/PDFs to a specific folder?

Please let me know your thoughts,

Thanks,

Sri

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.

Hi Team,

Context - I have bunch of documents/pdf or word document. The management would like to get the summarized view of the document / paragraph . Is it possible to develop some App which can take the document/ paragraph and summarize it in a line or two.

Please let me know,

Thanks,

Sri

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).

Hi everyone! I have been trying to find a way to do this without creating a new idea, but I have decided to make it an official 'Idea' to see if there is anyone else that might appreciate a feature like this (or has found there own way to do it!)

Do your workflows look like this...

but you wish they could look like this?

Well... they can with your help!

Okay, I might be crazy...but its worth a shot.

While I understand this is an extremely niche issue, in my experience, it can become very difficult to trace the data through unmanaged lines in large workflows. I think it will be great to cable manage canvas lines so workflows are easier to follow. Heck, while I am already at it, I think it we should all start calling these canvas lines cables... They don't carry electricity, but they sure do carry data!

Here is an example I created in Alteryx using select tools and containers:

There are circumstances where the python install section of Alteryx fails - however it does not report failure - in fact it reports success, and the only way to check if the Jupyter install fails is to check the Jupyter.log to look for error messages.

Can we add two features to Alteryx install / platform to manage this:

- If the installer for Python fails - please can you make this explicit in feedback to the user

- Can we also add a way for the user to repair the Python install - either using standard MSI Repair functionality, or a utility or a menu system in Designer.

Thank you 

Sean

Ability to color the connector lines to symbolize a path or data. This would help when you have multiple sources into a Join to determine that a path is still the same set of data when you have multiple paths created.

I am working with complex workflows which use multiple files as input, located on network drives. Input tools are Input Data, Directory, Wildcard Input, Wildcard XLSX Input (from CReW macros).

Regularly, I experience very slow Designer when working on the workflows (Window freezes for quite some time), especially when working from home. Switching off Auto Configure did not really help because I the column list sometimes does not converge even after pressing F5 multiple times, and when actively working on workflows, I have to press F5 all the time...

To improve this issue, I would like to propose a "Disable Auto Configure of File Inputs" which would not watch the loaded files but still would update the configurations downstream. This could include to not check automatically whether Macro files on network drives have changed. F5 could be used to update all configurations manually.

I am working with complex workflows which use multiple files as input, located on network drives. Input tools are Input Data, Directory, Wildcard Input, Wildcard XLSX Input (from CReW macros).

Regularly, I experience very slow Designer when working on the workflows, and slow progress when running the tools mentioned above, especially when working from home. Switching off Auto Configure did not really help because I the column list sometimes does not converge even after pressing F5 multiple times, and when actively working on workflows, I have to press F5 all the time...

In order to speed up both working on workflows and running the workflows, I would like to propose a function "Cache all File Inputs" which loads and caches all file inputs at once. To achieve this state, I now have Cache and Run workflow once per every file input.

Hello!
I like to annotate my workflows when finished, and it can be a bit of a pain to add more and more comment tools by searching for them, or going through the current right-click menu:

What would be nice is the option to right click anywhere on the canvas, and have the option of 'add comment', similar to how we have the option for 'add container' when selecting tools on the canvas.

Cheers!

Hi,

I would love it if; when I select cells/ columns or anything really, from the results window (see pic), that it shows me a number count for what I selected please.

Thank you! 😁

A simple quality of life improvement that I would love, is the ability to rename the output of the transpose tool in its configuration, rather than only having 'Name' and 'Value' 

Would just let me drop the renaming of these fields afterwards :)