Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I am currently using alteryx to generate pdf reports and noticed there is no option to have multiple row headers. In my line of work i cant skip this as the end users insist on having it like they have always had it.

I definitely think this should be available as many of us like replicate canned reports which are otherwise in excel and hence see the need for such an option.

The following might give an example of the multi row header,

Also the ability to merge certain columns to create the above effect should be available.

There is duplicated action in the table tool to force the user decide the decimal places.

In the normal situation, all the data preparation process has been completed prior to the Table tool, we just want to leverage on this tool to format the header or incorporate conditional formatting. However, once the Table tool is connected and we have to re-configure the decimal places for all the numeric columns, the column names will be varied from year to year and it brings additional manual intervention to the workflow.

We recommend to provide flexibility for us to take the original upstream data source without changing the underlying data set.

Lack of tools in Alteryx to extract data from True PDF. The current set of tools (Computer Vision) only allow us to extract data from images which is not ideal for True PDF documents in terms of accuracy.

Please add a data validator workflow.

Suggested features will be the following:

1.  Add validation name and set the field/s of your data you want to validate. (it can have more than one validation name on one workflow)

2. On the selected validation(name). Add features that will check/validate the information below:

   A. Verify data type
   B. Contains Null
   C. Max and Min string length
   D. Allowed values only, else it will give you an error
   E. Regex expected to match and not allowed to match.

3. It can have two(2) outputs. One is True(which is match) and False(which is fail over/error).

It'd be great to have all DCM connections available in the Data connections window.

And when Use Data connection Manager (DCM) is ticked, The screen defaults to DCM Connection list. 

The Transpose In-db stands in the "Laboraty" for years now. I understand Alteryx invested some time and money to develop that but sadly we still can't use that tool for sensitive workflows. Did you get some bugs on it? Can you please correct it and make this tool an "official" tool?

Thanks

The Alteryx.Flexnetoperations.com  license management site needs major work.

On the View Licenses page it shows all licenses going back several years. A basic need is to show only licenses which haven't expired, but that is not an option.You cannot even sort on the expiration column while you can sort on most others columns.

The most simple need is to see a list of my current active license users - but I do't see a way to do that.

I tried an "Advanced Search" and chose  expiration date after 2019-10-29 and none of my licenses which expire in 2020 appear - I get a blank list.

Similarly on the administer machines page you cannot filter to hide expired licenses or even on the licenses column (which doesn't sort either).

The help link on the page doesn't bring you to help specific to that page but the general activation help front page. After several clicks I found this page:

https://help.alteryx.com/licensing/current/Administer/AdministerMachines.htm?tocpath=Administer%7C__...

But  the help is incomplete (doesn't list Machine types or the difference between Active and Inactive)

Also, there is no export capability - copy and pasting into Excel is a formatting headache as it brings in check-boxes.

Lots of room for improvement here.

Cheers,

Bob

P.S. I understand that work is being done on this, but an ETA would be greatly appreciated.

I've obviously been doing lots of work with APIs for this to be my second idea posted today which relates to an improved based on recent work with APIs, but I also believe this is wider reaching.

I've been using Alteryx now for over 4 years and always assumed implicit behaviour of the select tool, so would add a select tool as best practice into a workflow after input tools to catch any data type issues. However I discovered that only fields where you either change the data type, length or field name result in that behaviour being configured and subsequently ensured. I discovered this as part of API development where I had an input field which was a string e.g. 01777777. Placing a select tool after this shows this is a string data type, however if the input was changed to 11777777 the select tool changes to a numeric data type. Therefore downstream formulas such as concatenating two strings would fail.

The workaround to this is to change the select tool to string:forced, which is fine when you know about it, but I suspect that a large majority of users don't. Plus if you have something like 2022-01-26 which is recognised initially as a string, then the forced option will be string:forced, however if you wanted it to be date:forced you need to add a first select tool to change to date, and a second select tool to change to string:forced.

Therefore my suggestion is to add a checkbox option in the select tool to Force all field types, which would update the xml of the tool and therefore ensure what I currently assume would be implicit behaviour is actually implemented.

At the moment, in order for users in our organisation to run apps, they need to be added to permissions for the data connection for the server/DB the app uses (as we use Gallery connections for ease of collaboration within the Analytics team).

This is fine provided users running the apps do not have Alteryx Designer, however, we have users across the business who do use Designer - we don't always want these users having direct access to query the server/DB through designer just because they have the connection in order to run workflows on the Gallery. It's my understanding that at the moment this is necessarily the case, which is not ideal.

Would be great if we could grant permissions for users to use the connection to run apps in the Gallery without that enabling them to use that connection in Designer to query the DB however they want.

When developing and/or troubleshooting workflows, I frequently disable the outputs using the checkbox in the Runtime configuration settings to speed up the workflow and prevent sending emails and/or overwriting data in the output sources... however, 9/10 times I forget to turn off this checkbox when I save my workflow back up to the Gallery. This results in countless emails from users to the tune of "I ran the workflow successfully, but there was no output?" 🙂

Would love love love to see some sort of warning notification (similar to the ones that already shown for data sources etc.) when saving to the Gallery if the "Disable All Tools that Write Output" option is selected in the Runtime settings.

Thank you!!

NJ

In order to debug a call to a REST API - it is often necessary to take the web call, and pop this into a web browser. Can you add a second output to a RestAPI tool (a derivative of the Download tool) that has a second output that provides the full web call that was made, including the full parameterised URL. This would make it MUCH easier to debug rest API calls.

cc: @TashaA

Similar to this idea https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Download-tool-Request-and-Response-details/i...

except my preference would be to pull Rest API calls into a more specific tool and give a second output for the responses

Could we please change the Interactive Chart tool, to:

• recognize when upstream types have changed and reconfigure (in the case of numerical types marked as string)
• For line charts - sort the values in order of the X value

Sample Flow - derivation of challenge 201:

Issue 1:

- The first interactive chart on this flow has no sorting at all performed by the charting tool - this may be due to the fact that the X & Y axes are in string fields.   Generally line charts would attempt to sort both the axes and the values (where the values should order according to the X axis).   Please can you add a default sort anyway?

Issue 2:

- If you then change the data types on these fields to be numeric - the charting tool still does not sort them until you reconfigure the tool manually
- REquest: please can you get the tool to remember the data types, so that it can prompt you; or even better just reconfigure?

(image looks identical after retyping the fields)

Issue 3:

- When you do a manual reconfigure of the tool after changing the types - the axes are sorted, but the values are not - so you end up with a chart that crosses back and forth.   Generally line charts are ordered in the order of the X Axis for the values

- Request: Please sort values on the line chart automatically in order of the X value?

NOTE: Finally got the outcome needed by forcing the sort before the interactive chart tool

While Alteryx allows for a proxy username and password in the settings, these are not passed properly to an NTLM proxy. Support for NTLM authentication would be incredibly useful for a number of corporations who utilize this firewall setup.

We currently have to either download via Python or cURL through batch commands called by Alteryx. Since Alteryx uses a cURL back-end, this should be a fairly simple addition to the existing download tool by allowing a selection of proxy server, port, and authentication method in addition to the proxy username and password. This could be done either in the tool itself or in User Settings.

Would be great if anytime a tool (macro tools in particular such as "Data Cleansing" tool) is copied all items from the copied tool are retained to the new pasted version of the tool. Would expect in the instance of the Data Cleansing tool for example that in lieu of not showing the fields that were in the copied from tool to be shown similar tool in which they show but noted as "Missing" and then as the new copied tool is attached to a like data source (likely same data source elsewhere) they then are checked or not checked and no longer showing as "Missing". 

This would allow these tools to be copy/pasted and repurposed vs wiping out as they won't be associated right away on the pasting process until manually moved into the proper place on the respective new or updated workflow.

When building API calls within Alteryx there are a few common steps required

1) Build out the URI for the API call (base URL plus any query parameters)

2) Deal with authentication, such as basic authentication requires taking a key and secret, base 64 encoding and passing this into the tool

3) parsing the results out and processing these downstream

For this idea I am specifically focusing on step 3 (but it would be great to have common authentication methods in-built within the download tool (step 2)!).

There are common steps required to parse out the results, such as using Filter (to check for a 200 response), JSON parse, text to columns and then cross tab to get the results into a readable format. These will all be common steps anyone who has worked with APIs will be familiar with:

This is all fine for a regular user to quickly add in and configure these tools. However there is no validation here for the JSON result being as expected, which when embedding an API into a batch macro or analytic app means it can easily fail.

One example of a failure which I've recently come across is where the output JSON doesn't have all fields (name:value pairs) depending the json response. For example using the UK Companies House API, when looking at the ceased to act field at this endpoint - https://developer-specs.company-information.service.gov.uk/companies-house-public-data-api/resources... the ceased to act field only appears in the results if a person has actually ceased to act. This is important if you have downstream tools such as a formula to create a field [Active] where you have:

IF ISNull([ceased_to_act]) THEN "Active" ELSE "Ceased to Act" ENDIF

However without modification the macro / app will error if any results are returned where there is not this field.

A workaround is to add in the Crew Ensure Fields or union on a list of fields, to ensure that the Cease to Act field is present in the output for all API calls. But looking at some other tools it would be good if an expected Schema could be built in to the download tool to do this automatically.

For example in Power Automate this is achieved as follows:

I am a big advocate of not making things unnecessarily complicated. Therefore I would categorise this as an ease of use feature to improve the experience of working with APIs within Alteryx and make APIs (as load of integrations are API based) accessible to as many users as possible.

TIBCO Data Virtualization is a Data Virtualization product focused on creating a virtual data store consolidating data from throughout the enterprise.  It can be accessed via a SQL query engine, and has a variety of supported connectors, including an ODBC driver.

This data source can be connected to via ODBC in Alteryx today, but error messaging is unclear/unhelpful, and attempting to use the Visual Query Builder causes Alteryx to crash.

Adding TIBCO Data Virtualization as a supported ODBC connection would empower business users to leverage this product and easily utilize this enterprise data store, enhancing the value of the Alteryx platform as a consumer of this data.

Similar to https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Custom-Functions-in-AMP/idc-p/845446#M16381, it would be great to have AMP allow for custom C++ functions. Custom XML functions were added in 21.1 for AMP, so custom C++ functions would be the natural next step!

cc: @jdunkerley79 @TonyaS 

We have Alteryx running in AWS which seems to be a common setup.Our AWS instances are set-up with IAM roles which has been one of the security measures applied in order to finally allow our enterprise company to allow some development in the cloud. IT will not allow the sharing of Access keys to connect to S3.

• Would like to use the AWS S3 Tools from the connectors palette as the AWS CLI has limited ability to handle/report exceptions or issues with any detail. At the moment, we are limited on what goes into production as we are using CLI for what we can.
• Ideally, an option would be to add to the S3 Tools allowing the user to select IAM Roles rather than Key Access. Refer the screen attached.

In the dynamic input tool,

Where you “Read a List of Data Sources”, there should be a radio button below the “Action” field, to   

“INCLUDE FIELD OF DATA SOURCES”,

Then you’d have an output field with the isolated name from which the data was sourced. You wouldn't be required to "include full file path" then parse out the sheet the data came from.