Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hello,

It appears that Alteryx does not accept .svg (or other vector image format) for icons (I think to custom macro icons), image in comment, etc...

I think that would be a great idea, especially to manage web integration and support of different resolutions.
here an example of a svg logo I made :


As you can see you can zoom in/out without loose quality.

 

If I set an Excel file mask under the "arbitrary" configuration of the File Browse Tool on the desktop version, Alteryx will not prompt for worksheet selection. If I save that same configuration to the server, then the file mask is ignored (the users can select any file) and Alteryx will then prompt for a worksheet selection. Please set it where the environments have consistent behavior.

 

Prompting for a worksheet should be an option that the developer can turn off.

It would be nice to be able to set a default date for the Date Interface tool.

Props to @KaneG for the workaround ( http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/Set-Default-Date-for-Date-Interface-Tool/m-p/3573... But I'd like to see something built in to the tool rather than use a workaround every time as the standard.  Plus, I enjoy the uniform look of having two date inputs.

Just as a side note while we're on the topic of the Date Interface tool; it is really misleading the way "Today" stays outlined even after you click on a different date.  I always second guess if it took my click or not.

 

We need an option to schedule a continuous bi-weekly payroll workflow. It is every two weeks starting on a certain day of a week. Some months have 3 and other have 2. If we had an option to select the starting day in a particular month and then select bi-weekly bullet (or every 2 weeks) from that date it would be perfect. thanks

Ok the time has come to expand functionality in the record ID tool. I would like the ability to restart the counter based on a field (e.g zip code). You can do it quickly in Tableau (see image) so why not have this functionality readily available in Alteryx? Sure, you can already do it in Alteryx - the long way - with the generate rows tool, look at previous/active row with certain condition and do +1 or something like that.

Having a simple restart counter in Record ID tool just makes sense. It's intuitve to have it there, and it's easier to use than generate rows tool. IMHO also easy to develop by Alteryx and +1 for Alteryx in gartner magic quadrant! 

 

 

Team Drives are shared spaces where teams can easily store, search, and access their files anywhere, from any device.

Unlike files in My Drive, files in a Team Drive belong to the team instead of an individual. Even if members leave, the files stay exactly where they are so your team can continue to share information and get work done.

I sometimes find that a workflow would be more efficient if I swapped the order of a couple tools. It would be cool if we could select 2 tools and then right-click or something to swap them.

It would be nice to have the ability to automatically generate twbx files from a master Tableau workbook so that end users can open the file in Tableau reader.  For example, if I were creating separate CSV files with my data for each state I would similarly want to create them as a ready to consume twbx file with Tableau Reader.

I have been going back and forth between output tool and render tool. The render tool works well when you want formatting. It's also great when you don't want an output created (when rec count=0) while output tool always generates a file regardless if there are records present or not. Output tool works well when you have a lot of fields but then you cannot easily control styling.

My issue is that I have a render tool connected to table tool. In the table tool everything looks neat; there's no wrapped text and no unnecessary white space (auto column width not necessary). However, with the render output, you don't know what to expect. Especially, when you have a lot of fields (30+) data gets truncated and column width is forcibly narrowed due to paper dimensions used in render tool. I skip letter and tabloid formats and now I have to mess with custom paper width (e.g.50) to get my reports looking right and when you have dynamic fields, this is not ideal. 

Would it be possible to make the paper size/width automatic in the render tool just like in the table and layout tool? Then this tool also doesn't negate what layout/table tools do so well.

 

 

The Input Tool reads Excel however many dashboards require multiple people to update a spreadsheet. Excel is too much of a hassle to share and update. Being able to read directly from a Google Spreadsheet would allow easy multiuser access to updating spreadsheets for dashboards.

Please add Google Spreadsheets to be an option in the Input Tool.

Tim

In the ‘Report – Table’ tool I would like to be able to force headings to multiple lines. For example If I have a heading such as “Catchment (%)” or “Spend (£)”, I would like there to be an easy way to make the (%) / (£) move to the second line when I have fixed width columns.
 

 

When posting an alteryx job to the gallery; or packaging them for transport - any deep dependancies are lost (I think that we start to have trouble once you're 3 levels deep).

 

For example - you have a canvas; which uses macros; which in turn have macros; which in turn have macros.

 

this is not as uncommon as it may sound on the surface - due to the current lack of flow-of-control support in Alteryx; we need to wrap all of our ETL jobs in Batch Macros to force them to run in a specific order.   Within these ETL jobs, it's common to decompose for lookups; master data management; etc.

 

Is this something that the team is currently looking into fixing - this does cause quite a bit of pain when deploying to the gallery because the jobs need to be manually stitched together and packaging does not carry the full working solution?

 

 

 

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

I really like the Tool Container. I also really like to have neat and tidy modules. Sometimes though, the two are in conflict because the Tool Container automatically sizes itself so I end up playing around with tool placement to get my containers the same.

Could you please add the option to make the Tool Container a sizeable object (like the Explorer Box) or give width and height value boxes in the tool properties?

In some cases, the information about incoming columns to tools are (temporarily) forgotten, e.g. if Autoconfig is switched off, if the incoming connection is temporarily missing, or if column names are generated dynamically and the workflow has not been executed, yet.

Many tools deal with that situation well, e.g. Selection, Formula, or Summarize. In these cases, the tools tell the user that they cannot find incoming columns, but they preserve the configuration so that the user still can (at least partially) work on these tools and important information on the configuration is not lost:

 

Example Select Tool

1. First step: Connections present, configuration typed in:
   
2. Second step: Connection cut, confguration opened. The configuration looks screwed up but implicitly contains all settings:
   
3. Third step: Connection re-connected. The configuration is as before:
   

 

Other tools behave the opposite, for example Unique or Macro Input (an for sure many other tools). If the incoming columns are currently unknown to the Designer and you click once on the symbol, the entire configuration of this tool is lost. You might try to get the configuration back by pressing undo. This, in most cases does not work. Or, even worse, you find out what happened later when it's too late for undo. In this case, you either have an old version of that workflow to look up the configuration or you have to re-develop it. In any case, this is unnecessary and time-consuming software behaviour.

 

Example Unique Tool

1. Step 1: Connections present, configuration typed in:
    
2. Step 2: Connection cut, confguration opened. The configuration is empty:
   
3. Step 3: Connection re-connected: The entire configuration is permanently lost:
   

I wasn't sure whether I should report this as a bug or a feature enhancement. It is somehow in between. Two aspects tell me that this should be changed:

• Inconsistent behaviour of different tools for now reason,
• Easy loss of programming work, resulting in time-consuming bug fixing.

Please make sure that all tools preserve their configuration also if information on incoming columns is temporarily lost.

Quick and (hopefully) simple one here.  Many times when I use the Text To Columns tool, there is still leading whitespace from comma separated lists with spaces.  It would save from the minor inconvenience of putting a Data Cleansing tool after each of these tools to include an Advanced Option to trim whitespace from the results.  I tried some workarounds using the empty fields and including spaces in the delimiters box, but this results in unwanted behavior.

 

SOOOOoooooo many times it'd be great to just dictate the character length/count (fixed width) for the parse (just like you can in excel), instead of being constrained by a delimiter or being obligated to go create (potentially complex) REGEX.  Ideally you could go into the column and insert the <break> (multiple times if needed) after the given character where you'd like the parse to occur.  Anything past the last <break> would all be included in the final parse section/field. 

You could also do it a little less visual and just identify/type the character count you want for each column.  If you really want to enhance this idea, you could also include the ability to name the fields and prescribe the data type.  Those would just be gravy on the meat of the idea however, which is, provide the ability to parse by fixed length fields.

 

 

 

After multiple years of using Alteryx, The tabbed document feature was left out of 2022.1.  This feature allows for a much cleaner canvas for exploring workflow and output data.  I view this feature as a basic function of Alteryx, I was surprised to find out that the development team intentionally omitted this function.   I really don't want to revert back to older versions but it may be only the way to have a more comfortable feel of Alteryx.

It would be absolutely marvellous if the ability to use a field as the replace value could be incorporated into the Regex tool. Currently the "Replacement Text" field is a hardcoded text value, and so to make that dynamic you have to wrap the tool in a batch and feed in the value as a Control Parameter. If we could just select a field to use as the replacement value, that would be spiffy.

 

 

M.

Pardon the length of this post, but I have been working with Alteryx since version 2.0 (11 years) and have been accumulating a wish list ever since.  Some of these suggestions have been made in the past but have yet to be embraced.  This is the first post for the first 'idea' but, as I said, this is a wish list that has grown since I was first introduced to Alteryx. More posts will follow.

 

I will break this into sections to hopefully make the suggestions easier to categorize and digest.

 

Application interface - Since I was introduce to Alteryx, the application interface (what is presented to users) has remained rather stagnant and, with the rumored push to adopt HTML as a replacement for pcxml, could benefit from the following additional settings. I suggest these based on the fact that dot Net classes for interface controls are readily available in Windows which allow for manipulation of each of the controls attributes.

 

1. The ability to set 'style' attributes for each of the interface tools in the application interface (font-family, font-style, font-size, font-weight, color, etc. This could be presented to the developer as an additional (perhaps optional button) in the Configuration panel for each interface tool as below:

These settings would be specific to the type of interface tool and to how the individual tool would layout and/or be styled relative to the application interface window. One layout option, applicable to most interface tools, would be where the label would be relative to the object itself (top, bottom, left, right). The CSS could be stored in and interpreted from the XML of the yxwz file referencing the ToolID of the Node in a section of the XML hierarchy called <CSS> or something standard.  An option to alter the default CSS could be displayed with a radio button control so that if not selected, the tool would fallback to the default system CSS of the tool.  This default could also be set in System settings so that a consistent interface could be defined across the enterprise.

 

2. Moving to the actual window that displays when the application is opened, a lot of the same concepts could be applied to the Interface Designer pane.

Attributes that could be set could include position on screen when opened, width and height of the window, and all the attributes of a dot Net form.  The same radio button strategy used for individual interface tools could be employed to use or not use system defaults.

 

3. In the UI, it would be nice if there was additional flexibility in how the interface tools could be laid out.  Along with the relative position of labels for each control, being able to layout controls horizontally as well as vertically would allow for a more organized interface.

 The Radio buttons would work as normal with the Text Box controls inside each Radio button and only displaying when the button is selected.

 

I realize a lot of the current development in Alteryx is focused on the new Alteryx Connect and being able to attach to more data files and services. But, if there is still also a concerted effort to move from what could be considered a legacy proprietary mark up language, pcxml, to a more robust and universally accepted mark up, html and css, then, in my humble opinion, expanding the options for developers to design more user friendly and customizable applications to a standard 'style' across the enterprise, both on the desktop and in the gallery, is a worthy endeavor.

 

Thanks for your attention.  More to follow.

 

Dan