Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Due to different file formats whether it is .xlsb or any other formats, sometimes it requires end user to install additional drivers/engine.

Some of these driver installations require installations of outdated software e.g. Microsoft Access 2013 (Microsoft Access Database Engine 2013), which poses unnecessary security risk.

Therefore we recommend that in the future version should take note and incorporate such drivers into the installation package so that there is no need to install them separately.

Every time we create a file output - you first have to check if the folder exists - and if not then create it.

Currently it's quite onerous to do a directory create - especially with all the error trapping to make this production safe - and everyone is reinventing the wheel in their own companies.

Given the commonality of this need - could we add a tool that allows you to check for existance of a directory and attempt to create it (with nested directories and useful status / error descriptions to act upon)

With the 2019.3 release the summarize tool now includes prefixes for grouped fields. While a nice addition, in application it makes using this data downstream (like joining to other tables) more involved because of needing to remove this prefix. 

It would be nice to have this as an option (a checkbox to add/remove prefixes maybe) or just revert back to pre-2019.3 behavior...thanks!

The Source field of the field metadata is very useful, but has some problems.

• It is repetitious. A long connection string repeated for many fields from the same source can bloat the size of the workflow above 10 MB, and when removed is around 0.5 MB.
• It exposes sensitive information about a company's infrastructure, such as server names, ports, user ids, and proprietary data structures.

I first started paying attention when we found a user's password in the metadata because they had passed it as a string to the Dynamic Input Tool (separate Idea submitted for that - LINK). Then when I had to share an App with the Alteryx Support team for support with an issue, I thought to check the metadata, and I noticed that the file was too big and was exposing information that I would not normally share with another company.

I'm not sure how you want to handle this, but here's some thoughts:

• Default the Source field to 'off' and provide users the option to turn it 'on' in the workflow/app settings.
• Provide a mechanism to strip the 'Source' field at time of saving or exporting the workflow.
• If nothing else, provide education to users on the implications of including this information in the file.

Thanks for listening!

Cameron

From what I can tell using ProcMon, presently when using the Directory tool to list files (including subdirectories) the Alteryx Engine runs a single threaded process.

When you're trying to find files by checking recursively in large network paths, this can take hours to run.

It would be great if the tools would split up lists of directories (maybe by getting two or three levels down first) and then run each of those recursive paths in parallel. 

While it is possible to do this using a custom Python or cmd->PS command, it would be great if this could just be a native part of the application.

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

@AdamR_AYX,

Limit conversion warning allows for a minimum of 1 message.  Can we set the minimum to 0 to completely ignore the message?

Perhaps we can allow warning messages a similar function as ERROR messages and allow the designer to Ignore, Warn or Cancel?

ConvError: Imputation (441): Tool #104: No demand: 0.200000000000031 had more precision than a double. Some precision was lost.

ConvError: Summarize (456): Data: 0.360000000004675 had more precision than a double. Some precision was lost.

End: Designer x64: Finished running FP Model - Marquee Crew v3.yxmd in 32.3 seconds with 16 field conversion errors and 4 warnings

Thanks,

Mark

When creating a workflow I generally open a "TEMPLATE" first and then immediately save it to the "NEW WORKFLOW NAME".  My template includes all my preferences that aren't set naturally within the user settings and won't get RESET by them either.  It has a comment box and containers as well as logos and copyrights.  It would be nice to have ready access to this feature.  Maybe others have standards that they want applied to all users and their workflows too.

Thanks,

Mark

Currently the cross tab tool automatically sorts alphabetically by the "New Column Headers" field. Often times I have to output data with dates across the columns and therefore have to do a cross tab to achieve this. The problem is when I have the dates formatted with month names, the crosstab automatically sorts it in alphabetical order instead of date order (i.e. Apr, Aug, Dec, etc vs Jan, Feb, Mar). To get around this issue, I have to use a dynamic rename tool. It would be great if there was a way to choose the order of the crosstab (i.e. in the order of the data, crosstab, another field, etc.).

When I import an Excel file in to Alteryx I get an error: “shared strings root=x:sst” and Alteryx cannot read the file.

I can work around this by manually opening and saving the excel before importing it into Alteryx but this is not ideal, especially considering the automation implications.

I believe this may be happening because the XLSX generated by the source of the report has a prefix “x:” in all the tags in the Shared String XML embedded in Excel. See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/open-xml/working-with-the-shared-string-table 

Essentially, it would appear Alteryx is not able to read generated Excel sheets which has the prefix "x:" (e.g. from a bot). The second file which has been opened and saved in Excel manually can be read by Alteryx correctly.

Example of file as exported from ”BOT”:

How the same file looks once it is manually opened and saved:

Ideally Alteryx would read the file as is, i.e. with the "X:SST" tag seen above as having to manually open and save the excel before it can be read is rather clunky.

Thanks!

Hi Alteryx Devs - 

It would be *really tight* to have a drop down interface tool that would support auto completion based on a odbc connection to a table/column or ajax call.  I recently had a situation wherein we need to give the users the ability to select an address, then run a workflow.  But the truth is, our address data is terrible, and what I really needed was to be able to let the users start typing the address, then give them a list of choices to pick from, they pick the correct (but usually wrongly formatted) address, and then I send that value into the workflow. 

I could not find a decent way to give a gallery user a reliable way to pick an address from our list, so eventually wound up having to write an ajax piece to handle the auto completion, capture the user input, then post to a service that would in turn, interact with gallery through the API, get the response, and send it back calling page, and back to the user.  A significant amount of work to put into something that is an exceedingly common web operation of auto completion.  

This would make a lot of gallery operations flow so much more naturally.  

Thanks for listening! 

brian

In the Gallery, the File Browse tool returns the file location on the server where the file was uploaded. This allows the file to then be read in as input to a workflow.

If you need the file path of the original file location, you have to add a Text Input for the user to manually add it.

In my case (#00293302), I used a chained app to populate a list box for the user to select the Sheet Names they would like to process through the application. Unfortunately, since I was not able to capture the original file location the application errored out. This is due to the second app using the file location on the server where the file was uploaded, which is provided by the first workflow. This file location (from the Browse tool) is a temporary file location, where inputs are immediately deleted after processing.

Want to test this out? Create an application where you Output the file path from a File Browse tool.

i know.....grrr, this doesn't match your original file location!

Thank you,

Mark

Hello,

As of today, only English is available. But it's hard to convince French Customers with french language data to buy the AIS if it cannot work with their data.

Best regards,

Simon

Hi there,

When connecting to data sources using DCM - could we please add the ability to make JDBC connections?

see:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Ideas/Add-the-ability-to-connect-to-data-s...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Engine-Works/JDBC-Connections-in-Alteryx/ba-p/968782

As mentioned in these threads - JDBC is very common in large enterprises - and in many cases is better supported by the technology teams / developer community and so is much easier to make a connection.    Added to this - there are many databases (e.g. DB2) where JDBC connections are just much easier 

Please could you add JDBC connections to the DCM tooling?

Thank you

Sean

cc: @wesley-siu @_PavelP 

When a custom (bespoke for @Chrislove) macro is created, I would like the option to create an annotation that goes along with the tool.  This is entirely cosmetic, but might help users to recognize the macro.

Thanks,

Mark

Sometimes, Control Containers produce error messages even if they are deactivated by feeding an empty table into their input connection.

(Note that this is a made up example of something which can happen if input tables might be from different sources and have different columns so that they need separated treatment.)

According to the product team, this is expected behaviour since a selection does not allow zero columns selected. This might be true (which I doubt a bit), but it is at least counter-intuitive. If this behaviour cannot be avoided in total, I have a proposal which would improve the user experience without changing the entire workflow validation logic.

(The support engineer understands the point and has raised a defect.)

Instead of writing messages inside Control Containers directly to the log output (on screen, in logfile) and to mark the workflow as erroneous, I propose to introduce a message (message, warning, error) stack for tools inside Control Containers:

1. When the configuration validation is executed:
1. Messages (messages, warnings, errors) produced outside of Control Containers are output to the screen log and to the log files (as today).
2. Messages (messages, warning, errors) produced inside of Control Containers are not yet output but stored in a message stack.
2. At the moment when it is decided whether a Control container is activated or deactivated:
1. If Control Container activated: Write the previously stored message stack for this Control Container to the screen and to the log output, and increase error and warning counts accordingly.
2. If Control Container deactivated: Delete the message stack for this Control Container (w/o reporting anything to the log and w/o increasing error and warning count).

This would result in a different sequence of messages than today (because everything inside activated Control Containers would be reported later than today). Since there’s no logical order of messages anyways, this would not matter. And it would avoid the apparently illogical case that deactivated Control Containers produce errors.

Dear Alteryx GUI Gang,

I'll create a container and then customize the colours, margins, transparency, border and then want consistency for other containers.  It would be nice to have a format painter function (brush) to apply the format of one container to another.  This of course could be extended to other tools like comments.  There might be a desire to apply this to more tools too, but the comments and containers would be my focus as they are almost always custom configured.

Cheers,

Mark

Alteryx 2019.4 added support in the Input tool for Tableau .hyper extract files. The tables stored in the .hyper files have a schema and a table name. Tableau's old .tde files and Hyper files created by Alteryx & Tableau Desktop use "Extract.Extract" as the schema.tablename. However when using Tableau's Hyper API the default schema is "public" and the table name is arbitrarily specified by the user or application.

This has two impacts:

1) Without this support Alteryx can't open many .hyper files created by other applications. By way of example I've attached a sample .hyper file (in a .zip because the community software doesn't allow .hyper files) that has the schema.tablename "public.table1".

2) Also support for names beyond Extract.Extract is required in order to support multiple table extracts (submitted as a separate Idea).

Please update the Input tool so the user can select the particular schema and table name from the .hyper file.

Jonathan

Alteryx 2019.4 introduced support for Tableau's .hyper extract format, however it only supports single table extracts. .hyper files have supported multiple tables since mid-2018, so I'd like Alteryx to support that as well.

Here are a couple of current use cases (as of February 2020) and one future one.

- We have malaria incidence data that is joined to multiple sets of spatial data. Doing all of the joins in the extract creation process to build a single table extract is not possible due to processing time & memory constraints, so we use a multiple-table extract.

- There are multiple ways to do row level security in Tableau. A common way is to have separate tables for the data & the entitlements and then use calculations at run-time to filter the data, and for that having a multiple table extract is ideal.

- In 2020 Tableau will be introducing new data modeling capabilities (this was first demoed at the 2018 Tableau Conference, there were sessions on it at the 2019 Tableau Conference) where one goal is vastly improved performance for large fact table to fact table joins where previously we'd have to do much more data preparation. This is another case where multiple table extracts would be useful.

I've attached a sample Hyper file with two tables in the extract (it's zipped because the Community site doesn't accept .hyper files).

Supporting alternative schema and table names in Hyper extracts https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Input-tool-Support-more-than-Extract-Extract... is a prerequisite for this because by definition multiple table extracts have multiple table names.

A related idea is supporting multiple table extracts for the Output tool: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Support-multiple-table-extracts-in-the-Table...

Jonathan