Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hello,

My issue is very easy to solve. I want to use the generic ODBC In database for a specific base (monetdb here but it isn't important).

The connexion works just fine. However, I cannot create table because the data types are changed and does not even exist. Here is my data with some Date type :

And here the error in my data stream in give me this very interesting message  :

Error: Entrée du flux de données (2): Erreur lors de la création de la table "formation.temp1" : [MonetDB][ODBC Driver 11.31.11]Type (datetime) unknown in: "create  table "formation"."temp1" ("AccountNumber" varchar(255),"BillToAddressID"
syntax error, unexpected IDENT in: ""Freight""

CREATE  TABLE "formation"."temp1" ("AccountNumber" varchar(255),"BillToAddressID" float,"BusinessEntityID" float,"Comment
" float,"CreditCardApprovalCode" varchar(255),"CreditCardID" float,"CurrencyRateID" float,"CustomerID" float,"DueDate" datetime,"Freight" real,"OnlineOrderFlag" float,"OrderDate" datetime,"OrderDate_Month" varchar(255),"OrderDate_Year" float,"PurchaseOrderNumber" varchar(255),"RevisionNumber" float,"SalesOrderID" float,"SalesOrderNumber" varchar(255),"ShipDate" datetime,"ShipMethodID" float,"ShipToAddressID" float,"Status" float,"SubTotal" float,"TaxAmt" float,"TotalDue" float)

1/ My field is a date, why do you want to convert it in Datetime??

2/ Datetime is not even a usual field type in sql database (at least not supported by monetdb, vertica, postgresql, oracle, etc, etc...)... it should obviously be timestamp

Currently, this non-specific in database ODBC connexion cannot be used at all!

Now : when you double click on the part of a field name text field (Formula, Filter, etc.) it selects only the word you double clicked.

Idea : It would be easier if a double click would select the entire field name with brackets for copy-pasting as an example.

It would be useful to have the WorkflowName captured as one of the default Engine constants. The WorkflowDirectory is included so why not the WorkflowName as well?

I often have to use configuration files to pass in values to workflows meaning the workflow name needs to be manually entered into the workflow, either as a text input or User Constant, which feels like an unnecessary step as Alteryx must know the name of the workflow once it has been saved.

The Problem: Sometimes we are developing workflows where we use a data connection that the developer has access to but not necessarily the people running the workflow do.

For example,

• A workflow is pulling from one database to another, with some specific transformations. 
  • This workflow is used by many people, some have Designer for other purposes.
  • The workflow also writes to a log table, documenting different parts of the workflow for auditing purposes.
    • This log table is not something that the people running the workflow should have access to write to other than when running this workflow
    • This log table outputs using a data connection so that it is not embedding passwords (a company-wide best practice)
    • For someone to run this workflow with this set up, they would need access to this log table's data connection
  • If the log table data connection is shared to that group of users, now any of the users with Designer can go write whatever they would like to that table since that data connection has access to. 
  • This also makes the log table unsecure for auditing purposes.

The Solution: We are looking for a way to have a data connection in a workflow without giving all of the running users full access to use that connection in their workflows. Almost a proposal of two tiers of permissions:

• Access to use a data connection in a workflow you are running
• Access to use a data connection in a workflow you are building

The Dynamic Input will not accept inputs with different record layouts.  The "brute force" solution is to use a standard Input tool for each file separately and then combine them with a Union Tool.  The Union Tool accepts files with different record layouts and issues warnings.  Please enhance the Dynamic Input tool (or, perhaps, add a new tool) that combines the Dynamic Input functionality with a more laid-back, inclusive Union tool approach.  Thank you.

Alteryx is not able to read generated Excel sheets which have the prefix "x:" within it's XML tags.  Often this occurs when an xlsx file is created from a bot or rpa process.  Example file attached.

I think we can all agree that Workflow Summary Tool is immensely powerful in summarizing large and/or complicated workflows.  However, some companies have begun to bar the use of certain GenAI applications, like ChatGPT. Unfortunately this makes the use of the Workflow Summary Tool impossible.  At the same time those companies are allowing the use of other forms of GenAI, like AzureAI.

In the Workflow Summary tool, it would be nice to have the capability to select which GenAI engine you want to use (ChatGPT, AzureAI, etc) so that you don't break corporate policy by using barred applications.  This could simply be a dropdown in the GUI configuration for the Workflow Summary Tool with a list of the most common engines.  The user would then supply their API key for that engine, and you're off to the races.

I am running into unexpected functionality when utilizing the date interface tool in an Analytic App after upgrading to 21.3. Previously I was able to easily select dates in the past in the app interface by first selecting the Year, then the month, date, etc. After updating I am only able to see the prior and upcoming three months, which makes it difficult if you need to navigate back, say, 10 years. A ticket was put in they could not find when or why this change was made. This issue was brought up to our Designer SME group and they agreed that this isn't an improvement on the old design and is more cumbersome. They recommended posting to the Ideas page to bring back the old design.

Thank you to @LeahK for suggesting that this should be a separate idea (cc @JulieH; @TaraM, @LeahK, @JoeM😞

The lack of home use / learning editions of Alteryx is a serious mid-term competitive threat factor for Alteryx - and it's well worth both this Alteryx community; and the Alteryx Community Management team making this a key priority for the Alteryx platform.

Rationale:

The BI/Data science space is very competitive (as evidenced by the recent Gartner 2016 Magic Quadrants), and although Alteryx was given very favourable review in some factors - there were serious concerns about licensing costs; and time to productivity.

Clearly - Alterxy succeeds in direct proportion to the size of the active user base - so the question is "How do we increase the licensed / deployed user base" and I believe that there are 3 factors which all relate to the issue of learning-edition alteryx licenses.

a) Time to productivity:   Right now - I cannot ask one of my staff to learn Alteryx at home and prove their capability before paying several thousand dollars to give them a license.   Once I give them a license; it then takes them 2-3 months to become productive, and we run the lottery of finding out whether this person was a good fit for this kind of role in the first place.   Solution:  Make Alteryx available in a learning edition at home with a robust certification program; and a learning progression built in - that way I can tell my staff "I will give you a license once you demonstrate your competence by learning to this level".   How does this help Alteryx: lower time to productivity = more attractive product

b) Size of committed user base:  As tech professionals - we take our tech bias with us to our new role (the "Affinity effect"), and often will have some leverage in tool selection.   The more people know Alteryx and are invested in their Alterxy skill set - the greater this "Affinity effect" will start to show in sales figures.   This also makes the tool more sticky, reducing the defector population if users can see and use latest features at home.

Solution: Give the learning edition away for free - Pentaho spoon is currently free for learning; as is Tableau Public; and MS Power BI is incredibly cheap to learn.   If Alteryx doesn't do this - others definitely will anyway, and this "Affinity Effect" will be washed out.

c) Increase the skill pool in the market:  The more wide-spread the skills are - the more likely I am to purchase a toolset.  So - if Alteryx skills are very broadly available in the market - it's easier to make the purchase decision for Alteryx rather than competitors.   However - right now the skillset growth is severely constrained, so Alteryx is making the "Buy Alteryx" decision needlessly harder.   

Solution: Make Alteryx available for training; learning; & Certification for free.   

Note: Although this is directly contrary to my personal interests in the short term (the smaller the number of people with skillX, the higher the market value), it is also long-term selfish because I will be able to increase the impact within my firm by having access to a greater pool of skilled and instantly productive workers in the market.

Although price may be an issue - this is a separate matter.   I believe that Alteryx can do a lot to create future sales pipeline, and a committed and very sticky user base by providing this home-learning & certification program.   In my mind - this is probably one of the biggest competitive opportunities & threats facing Alteryx right now, given the velocity of this particular industry & segment.

I'd be very happy to talk this through in detail with the Alteryx team if that's helpful (just PM me)

Many thanks

Sean

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

it would be great if the formula tool could expand the intellisense to the select column box. For example, I could start typing in the select column box and it would widdle down the list of fields down.let's suppose I wanted to update field 79A, I could type in 7 and it might show something like 

7

17

27

37

70

71

79A

79B.

So if I typed in 79 then, it would further reduce it to 

79A

79B

And i could select 79A.

Hello,

I work for a company with circa 250K employees. We are in the process of shifting all documents over to OneDrive and I've noticed that when I have an Alteryx workflow that uses inputs stored on OneDrive the connection can be very intermittent. I use the UNC file naming protocol for my input/directory tools, but more often than not I need to run a VBA script that accesses OneDrive before Alteryx tools will connect.

There's a couple of posts on this community about this, but nothing in the ideas board. I believe the SharePoint connector is being updated for v11, but nothing for OneDrive.

I'd like there to be better integration to OneDrive for business and SharePoint Online please.

Thanks,

John.

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

When entering a number of column names in the RegEx parse mode - please can you allow either Enter or down-arrow to move down to the next cell (standard windows convention)?

Currently Enter just exists the edit mode; and down-arrow does nothing.

cc: @Hollingsworth 

As simple as the title : an In-Database Block Until Done would be a pretty nice feature to control the execution of a workflow.

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.

Hi there,

The download tool is currently very cryptic, and difficult for most users to grasp..   This is due, at least in part, to the fact that it tries to be generic and serve all needs instead of being broken into smaller tools which fit the need.

Could we please break the download tool into:

- Input FTP tool.   This would allow you to download from FTP or SFTP sites, and work in a wizard fashion to get you to the file / files you wanted and take you through FTP authentication

- Input: Web API call.   This would be much easier if there was a wizard where you could put the API you wanted to call, and then you could add the parameters using a wizard

- Input: Web-download:   This would allow you to download frames or pages from the web.   this would be a good place to do what so many users have asked for and which Excel does natively - i.e. allow you to see the site in a wizard in a browser, and pick the elements you want to download.   Must allow for authentication and walk you through this with the wizard.

- Output; FTP put.   AS above - splitting this out makes it more sensible

There are probably other variants, and we can keep the Download tool for super-complex or bespoke uses - but if we break this down into smaller tools with simpler capabilities, we'll get a higher usage.

Thank you

Sean

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