Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Would be nice if Alteryx had the ability to run a Teradata stored procedure and/or macro with a the ability to accept input parameters.  Appears this ability exists for MS SQL Server.  Seems odd that I can issue a SQL statement to the database via a pre or post processing command on an input or output, but can't call a stored procedure or execute a macro.  Only way we can seem to call a stored procedure is by creating a Teradata BTEQ script and using the Run Command tool to execute that script.  Works, but a bit messy and doesn't quite fit the no-coding them of Alteryx.

Hi,

It would be great if users have the option to display the number of records that go in and out of the different tools in your canvas. This allows users to very quickly see how many records are in their datasets, and especially quickly analyze the results of specific actions such as joins, filters etc. without the need to open each individual tool. Especially when performing joins this can be very useful to quickly see how many of your rows have been successfully joined. I think this will give users a feeling that they have more control over their data and a better understanding of what is happening in Alteryx. Also if you quickly want to review a complex workflow (especially when it is not your own) this could be a huge timesaver. Simply run the workflow and follow the numbers to see what is happening and identify tools that might cause issues.

Love to hear what you think!

Currently - in workflows which make active use of dynamic queries - if the record set is empty then we end up with errors such as "a record was created with no fields".   This creates issues  when a dynamic query pumps rows out to a macro output, or where dynamic queries go into a join.

Could we change the result of the dynamic query so that if it returns an empty record set it still has columns but no rows and therefore doesn't cause errors in workflows?

Let me know if we need to provide a worked example?

Thank you

Sean

Most of the finance industry is using HFM or Essbase finance solutions which is flexible in keeping the data and generating reports. Alteryx should create a direct connection with Hyperion or Essbase so that it's easier to connect with the data in those systems and it can directly feed other system reports.

Currently the BROWSE tool shows numeric data in raw format.  It would be easier to evaluate a column of data if the data was right justified and formatted with the decimal point aligned.  

Thiwould change this

234.56788

12.0

.098

to 

    234.567

      12.000

          .098

Can we please have a tickbox (ideally one that remembers your preference to be ticked or unticked) on the Save to Gallery pop up that would allow us to save a (timestamped?) copy of that workflow on a local drive (perhaps one that is preset in the user settings)?

Alteryx Server was recently updated to allow TLS-mediated connections to the MongoDB persistence layer. This allowed us to switch off of the embedded MongoDB to a highly-available MongoDB Atlas cluster. To our surprise after the switch, when we went to edit our workflows that make use of the persistence layer's data (Server Usage Report, etc.) to hit the new Atlas cluster, we found that the MongoDB Input tool does not support TLS connections. This absolutely needs to be changed. Based on organizational constraints, Atlas is our only option for a HA persistence layer. We absolutely have to have TLS support for the MongoDB Input tool. There is no other way for us to natively query our server persistence layer in Designer. Please bring the MongoDB Input tool into alignment with the MongoDB connections that are supported by Alteryx Server.

When the append tool detects no records in the source, it throws a warning. I would like to have the ability to supress this warning. In general, all tools should have similar warning/error controls.

The download tool is currently a general purpose tool that is used for many different things; from downloading FTP files; to scraping websites.

However, as a general purpose tool, it cannot serve the specific need of scraping a website without doing a huge amount of work to get there.    What makes Alteryx great is the fact that it drops the barrier so that regular folks can do some really powerful analytics, but the web scraping capabilities are not yet there and still require a tremendous amount of technical skill to accomplish.

I'll go through this from top to bottom:

• Split capability: The download tool tries to be too many things to too many people.   Break it up into its component parts - one for FTP; one for Web Scraping; etc - with deep speciality.   You can still keep the download tool as the super-user version but by creating the specialized tools, we can make this much more user-friendly
• Connection:  For enterprise users, where there's a locked down connectivity to the internet - there is no way to scrape web content without using CURL.   So we need the ability to connect to websites in a way that does not require curl or complex connectivity setups for users to navigate through web proxy settings.
  
  • Alteryx could auto-detect settings by allowing the user to point to the site within a controlled browse form like Excel does
• Parameters: Many websites explicitly support named parameters (using ? notation) - it would be very useful to allow the user to link to these parameters explicitly without having to do complex string conjugations or %20 scrubbing to get of non-URL friendly characters
• Content: Alteryx presents the user with no native ability to process HTML, so all scrubbing to pull out a specific field has to be done through complex read-through of the underlying source of the website (delivered in "DownloadedData") followed by guessing on patterns on how the site does tables or spans etc, followed by complex regex.    
  • Instead, we could present the user with a view of the web-page and ask them to select the elements that they want
  • This would serve the dual purpose of making this user-friendly for regular folks and abstract away the technicalities; but also would allow the download tool to eliminate all the other bits of the page that are not wanted like scripts; interstitial adverts; images; headers & footers etc.
• Improved post / parse capability:   Sometimes the purpose of a URL is to generate a download (like the Google Finance API) - again, would be good to observe the user using the target site to record & interpret what they are looking for and what they get (e.g. the file from google)
• HTML & XML types: why not an explicit type in Alteryx for web content?
• Finally - HTML aware.   The browse tools are not currently HTML aware, so all the useful formatting to be able to see what's going on, expand nodes, find patterns etc - all this has to be copied out of Alteryx into Notepad ++.   Given the ubiquity of HTML parsers and pretty printers and editors, it should be reasonably easy to get a cheap component that can provide this capability

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 

It can be daunting to find the tool that is currently being processed by the engine in workflows that contain hundreds of tools with many ins, outs, and branches. During runtime, I want to be shown the tool that is running on the canvas. This functionality should be in the form of a button or something to direct focus to that area. It should not be the default.

My team uses a shared macro repository (say F:\AlteryxMacros), and we recently ran into an issue with the default save location for macros. While we save most macros to our repository, there are times when folks save their macros elsewhere (let's say C:\MyAwesomeWorkflow). The issue we've encountered is that if you go to file >> save as with a macro, it will ALWAYS default to the macro repository, even when my macro is currently saved elsewhere (C:\MyAwesomeWorkflow). Speaking for a friend, people have accidentally saved things to the macro repository by accident. Or, they waste time navigating from the macro repository to the their current folder.

If a macro is saved somewhere, please change the file >> save as to default to the current folder. Thanks! 

The option to open Hyper files in 2019.4 is great! For some of our use cases it would be even better, if we would be able to directly open Hyper files that have been published to Tableau Server.

It should be possible to achieve this by combining the Tableau REST API method Download Data Source, which returns a Tableau Packaged Data Source (.tdsx), which then would need to be converted to a Zip file to be able to navigate to the contained Hyper file.

It would be helpful to be able to embed a macro within my workflows so in the end I have one single file.

Similar to how Excel becomes a macro enabled file, it would be great if the actual macro could be contained in the workflow.  As it stands now, the macro that I insert into a workflow is similar to a linked cell in MS Excel that points to another file.  If the macro is moved the workflow becomes broken.  I often work on a larger workflow that I save locally while developing.  Once it's complete, I then save the workflow to a network drive and have to delete the macros and reinsert these.  It also makes it challenging if I were to send a workflow to someone else... I will have to give them instructions on which macros to insert and where.  Similar to a container, they could be minimized so to speak to their normal icon, and then expanded/opened if any edits were needed....then collapsed when done.

Thanks for the consideration.

It would be great if we could create more customization of the email output in the Events in the Workflow Configurations.  Currently we can output the number of error, warnings, etc. and the entire output log.  It would be great if we could only send the error messages in an email instead of sending the whole output log (similar to the output of a workflow run with errors in the Alteryx Gallery).  The customization in the Email Tool is great, but this isn't helpful when a scheduled workflow fails. I found this related thread on the discussion forum: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Customize-Events-Error-Message/td-p/42... Thanks!

There's often a need to do a cascade of filters which would normally be handled in a programming language by a Case or a Switch statement.

For example:

- if it's a cat then go left, otherwise go right 

      - if it's a dog then go left otherwise carry on right

             if it's a fish then go left otherwise carry on right

                   otherwise do xxxx

This could be handled more elegantly by a conditional split tool that allowed you to specify multiple conditions like a case statement, and which then generated multiple output nodes; with the last one for any leftovers.

When we have too many steps in a workflow, it is mandatory to use container to represent better business flow. It can collapse many steps to represent one business flow.

But, when we open collapsed tool container, workflow canvas not resizing to give space for tool container, it overlap on existing tools.

It is better to resize workflow canvas when we collapse or resize tool containers. 

We need some way (unless one exists that I am unaware of - beyond disabling all but the Container I want to run) to fire off containers in particular order.  Run Container "Step1" then Run Container "Step2" and so on.