Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Cleanse Macro

Given a choice between the delivered macro and the CReW macro, I’ll choose the CReW macro for both speed and functionality.  Wikipedia says, “Data cleansing or data cleaning is the process of detecting and correcting (or removing) corrupt or inaccurate records from a record set, table, or database and refers to identifying incomplete, incorrect, inaccurate or irrelevant parts of the data and then replacing, modifying, or deleting the dirty or coarse data.”  If Alteryx were to convert the macro to a true tool, here is my feature request list:

Performance:

• AMP compatible – Fast!
• Faster than the CReW macro for deleting empty fields/rows
• Resolve time it takes to load the tool (current macro versions are slow), html is faster.

Feature Enhancement:

• Allow selection of fields based on data type
• Include incoming/outgoing SELECT functionality
• Allow for PREFIX functionality (like multi-field formula), but NOT default
• Read incoming metadata to provide color coding of fields to indicate where potential problems exist (e.g. NULL, Whitespace) – part of browse everywhere currently
• Allow for Nulls to convert to 0/blank or 0/blank to convert to Null
• When removing punctuation, provide for exceptions (e.g. Numeric set of negative, comma and period).
• Include HTML tag removal
• Support internationalization (character sets)

Going the extra mile:

• Display or opt for output, cleanup metrics.  How dirty was my data?  Potentially, allow for ERROR to stop workflow if garbage is detected.
• Optional:  Detect outliers in numeric data.  I’ve got an outlier detection macro that we can review, but while you are passing all of the data for numeric values, explaining or tagging outliers would be useful.  Could be a box-whisker on numeric values maybe?
  • Make outlier actionable
    • Identify in data (new field indicator)
    • Remove
    • Modify/Impute
  • Test/Preview against metadata:  (pre-run), see what the incoming/outgoing results would be on *all of the metadata before I run the workflow.
  • camelCase:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case
  • Identify/Replace unknown values (e.g. N/A, Not Applicable, #) with Null() or other?
  • Identify/Remove duplicate values within a cell
  • See also:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cleansing
  • Option to point to a “personal” dictionary for spelling or validation
  • Provide “smart” annotation on tool

Hello Alteryx Devs - 

When I got to write some scripting in the formula tool, my data stream properties should be the first to be suggested once a user starts typing a letter, not the last. 

uppercase(Ad -> gives me:

DateTimeAdd

FileAddPaths

PadLeft

PadRight

ReadRegistryString

[Address]

I think we would need a dedicated R macro to ascertain the chances anyone in is going to need [ReadRegistryString] before they need a column of their own data that starts with [Ad...]

Easy fix.  Makes a big difference.  

Thanks.

Hello Team,

Currently, in the select tool, we have to scroll up or down to check or see the list of the fields. In case, if the user wanted to change the data type, they can scroll into the list. Like, I am working on the mid-size data, and sometimes data contain 300+ fields, if I need to change anything in the data type I have to search by scrolling up or down. 

The idea here is, If you provide a search bar under Field, it will be a great help to all, in case if anyone needs to go for some specific field, the user just types the name in the search bar and make changes quickly. The select tool is important and we used much time while working on the flow. 

Thank you,

Mayank

Please add Parquet data format (https://parquet.apache.org/) as read-write option for Alteryx.

Apache Parquet is a columnar storage format available to any project in the Hadoop ecosystem, regardless of the choice of data processing framework, data model or programming language.

Thank you.

Regards,

Cristian.

Hello all,

From https://www.sqltutorial.org/sql-triggers/

Introduction to SQL Triggers

A trigger is a piece of code executed automatically in response to a specific event occurred on a table in the database.

A trigger is always associated with a particular table. If the table is deleted, all the associated triggers are also deleted automatically.

A trigger is invoked either before or after the following event:

• INSERT – when a new row is inserted
• UPDATE – when an existing row is updated
• DELETE – when a row is deleted.

When you issue an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement, the relational database management system (RDBMS) fires the corresponding trigger.

In some RDMBS, a trigger is also invoked in the result of executing a statement that calls the INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement. For example, MySQL has the LOAD DATA INFILE, which reads rows from a text file and inserts into a table at a very high speed, invokes the BEFORE INSERT and AFTER INSERT triggers.

On the other hand, a statement may delete rows in a table but does not invoke the associated triggers. For example, TRUNCATE TABLE statement removes all rows in the table but does not invoke the BEFORE DELETE and AFTER DELETE triggers.



So basically, I would like to create some triggers from in db tools in Alteryx.

Best regards,

Simon

Connect to Azure SQL Database with Azure AD also with Multi-Factor Authentication is a crucial feature nowadays. The tool should be configurable by interface tools so we can change the database within the same Azure Database server.

There is a workaround to use ODBC for this but it does not support caching credentials and that's why problematic to use. The credential prompt is appearing every time we run the workflow. With ODBC it's also required to have a separate DSN for every database in the same server.

To make it easy for users there should be a native connector for this feature. The user experience should be easy as it's in an azure data lake connector.

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.

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

Hello all,

When looking at the Results window, I often find it a headache to read the numeric results because of the lack of commas. I understand that incorporating commas into the data itself could make for some weird errors; however, would it be possible to toggle an option that displays all numeric fields with proper commas and right-aligned in the Results window? I am referring to using a display mask to make numeric fields look like they have the thousands separator while retaining numeric functionality (as opposed to converting the fields to strings). 

What do you think?

Our company often builds applications where we need the ability for it to dynamically update dropdowns based on a user's previous selections. 

For example: 

• A user needs to select their Server, database, and table for analysis (3 dropdowns).
• When the user selects their server, a query is run to get a list of all databases on that server. Then the database dropdown will automatically populate with this list of databases. 
• The user then makes a database selection, and a query is then run to get all tables within that database. The table dropdown will automatically populate with this list of tables. 
• The user makes their table selection, and then runs their analysis using the server, database, and table variables with values that they have selected from each dropdown.

We can do this in other programs, but unfortunately the lack of dynamic selections/dependent dropdowns is a big limitation for us when building Alteryx applications. Our current workarounds are chaining applications together, or using PyQt within the workflow. Chaining is clunky and often causes unforeseen issues when uploading to Server with errors that are non-descriptive, and using PyQt comes with Python versioning issues. 

If this interactivity can somehow be added to Alteryx applications it would be a huge upgrade to our current Alteryx processes. Any suggestions for further workarounds would also be helpful!

Thank you, 

Amanda 

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 

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.

There are few workarounds for this task, but it would be really very easy if Data Cleansing Tool could delete Null Rows and Null Columns. After all its just a macro which can be modified and re-packaged into Alteryx Designer.

Currently, to delete a null row requires multiple columns validation for common Null attributes,

similarly to delete a null column every column has to be compared on a row-level and flagged for removal. Both of these approaches are clumsy.

Wouldn't it be so simple if Data Cleansing Tool gave such check boxes !!!

Hi, I was looking for this but couldn't find a similar idea, so I post a new one. If someone knows about a similar idea, please ask the moderators to mer

CountChars(<String>, <char to count>,<case sensitive>)

Where <char to count> and <case sensitive> are optional parameters.

If <char to count> is not provided, the funtion will return the total character count within the <String>.

If <char to count> is provided, it'll return the number of ocurrences of that character within the <String>.

PS: For those tempted to suggest a workaround, I've been using REGEX_CountMatches() for this. Actually, the focus is to simplify user's experience and workflow performance providing a native function, instead of using REGEX which it's very demmanding on resources.

Right now it is not possible to open .xlsx files in Alteryx that has restricted access to specific users from the excel file, even when you are logged in to Alteryx and Excel with the same user. If it is possible to make Alteryx recognize which users/email addresses should be able to input a file to Alteryx I think it would be a great enhancement. To get around the problem we are currently changing the file restrictions through right clicking on it -> Properties -> Security, but this is time consuming and not a smooth fix. 

All the best,

Elin

Hello,

I had a business case requiring a cost effective and quick storage solution for real time online sourced survey data from customers.  A MongoDB instance would fit the need, so I quickly spun up a cluster on Mongo Atlas.  Atlas was launched by MongoDB in 2016 as a database-as-a-service deployed on AWS.  All instances for Atlas require TLS/SSL to connect.  Currently, the Alteryx MongoDB connector does not support TLS/SSL connections and doesn't work against Atlas.  So, I was left with a breakdown in my plan that would require manual intervention before ingesting data to Alteryx (not ideal).

Please consider expanding this functionality on all connectors.  I am building Alteryx out in my agency as a data platform that handles sensitive customer information (name, address, email, etc.).  Most tools I use to connect to secure servers today support this type of connection and should be a priority for Alteryx to resolve. 

Thanks,

Mike Schock

I recently came to know that Alteryx doesn't support Denodo Data sources. We at our company are using Denodo as a data virtualization tool and also Alteryx is used for data blending. The request is for Alteryx to start supporting Denodo as a data source so that our company can reach out to Alteryx for any support related issues with Denodo.

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