Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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.

In some of our larger workflows it's sometime tedious to run a workflow in order to see some data, when adding something in the beginning of the workflow. Running und stopping it as soon as the tools gets a green border is sometimes an option.

 

It would be convenient to have an option in the context menu to run a workflow only until a specific tool.

In effect, only this specific tool has an output visible for inspection and only the streams necessary for this tool have been run - everything else is ignored and I'm fine to not see data for the other tools.

 

This would speed up the development of small parts in a larger workflow much more convenient.

 

Regards

Christopher

 

PS: Yes, I can put everything else in a container and deactivate it. But a straight forward way without turning containers on and off would be preferable in my opinion. (I think KNIME as something similar.)

Make the Container Caption Font Size Adjustable

 

I find it helpful to see the entire workflow at once.  It would be very helpful for the container size font to be adjustable.  For example, I am documenting a workflow with many containers and tools.  The containers represent segments of my workflow.  When I am looking at or printing the entire workflow, the container heading is too small to be read.  If the font size were adjustable, it could be increased to be readable and still fit easily into the length of the container.  

 

Thanks to zuojing80 and tcroberts for their comments on 9/10/2018.

@AdamR_AYX did a talk this year at Inspire EU about testing Alteryx Canvasses - and it seems that there is a lot we can do here to improve the product:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eN7_XQByPQ&t=1706s

 

One of the biggest and most impactful changes would be support for detailed unit testing for a canvas - this could work much like it does in Visual Studio:

 

Proposal:

In order to fully test a workflow - you need 3 things:

• Ability to replace the inputs with test data
• Ability to inspect any exceptions or errors thrown by the canvas
• Ability to compare the results to expectation

To do this:

• Create a second tab behind a canvas which is a Testing view of the canvas which allows you to define tests.   Each test contains values for one or more of the inputs; expected exceptions / errors; and expected outputs
• Alteryx then needs to run each of these tests one by 1 - and for each test:
  • Replace the data inputs with the defined test input.   
  • Check for, and trap errors generated by Alteryx
  • Compare the output
  • Generate a test score (pass or fail against each test case)

This would allow:

• Each workflow / canvas to carry its own test cases
• Automated regression testing overnight for every tool and canvas

 

 

Example:

 

 

For this canvas - there are 2 inputs; and one output.

Each test case would define:

• Test rows to push into input 1
• Test rows to push into input 2
• any errors we're expecting
• The expected output of the browse tool

 

 

This would make Alteryx SUPER robust and allow people to really test every canvas in an incredibly tight way!

Love the functionality to create filters on the Calgary database but it would be nice to be able to select the columns you wanted returned. There are times where you only want a couple columns but the input tool will return all columns creating a larger dataset then required. You can add a select right after the input but this is after the entire dataset has been loaded into memory. Combining the two would make the Calgary input tool behave more like a database then a standard "dumb" input source. 

Please add the ability to specify indexes when creating a table with the Write Data In-DB tool.

 

When running Teradata SQL using the Connect In-DB tool I need to create a table on the database using the Write Data In-DB tool and do numerous updates before bringing the data to the PC.  Currently there is no way to create a unique primary index (or any other index) when the Write Data In-DB tool creates a table.  This causes Teradata to consume huge amounts of wasted space.  Today I created a table with 160 columns and 50K rows.  This consumed over 20 Gigabytes of data with 19.7 Gigabytes of wasted space.  In Teradata the way to control wasted space(skew) is by properly defining the index which can't be done today.

It would be a handy feature if it were possible to choose a data type for an input tool to read the data in as. For example, if a dataset has multiple fields with different data types, it would be handy to be able to make the Input Tool read and output them all as a string, if needed. This would also make a handy tool, a sort of blanket data conversion to convert all fields to the specified type.

default file path in "File Browser" interface app would be a nice to have feature. Similar to what we have in Numeric, Text etc. interface app.

I have several regular outputs I use that are in both Excel and PDF (depending on who I am sending them to).

The format of these is always:

For Excel, create a summary sheet and set as the first tab, then create detailed sheets as additional tabs in the same .xlsx file.
The summary sheet always has the same fields, but the fields may reference different detail tabs day to day.

After the output, I can manually open Excel and change the field to a formula that references the other tabs (hyperlink function).
It would be great if I could just type the hyperlink formula in Alteryx and have that embedded into the Excel output.

The same goes for PDFs, except I would reference other pages (or if using PDF portfolio I would reference other PDFs in the same portfolio).

This should be a simple addition:

 

In the same way that many default tools automatically generate annotations when they are dropped into the workflow, or their configurations are modified, there should be a way to add custom annotations for custom made macros. 

 

Thanks!

The designing interface is very slow when we design an in-db workflow.

 

 

The reason of that is that Alteryx connects everytime he needs to refresh the data. Example on Hive :

Mar 20 15:28:49.453 DEBUG 6048 HardyConnection::Connect: Default branding specific auth mech: 2
Mar 20 15:28:49.453 DEBUG 6048 HardyHiveClientFactory::CreateClient: Create HS2 client.
Mar 20 15:28:49.453 DEBUG 6048 HardyHiveClientFactory::GetBackendCxnPool: Create session manager.
Mar 20 15:28:49.453 DEBUG 6048 HardyHiveClientFactory::GetBackendCxnPool: Create backend connection pool.
Mar 20 15:28:49.453 DEBUG 6048 HardyHiveCxnPool::GetHS2Cxn: Create HS2 connection.
Mar 20 15:28:49.453 DEBUG 6048 HardyHiveCxnPool::GetCxnFactory: Create backend connection factory.
Mar 20 15:28:49.453 DEBUG 6048 HardyHiveCxnFactory::CreateHS2Cxn: Create HS2 HTTP transport.
Mar 20 15:28:49.453 DEBUG 6048 HardySessionManager::GetSession: Getting new session handle.
Mar 20 15:28:50.399 DEBUG 6048 HardyTCLIServiceThreadSafeClient::OpenSession: TOpenSessionReq
    client_protocol = HIVE_CLI_SERVICE_PROTOCOL_V1

Maybe we could have an option on the IN DB Connection configuration to stay connected while designing (maybe with a limit time).

(PS : we also tried the option to Disable Auto Configure, it's clearly not he solution)

As you may know, the interrogation of Hive to get the Metadata is actually very slow on Alteryx

 

A first step of improvement (at least in the Visual Query Builder) has been proposed here

Smartest VQB

 

But the real issue for Hive is that the way Alteryx queries the Metadata : it passes "Show table" queries for all the databases. On our cluster, it means more than 400 queries that last each avout 0.5 seconds. The user has to to wait about 4 minutes.

A solution : using an API in java to ask the Hive metastore if it exists (it may be an other tab in the In database configuration). Our cluster admin has an example of a Thrift API in java that we can give you.

Result : 2 seconds for a 38700 tables in more than 500 databases !!

 

At present - to identify the dependencies of your workflow - you have to go to to "Advanced Settings" to find this critical capability.

(see @MattB 's great post here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Workflow-Dependencies/ta-p/49696 )

 

 

 

Could we instead move this to the workflow properties on the left hand side - this would be a more logical place to keep this info.

 

 

 

 

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