Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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.

Currently, the default location for autosaved files is "C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Alteryx\Autosave".  It would be nice to be able to customize, the same way you can for the working directory.

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!

It would be great if you could create default settings for the Tool Containers. As workflows become larger, I use containers a lot. But once I have 10-15 containers, I have to set all of them to have a Transparency of 1 and a margin of None. While the changes don't take long to make, it would be nice if they could be preset.

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

It would be really nice if we could save our own custom color palette when coloring tool containers and comments.

I use colors to define the purpose of my tool containers and it would be much easier if I could select a labeled, reusable color.

I would like to see a time interface tool similar to the Date and Numeric Up Down tools. I am working on some macros where the user can select the time they would like to use a filter for the data. 

 

Example: I want all data loaded after 5:00 PM because its late and needs to be removed.

Example 2: I want to create an app where the user can select what time range they would like to see records for (business hours, during their shift, etc) 

 

Currently this require 2-3 numeric up downs or a Text box with directions for the user on how to format field with Error tools to prevent bad entries. It could even be UTC time.

 

Time Interface Tool 

I've seen several posts and questions concerning NULL dates.  Is 09/31/2010 a valid date?  I know that 02/29/206 isn't valid and that 02/00/2006 isn't either, but I really don't like finding out about these in conversion warning messages.

 

I might suggest a function that returns True or False on the date check and let the user configure appropriate rules to rethink the attempted date prior to committing the field to the date data type.

 

Cheers,

Mark

Checkbox ability to ‘not’ output the original column on a text to columns tool

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