Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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.

Tableau v2018.3 introduced multiple table extracts. These are particularly useful for fact table to fact table joins and fact table to entitlement table joins for row-level security where the number of rows created by the join and/or size of join results would be prohibitively large. Also they are useful for fact table to spatial joins where we might have multiple spatial objects (for example custom province/district/health facility catchment) for each row of fact table data.

So in Alteryx I'd like to be able to specify 2+ tables & their join keys and then write out a .hyper multiple tables extract.

Jonathan

It would be very helpful to have an output of the workflow into a step by step document. so someone who does not have access to Alteryx can undestand the steps taken to create the flow hence the result or output.

At the moment if a part of your python code takes more than 30s to run, Jupyter times out and Alteryx cancels the workflow. This makes the Python Tool unusable for anything intensive and the timeout should be removed by default or be configurable per workflow.

I've made this idea as none of the solutions in these threads feel satisfactory:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Python-tool-NbConvertApp-Timeout/m-p/3...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Python-Tool-Timeouts-When-Running-Work...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Python-SDK-timeout-error-cell-executio...

It'd be great to have all DCM connections available in the Data connections window.

And when Use Data connection Manager (DCM) is ticked, The screen defaults to DCM Connection list. 

Hi All,

Was very happy to see the Bulk Loader introduced for Snowflake during last release. This bulk loader is specifically available for Snowflake environments that are hosted on AWS, but does not provide functionality for those environments using Azure. As Snowflake continues to build momentum, I imagine this will be a common request. Is there something in the pipeline to add this functionality?

For an interim solution, we will be working toward developing some generic scripts/snowsql to mimic that bulk load, but ultimately we'd love to have this as part of the tool.

Best,

devKev

Hello!
A quite minor, pedantic issue from me today. 

Currently, the Oversample Field Tool's naming and configuration suggest that the tool can over sample data:

However, I would argue the tool under samples data instead.

Here are a few sources that explain this much better than I can:

• Towards Data Science
• Wikipedia
• Medium

And an image is taken from Medium:

Effectively either step is to create a similar (or same) number of records between each class. Under sampling is the process of taking samples from the majority class, and ending up with a smaller dataset than started with. Over sampling is the process of duplicating records within the minority class, and creates a larger dataset.

When using the Oversample tool within Alteryx, using the example workflow for reference:

When summarizing the input:

And the output:

It's clear that the data has actually been under sampled, in that random samples have been taken from the majority class to match the minority, rather than creating duplicate minority records. 

I would suggest a quick renaming of the tool to "Undersample Field Tool", and documentation to not cause confusion to new users of the platform.

Kind Regards,

TheOC

Where it stands now, only a file input tool can be used to pull data from Google BigQuery tables. The issue here is that the data is streamed and processed locally, meaning the power of BigQuery processing isn't actually being leveraged.

Adding BigQuery In-Database as a connection option would appeal to a wide audience. BigQuery is also standard SQL compliant with the SQL 2011 standard, so this may make for an even easier integration.

I decided to get real fancy when building a standard macro the other day. I checked the box on my macro input that made the connection optional:

It worked really well. My macro then became more complex, so I changed it to a batch macro. To my great surpise/astonishment/shock, the optional incoming connection is no longer optional:

The standard macro is working as expected on the left, but the batch macro is producing an error because my optional connection is requiring that something be connected to it.

I've been told that the code to make it optional is not there for batch macros and that this would be a product feature/improvement.

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 

When training people on the use of action tools, something that I always have to hit on is that when you are telling the tool which piece of the XML that you are adjusting, it's sort of difficult to tell what you have selected, and super easy to accidentally select something else.

Example:

When you initially select the action to take it's this nice Blue Color. However, it still doesn't feel exactly like you have actually selected anything or told the Action Tool what to do, since it's so easy to just select any other one of these actions.

A slightly different problem is that if you are selecting an action that has been previously configured, it is just this light grey color. So it can be easy to accidentally change your settings because you may not realize it's actually set up.

Here is a recent community post that sort of outlines a few of these problems.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Analytic-App-to-Create-Custom-SQL-Quer...

Highlighted in this post: Solved: DateDiff question - Alteryx Community The DateDiff function under certain conditions does not work as you would expect and I suspect most people would not notice the inaccuracy.

Here is the formula for the Results Column below:

DateTimeDiff("2022-11-30",[Date],"months")

When creating a workflow I generally open a "TEMPLATE" first and then immediately save it to the "NEW WORKFLOW NAME".  My template includes all my preferences that aren't set naturally within the user settings and won't get RESET by them either.  It has a comment box and containers as well as logos and copyrights.  It would be nice to have ready access to this feature.  Maybe others have standards that they want applied to all users and their workflows too.

Thanks,

Mark

Please add a data validator workflow.

Suggested features will be the following:

1.  Add validation name and set the field/s of your data you want to validate. (it can have more than one validation name on one workflow)

2. On the selected validation(name). Add features that will check/validate the information below:

   A. Verify data type
   B. Contains Null
   C. Max and Min string length
   D. Allowed values only, else it will give you an error
   E. Regex expected to match and not allowed to match.

3. It can have two(2) outputs. One is True(which is match) and False(which is fail over/error).

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.

As we do more work analyzng the canvasses that our folk are producing - it's becoming more and more necessary to have a well documented definition and schema for the XML that is used for Alteryx Canvasses.

Please could you publish the full XML definition and schema for Alteryx canvasses - this will allow groups to perform deeper analytics on how people are using Alteryx, automate quality checks; look for learning gaps; scan for dependencies etc?

Note: this relates to an idea from @dataprep here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Documentation-tool-list-fileformat/idi-p/184...

cc: @revathi @LizaNemchynova @ydmuley

It would be extremely useful to quickly find which of my many workflows feed other workflows or reports.

A quick and easy way to do this would be to export the dependencies of a list of workflows in a spreadsheet format. That way users could create their own mapping by linking outputs of one workflow, to inputs of another.

Looking at the simple example below, the Customers workflow would feed the Market workflow.

It would be CRAZY AWESOME if we could get a report like this for all scheduled workflows in the scheduler.