Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

We see canvasses every day where dozens fields are brought into a canvas or a macro, but never used - and this just creates slowness for no good benefit.

Given that one of the selling features of Alteryx is the speed of processing  - could we look at three improvements to the Alteryx engine & designer:

• easiest: Keep track of every field brought in / created - and if they are not used in an output, then throw a warning at the end of the execution process
  • For example - you bring in fields a,b,c - you create field d and e during the flow in formula tools
  • Field d is never used as an input to any filters or formulae - and it doesn't appear on any output - so it's just waste
  • Field a and b are part of the output, so they are fine
  • Field c is never used at all - so that's just waste.
  • Field e is used to filter the records before output - so this one is fine.
  • So we've immediately found 2 fields that we can eliminate and make this canvas faster
• Medium: Ignore the unused fields in the execution engine
• Hardest: Tell the users that their field is unused in Alteryx Designer by doing a lineage analysis of the tools, just like software environments like Visual Studio do.    This may require a change to the engine & to designer 'cause we would need to make each tool capture the full detail of the fields that they know in their configuration in order to do this trace.

We've been looking into the phoneHome information that collects usage of Designer in the enterprise, and it looks like this data set (in the UsageReports collection, I believe).

Please can you add the CanvasFilename that was run to this data - we need to be able to surveil the use of Alteryx in our enterprise which is not being done within the server environment, and without the canvas name this becomes tremendously difficult.

Reference:

https://help.alteryx.com/server/11.0/admin/index.htm#Configuration/SaveDesignerUsageData.htm%3FTocPa...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Analytics-Blog/Alteryx-Analytics-11-0-Monitoring-and-Reporting-on-A...

cc: @BenG @avinashbonu @Deeksha @BenBu @revathi

We frequently have issues where users report slowness from an Alteryx installation on a particular machine; or where a specific tool or package fails to install correctly.

For our admin teams - this becomes a debugging exercise to go through different permutations to understand the cause - and if this is escallated to Alteryx Support, this becomes even tougher.

Could we think about including a basic "Self Diagnostic" in to Alteryx which runs through the basic functionalities of Alteryx with some basic timings; checks that Python is working correctly; checks the memory allocation and temporary disk space - and then either persists this to disk and/or sends to a central environment for analysis?

Given a large deployed environment like ours (over 10 000 seats deployed) - self-checkout-telemetry like this would provide the central team with massive increase in their ability to manage the deployed base; and at the same time signficantly reduce the time to resolve support issues.

Need a way to highlight lines whether that means right-clicking and selecting a color or what-not, but just having the lines become black & BOLD doesn't cut it. It's not easy on the eyes. If I could click this line/connector and make it bright green that would be ideal and then I can see where it connects better when zooming out.

Using the Snowflake Input and Output Connectors when Snowflake is setup to use Single Sign On generates a lot of browser windows as the connectors authenticate multiple times (opening a browser window each time) which is very disruptive and disctracting for users.  Any time the workflow interacts with the tools and it authenticates and the browser is opened.

This is driven by the Snowflake ODBC driver using the externalbrowser authentication method however it would be helpful if Snowflake and Alteryx worked together to refine how the connectors authenticate in order to reduce the number, or completely stop the browser windows and therefore greatly improving the user experience.

Speed up canvas edits - The Create/Remove Space Tool

Usually day two of working with a canvas I realize that I have been a fool, and I come up with a significantly more elegant or simple solution.  Moving all of the containers or tools to fit my slick new container is cumbersome and slow.  I've created a GIF of a feature several tools have which allows the user to easily move and arrange items on the canvas.

Open source tool used in demo: bpmnJs

Please upgrade the "curl.exe" that are packaged with Designer from 7.15 to 7.55 or greater to allow for -k flags. Also please allow the -k functionality for the Atleryx Download tool.  

-k, --insecure

(TLS) By default, every SSL connection curl makes is verified to be secure. This option allows curl to proceed and operate even for server connections otherwise considered insecure.

The server connection is verified by making sure the server's certificate contains the right name and verifies successfully using the cert store.

Regards,

John Colgan

Have you ever used a Join tool with several (or many) Join fields, looked at the the L and R outputs and wondered, why didn't these records join? When there are many columns in your data, this can be a hard question to answer. It would be very handy if Alteryx could somehow report the Field(s) that each record failed to join on (perhaps as an optional added field to the L and R outputs).

I have been developing and accumulating custom functions over the years and they have proved to be very useful.  I am submitting these here.  I hope they are found to be beneficial.

Functions included in the attached file include:

• DateTime
  • StandardDate(String) - Transforms any valid string to the standard date format yyyy-mm-dd
• File
  • FileDirDepth(Path) - Returns the zero based depth of the path (zero being the root)
  • FileGetFolder(Path, Depth) - Returns the folder name given the zero based depth in the path (zero being the root)
• String
  • LeftPart(String, Separator) - Returns the left part of a string up to the first separator
  • RightPart(String, Separator) - Returns the right part of a string after the first separator
  • Split(String, Delimiter, Index) - Returns the zero indexed part of a delimited string
  • CleanSpace(String) - Trims string and replaces multiple spaces with a single space
  • UnicodeToASCIIBasic(String) - Replaces all Unicode Characters with ASCII Basic equivalents
• Test
  • InList(Variable, List) - If Variable is in List returns True. List must be pipe delimited
  • IsValidEmail(String) - Returns True if string is a valid email format
  • IsUUID(String) - Returns True if string is a valid UUID

To make these functions available in Alteryx, place the attached xml file in the folder C:\Program Files\Alteryx\bin\RuntimeData\FormulaAddIn if you have a standard installation. If the install is non-standard, find the \bin\RuntimeData\FormulaAddIn folder and place the attached xml file there.  Ateryx will need a restart for the functions to be available.

When documentin alteryx screen I sometimes hit printscreen and need to paste important matters to Comment tool...

But there is no paste from clipboard 😞

I suggest adding a minor icon that enables not only reading from png but pasting a screen or other image copied directly from memory...

For I need the following setting so I printscreen and capture as is;

Then put that into a PNG or JPG file using paint. And then prepare a comment box with that image in the background...

The behavior of an "Overwrite Sheet (Drop)" configuration is such that it breaks formulas (#REF) that point to the overwritten sheet and named ranges that reference the overwritten sheet.  This is a bummer because the only way I've found to overcome the issue is to write a script that re-applies the named range.  This works, but it greatly raises the barrier to using this tool and in some corporate environments it won't even be possible.

What would probably be a good alternative behavior is to delete the contents of the sheet, rather than the rows/columns/cells of the sheet.  I think both probably have valid use cases but my proposed functionality is going to cause fewer issues and be the more popular behavior for most users.  I believe there is a google sheets API call for just this kind of behavior...

Alteryx should really get into the business of having a metadata management tool integrated into the UI.

We recently started training new users with Alteryx, making it more widespread than the few (less than 10) that already had it.  The good and bad of Alteryx is that it really allows us the power to do work we've never done before.  That also means that we've not had to worry too much about resource contention before either.  But with great power comes great responsibility and now we do need to think find a way to manage this power.

There are some good new ideas out there that use the concept of cloud-sourced data governance (specifically, I just checked out Alation).  But why should we have to go to two separate platforms then to examine our data? 

I already know that if I have to spend more time switching back and forth between two platforms to get the same job done with greater care will result in many people taking shortcuts.  Why couldn't this or something like it be integrated into Alteryx?

Hi,

I would like to be able to modify my connection string in the Alias Manager.

Connection string is greyed out :

If I want to change my connection string, I have to create a new alias.

It would be nice to have functionality similar to the List Box where a user can select all items at once, or deselect all items at once.  The workaround for now would be to roll everything up to an individual Key (maybe called "All").  But it would still be nice to have those two options (again, just like on the list box).

Would really love there to be a way to store environment related config variables without requiring the use of an external config 'file' that you need to bring in in every workflow.

Functionality should be similar to how the Alias manager works (although allowing aliasing of more than just DB connections)

The sort of things that would typically be included as such a variable would be:

• contact email address for workflow failure/completion
• other external log file location
• environment name
• environment specific messaging

If this could be set for different subscriptions or collections it would be fantastic. If not, at the server level would suffice.

Hello,

Please enable wildcard ability for the Amazon S3 Download Tool.

Add this to the "Object Name" field in configurations.

The current workaround is to use a macro to iterate over the filenames matching a pattern.

Adding this ability in the connector would remove the need for a macro.

Thank you.

Dennis

Hello. While working at my company it has come up a few times that An Interface tool that acts like a standard "grid" would be extremely helpful.  

This tool would allow users to update data that has a logical link to each-other like a stanard "row".  Below are a few very simple examples where this would be extremely helpful.

#1) An application is being used as a file System ETL that has an interface that allows users to select what data to pull from a flat file and store in a database.  The users can pick which 'columns' to keep by choosing the following information.  The column name, type, and final database location of that column. 

In this case a user needs to enter 3 key pieces of field information that have to relate to eachother.  

#2) There is a table in a database that has thresholds for a specific law at the state level. (for Example: All loans in Florida must have a loan balance < 300k).  However these laws can be updated, and the end users want the ability to #1: See the data, and then #2: Update it if the laws have changed.

A grid in this case would be perfect, as they could query the data to see the 50 states and specified limits, and then change the data in the "limits" column in order to update the database.

The previous 2 examples are pretty simple examples, but I have run into this request a few times from my personal experience, so figured I would see what everyone thought!

I know this has been suggested before, but it would be great if calculations and transformations could be cached between workflow executions.  Perhaps the browse tools could be configured as caches.  Any spot that has a browse tool fixes the value of that node between runs provided that there are no upstream tool changes. The cache could be optional (or flushed) to allow for dynamic input data that could change between executions, even if the tool chain didn't.