Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

We are working on building out training content in a story mode and would like to have short snippets playing in a loop for people to see embedded in the workflow. Currently you can add a .gif to a comment background and it will provide a still image on the worklfow itself but functions as a gif in the configuration display. The interesting part is when you are running the workflow the .gif works and then it pauses it when the workflow has completed!

Example GifGif upload in comment and playing in the configuration windowGif in workflow when uploadedGif after workflow run

This idea is concerned with suggesting values based on text box entry in an analytic app. This would be an autocomplete within the text box interface based on matches to a list of connected values. For example, if someone was posting "805 Wells Road" it would expand the text box window and supply potential matches to click on.

Quick and dirty photoshop image below:

It would be nice to have the ability to have a workflow wait/pause tool that would pause the workflow for a given amount of time before proceeding to the next step (i.e. wait 300 seconds). 

I have a workflow that uses the Run Command to run a batch file that kicks of a terminal emulator that cycles through steps the ultimately result in an exported text file that I use in an Alteryx workflow for further processing. The generation of the text file can take a few minutes. A delay could be placed in the batch file or terminal emulator script, but I think having a tool in the Alteryx workflow might be useful for other processes as well.

My fields names may be a little long (about 20 uppercase characters). As of today, I have to resize the column displaying the field name every time I browse the Select Tool, id est pretty much. If not blocking, it appears to be clearly frustrating that Alteryx doesn't save the size of the column...

Best regards.

We primarily work on tracking people through a store or any physical space and extract shopping trip information such as areas visited, dwell time, etc. This shopper track information consists of a series of X,Y coordinates which are also used to plot heat maps based on density of points in a given area.

I have been using a workaround due to the lack of cartesian coordinate support in spatial tools - involving converting cartesian values to Lat., Long. by dividing X,Y values by 10,000. This approach works fine for finding spatial matches between points and polygons. However, when using something like a heat map tool which requires Grid Size and Max Distance in Miles/Kilometers, since there is no support for smaller units of distance, you will not be able to generate a heatmap data file.

In addition to adding support for Cartesian coordinates, it would also be helpful to provide an option to load in a Floorplan/Image as Base Map when browsing Spatial tool results.

Hello,

we have several environment in our organization : dev, recept, production.

In order to make that change safe we intend to make several connection (standard alias)  like

PRODUCTION_HIVE

DEV_HIVE

RECEPT_HIVE

In our workflows, we want to use aka:%Question.v_environment%HIVE

Sadly, this solution does not work despite the value defaut. 

Right now - if a tool generates an error - there is nothing productive that you can do with the error rows, these are just sent to the error log and depending on your settings the entire canvas will fail.

Could we change this in the Designer to work more like SSIS - where almost every tool has an error output, so that you can send the good rows one way, and the error rows the other way, and then continue processing?    The error rows can be sent to an error table or workflow or data-quality service; and the good rows can be sent onwards.   Because you have access to the error rows, you can also do run stats of "successful rows vs. unsuccessful"

This would make a big difference in the velocity of developing a canvas or prepping data.

Can take some screenshots if that helps?

With a module that contains a lot of tool containers, it would be nice to have an option (similar to Disable All Tool That Write Output in the RunTime TAB) to disable all Tool Containers and then I can go pick the one or two that I would like to enable.

Hi, All.

As a newbie, I am impressed with Alteryx's ability to deal with lots of formats / connections when importing / imputing data. In a pretty simple way

However, I feel it misses something much more "basic", in my opinion at least. The option of telling Alteryx which decimal separator occurs in database being imported. Like Excel, SAS, IBM SPSS, to name a few, all of them do... Having a default of comma being the decimal separator, but letting the user opting to change it. Numbers in US are separated (integer part from non-integer) by a dot. The entire rest of the world (or almost all of it, there are other exceptions) uses comma instead...

I have posted a flow to deal with it on Alteryx Gallery (it is attached here), but it is, at least in my opinion, something cumbersome that should be pretty straightforward.

So... Is this something I feel alone, or is this a suggestion that could be thought as an improvement for Input & Output tools in future releases of Alteryx?

My best regards,

Bruno.

As of today, you must use a data stream out and then a hdfs tool to write a table in the hdfs in csv. Giving that the credentials are the same and that the adress in the DSN is the adress of the hdfs, it seems possible to keep the data in Hadoop and just putting it from the base to the HDFS.

Currently on the input tool I can only specify if the first row contains data.  It would be great if I could simply specify which row the data starts on, ie. row 4 or row 500, and then specify which row, if at all, contains the headers.

I periodically consume data from state governments that is available via an ESRI ArcGIS Server REST endpoint. Specifically, a FeatureServer class.

For example: http://staging.geodata.md.gov/appdata/rest/services/ChildCarePrograms/MD_ChildCareHomesAndCenters/Fe...

Currently, I have to import the data via ArcMap or ArcCatalog and then export it to a datatype that Alteryx supports.

It would be nice to access this data directly from within Alteryx.

Thanks!

In user settings you can define a "Logging Directory" and if you do the system will send the Output Log (Results view messages) to a file in that folder.  The name generated is Alteryx_Log_ + an apparent sequential number, example: Alteryx_Log_1519833221_1.

This makes it impossible to identify which flow it is associated with and which instance of execution simply by looking at the name, you have to parse the content to see the flow name and start/end timestamps.  For trouble shooting we want to be able to look at the list of file names and quickly see which file, of possibly hundreds of files, we need to look at to see what went wrong.

Hello,

Working on Dataiku DSS and there is a cool feature : they can tag tools, parts of a worklow.. and then emphasize the tools tagged.

Best regards,

Simon

For example I have an ERROR MESSAGE tool that is rather verbose.  I chose to modify the annotation as:  ZIP Code Check.  I presumed that the result would simply be "ZIP Code Check", but Alteryx added that to the beginning of the annotation rather than replacing the whole annotation.  I reported this as a bug, but was told that this was designed to operate in this manner.  It was suggested that I bring this out as a "New Idea" to the community for review.  If you agree that the tools should operate in a similar fashion for annotation (or other actions) across the pallet, please STAR this.  Otherwise, I'm happy to hear your feedback.

Thanks,

Mark

I often use user constants in my workflows and ever since the Workflow tab has been buried under the Canvas tab in the Workflow Configuration, I often forget to adjust my constants.   Out of sight, out of mind.  

My suggestion would be to create a tool that could be placed on the canvas with the constant name in the title area and a text box which shows the current value and allows the user to change the value before processing. 

One additional output that would be very useful is to enable output values to be placed into a PDF that has pre-defined fields that can be created by using the Forms tool in Adobe Acrobat. Our company uses Alteryx to prepare information that will be used in tax returns. Currently, the data that gets outputted, is then manually entered into PDF fields but I think there is an opportunity to have Alteryx do this for us. See the pictures below, I can create forms that can be defined as "Text1", and then my idea is to tell Alteryx that one specific field value, should be put into the PDF form "Text1".