Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

 

 

Hi there,

 

Adam ( @AdamR_AYX ), Mark ( @MarqueeCrew) and many others have done a great job in putting together super helpful add-in macros in the CREW pack - and James ( @jdunkerley79 ) has really done an incredible job of filling in some gaps in a very useful way in the formula tools.

 

Would be possible to include a subset of these in the core product as part of the next release?

I'm thinking of (but others will chime in here to vote for their favourite):

- Unique only tool (CReW)

- Field Sort (CReW)

- Wildcard XLSX input (CReW) - this would eliminate a whole category of user queries on the discussion boards

- Runner (CReW - although this may have issues with licensing since many people don't have command line permission - Alteryx does really need the ability to do chained dependancy flows in a more smooth way.

- Date Utils (JDunkerly) - all of James's Date utils - again, these would immediately solve many of the support questions asked on the discussion forum

 

I think that these would really add richness & functionality to the core product, and at the same time get ahead of many of the more common queries raised by users.   I guess the only question is whether the authors would have any objection?

 

Thank you

Sean

Please enhance the input tool to have a feature you could select to test if the file is there and another to allow the workflow to pause for a definable period if the input file is locked by another user, then retry opening.  The pause time-frame would be definable for N seconds and the number of iterations it would cycle through should be definable so you can limit how many attempts to open a file it would try.

 

File presence should be something we could use to control workflow processing.  

 

A use case would be a process that runs periodically and looks to see if a file is there and if so opens and processes it.  But if the file is not there then goes to sleep for a definable period before trying again or simply ends processing of the workflow without attempting to work any downstream tools that might otherwise result in "errors" trying to process a null stream.

 

An extension of this idea and the use case would be to have a separate tool that could evaluate a condition like a null stream or field content or file not found condition and terminate the process without causing an error indicator, or perhaps be configurable so you could cause an error to occur or choose not to cause an error to occur.

 

Using this latter idea we have an enhanced input tool that can pass a value downstream or generate a null data stream to the next tool, then this next tool can evaluate a condition, like a filter tool, which may be a null stream or file not found indicator or other condition and terminate processing per the configuration, either without a failure indicated or with a failure indicated, according to the wishes of the user.  I have had times when a file was not there and I just want the workflow to stop without throwing errors, other times I may want it to error out to cause me to investigate, other scenarios or while processing my data goes through a filter or two and the result is no data passes the last filter and downstream tools still run and generally cause a failure as they have no data to act on and I don't want that, it may be perfectly valid that on a Sunday or holiday no data passes the filters.

 

Having meandered through this I sum up with the ideal being to enhance the input tool to be able to test file presence and pass that info on to another tool that can evaluate that and control the workflow run accordingly, but as a separate tool it could be applied to a wider variety of scenarios and test a broader scope of conditions to decide if to proceed or term the workflow.

 

This functionality would allow the user to select (through a highlight box, or ctrl+click), only the tools in a workflow they would want to run, and the tools that are not selected would be skipped. The idea is similar to the new "add selected tools to a new tool container", but it would run them instead. 

 

I know the conventional wisdom it to either put everything you don't want run into a tool container and disable it, or to just copy/paste the tools you want run into a blank workflow. However, for very large workflows, it is very time consuming to disable a dozen or more containers, only to re-enable them shortly afterwards, especially if those containers have to be created to isolate the tools that need to be run. Overall, this would be a quality of life improvement that could save the user some time, especially with large or cumbersome workflows.

Dear all,

 

I'm involved in testing new data source called Yellowbrick at Zurich North America.  We are replacing Netezza with Yellowbrick as our single data source for all data marts.  Currently in our Alteryx designer version 2021.2, we do not have Yellowbrick as one of the data sources, and we had to use the "PostgreSQL" to test the connection to new Yellowbrick data source.

 

Could you or someone please add Yellowbrick to one of the available data sources so that it'll be easier for our Alteryx users to find that data source rather than go to that confusing "PostgreSQL"?

 

Sincerely,

Andy Dryden

 

 

Having the ability to call-out via ARROWS/SYMBOLS (gold star) would be nice without requiring the user to create images and call them to the canvas.  This makes the workflow even more readable.

 

Watermarks (e.g. DRAFT, AMP, Do NOT AMP, FINAL) would be useful on the canvas as well.  

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

I would like to be able to draw a box around some tools, them maybe right mouse click to add them to a container

The canvas has 3 options as demonstrated by exhibit A:

 

The user settings can change 2 of the 3 defaults as demonstrated in exhibit B. The layout default and connection settings progress can both be defaulted for all new workflows:

 

Thus, I would propose that a user setting be added to the annotation box so that I can set the default to hide.

 

Mic Drop

I'd like to see an enhancement that at the install level (through an XML configuration file for example), the use of the From field in the Email reporting tool could be disabled for population by the end user and instead would auto-populate with that current users e-mail address.  Currently users can populate the field with any address on their domain, which is useful, but also poses a risk in that messages can be made to appear to be coming from a party that is not aware of it.  We'd like to be able to control that on install and "turn off" access to the From field

The Idea behind the Password Masking is - we have "Download Tool" from the "Developer Tab" - which is used to Download files from the given site. For example, let's take Mainframe. I have a scenario where the Alteryx Workflow should connect to the Mainframe FTP Server, download the required file which is used for downstream transformation. For the download, I get the Username and Password information from the Database table (to reduce manual intervention and prevent errors). While passing the Username and Password as a parameter to the Download Tool Macro (Custom Macro - accepts the Username/Password, Filename dynamically) - the Alteryx Workflow will obviously show the username and password in the result window (as it is considered as an output data from Input Tool). Now I want that particular password field to be masked, so whenever the particular Workflow is shared to the User - the password field remains unexposed. I know there's a way to mask a particular field using "MD5 HASH" formula, but that helps to mask anything related to Dataset and not a password (as it may consider it as a new string and not a valid password). This feature would be really beneficial to Developers who use the download tool often. A New Tool or a Custom Macro - embedding this feature would be great for users who needs Masking functionality.

all too often, we build an alteryx flow just to realise that step 8 out of 10 was wrong -so back to the beginning and rerun the entire thing.   this often is tedious if your work requires a big data set.

 

So there is a workaround, using the Cache Macro which can be downloaded (but this does require quite a bit of fiddling with containers; disabling items; setting flags; etc) - but it would be good to allow the user to "restart from here" like you can with a powerpoint slide deck.    I appreciate that this may be tricky since Alteryx may be flushing data out of memory as it goes along, so it cannot restart from any arbitrary point - but if we put the workflow into a "testing cached mode" to cache data at each step; or allowed users to set particular controls as a breakpoint and cache at these points, that would help immensely.

 

Thank you

Sean

 

Hi,

It would be helpful to improve the tools regarding connections, for example:

In a snowflake data connection tool, it would be good to have the form to fill with the necessary parameteres of warehouse/role/etc as shown in the driver configuration, instead of setting all this details in the driver or manually in the connection string (and for snowbl (bulk) the connection string is not applying the adicional parameters at all). Also for bulk output we would like to have the DSN-less option available.

 

Regards.

 

When using a File Browse to get a file from a user on the gallery, I want to be able to limit the sheets available as options to select from. Currently all sheets and named ranges in the workbook appear in the list. In the example below, I would want to be able to limit the options to just the Allow sheet so that the <List of Sheet Names> and the Don't Allow sheet are not even options for the user.

 

 

Hi - Please delete this if it perhaps exists already in a newer version.  (I am on 2022.1 and don't see this functionality.) 

 

I would love to see the ability to right click a tool that isn't in a container and be able to add it to an existing container.  Currently I drag it over and drop it into the container then move it back to where it was.  Inevitably I misalign the tools and spend time getting it linear again. It would be cool if based upon the choice made in the right click, it would bring the assigned container around the tool in its existing location.

 

OR

 

Perhaps within the config of the container you could choose tool #s to add to the container?

 

Anyways this isn't a huge need but it would be nice to see that additional functionality for people that spend a disproportionate amount of time aligning and distributing their tools HORIZONTALLY.  (Nobody cares about the people that do vertical workflows.)

 

 

 

 

 

Idea:

An Alteryx version for Mac OS X sounded like a nice idea... Although there are options for using bootcamp with windows 7-8

or some virtualisation software as mentioned in a community post here.

 

Rationale 1 (Competitors do it):

First of all there is no need to neglect a customer segment using Mac's.

 

• Rapidminer Studio comes with a dedicated OS X version,
• Knime has Mac OS X support 
• Weka has Mac OS X support as well
• SPSS Modeler is Windows only but SPSS Stats is Mac OS X compatible.

 

Seems SAS was compatable in the last decade, but they dropped it. Now SAS is not OS X compatible but

still with the "SAS OnDemand" version Mac users can easly get a hands on experience.

 

Rationale 2:

The Mac Pro Beast has 7.2 TFlops of computing power with the help of dual ATI graphics cards.

It would be awesome to install Alteryx on one... 

 

When working in a large workflow wireless connections help to make it easier to work with. However sometimes you want to be able to see all your connections (when debugging). 

 

I'd like to see a toggle (button on the toolbar) which would display all the connections including wireless. Ideally the wireless connections would be a different color. You could then click the button again to make the the wireless connections invisible.

 

Reason:

The existing options to display are limited as you have to click on individual tools to see the connections. 

 

I find it annoying that the count records and heat map macros have file inputs which point to a W drive. This will show up in workflow dependencies and can cause false alarm warnings. Since these are packaged with Designer, simply change the macros to text inputs instead of file input. 

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

It is just a bit of annoyance, really. I'd like to see the option of inputting a hexcode of color and/or a screen color picker in the color dialog. At the moment, you have to change R, G, B separately or play around with the cursor to find the right color.

The color dialog is relevant for the documentation purposes but also reporting tools and I'm sure it would make life easier to some people, especially when branding colours are important.

 

 

As each version of Alteryx is rolled out, it would be much easier for our users and admin team to validate the new version, if Alteryx allowed parallel installs of many different versions of the software.

 

So - our team is currently on 11.3 - if we could roll out 11.5 in parallel then we could very easily allow users to revert to 11.3 if there are issues, or else remove 11.3 after 2-3 weeks if no issues.

The same goes for versions which are in BETA.

 

This would be a huge help!

 

cc: @avinashbonu ; @Deeksha ; @revathi

Right now in order to pass a parameter to pre/Post SQL we need to make a macro as a work around.

It would be really great if this was a native capability for the output tool so we don't have to replicate all the output too fields as macro inputs