Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hello all,

Some Database, including Hive, support natively scheduled queries (yes, the scheduling configuration is inside the database, not through etl/dataprep system). I think this would be an interesting feature for in-db workflow output : you play the worflow once and then only have to run it when it changes, the database do the scheduling. 



https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/Scheduled+Queries

Intro

Executing statements periodically can be usefull in

• Pulling informations from external systems
• Periodically updating column statistics
• Rebuilding materialized views
  

Best regards,

Simon

Alteryx doesnt support querying tables within Apache Ignite via Ignite ODBC connector. Connectivity from Ignite being an in memory database with Alteryx would help in better connectivity via ODBC.

https://apacheignite-sql.readme.io/docs/overview 

Currently, if you download and Alteryx package from an alternative version it doesn't allow import into a newer version.

Workflows allow this with a warning it would be good to allow it on packages too. 

The email tool, such a great tool!  And such a minefield.  Both of the problems below could and maybe should be remedied on the SMTP side, but that's applying a pretty broad brush for a budding Alteryx community at a big company.  Read on!

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

What I said the first time I ran the email tool without testing it first.

1. Can I get a thumbs up if you ever connected a datasource directly to an email tool thinking "this is how I attach my data to the email" and instead sent hundreds... or millions of emails?  Oops.  Alteryx, what if you put an expected limit as is done with the append tool.  "Warn or Error if sending more than "n" emails."  (super cool if it could detect more than "n" emails to the same address, but not holding my breath).

2. make spoofing harder, super useful but... well my company frowns on this kind of thing.

Preface: I have only used the in-DB tools with Teradata so I am unsure if this applies to other supported databases.

When building a fairly sophisticated workflow using in-DB tools, sometimes the workflow may fail due to the underlying queries running up against CPU / Memory limits. This is most common when doing several joins back to back as Alteryx sends this as one big query with various nested sub queries. When working with datasets in the hundereds of millions and billions of records, this can be extremely taxing for the DB to run as one huge query. (It is possible to get arround this by using in-DB write out to a temporary table as an intermediate step in the workflow)

When a routine does hit a in-DB resource limit and the DB kills the query, it causes Alteryx to immediately fail the workflow run. Any "temporary" tables Alteryx creates are in reality perm tables that Alteryx usually just drops at the end of a successful run. If the run does not end successfully due to hitting a resource limit, these "Temporary" (perm) tables are not dropped. I only noticed this after building out a workflow and running up against a few resource limits, I then started getting database out of space errors. Upon looking into it, I found all the previously created "temporary" tables were still there and taking up many TBs of space.

My proposed solution is for Alteryx's in-DB tools to drop any "temporary" tables it has created when a run ends - regardless of if the entire module finished successfully. 

Thanks,

Ryan

Please enhance the dynamic select to allow for dynamic change data type too.  The use case can be by formula or update in an action for a macro.  If you've ever wanted to mass change or take precision action in a macro, you're forced to use a multi-field formula.  It would be rather helpful and appreciated.

Cheers,

Mark

Two additions to the formula tool that would be great to see:

- When I select a function (like DateTimeParse) and hit F1 for help - please could you take me to the help for this specific function?

- For the parameters which are ordinal or "magic value" type parameters - please can you create a simple formula builder so that we don't have to keep on going into the help text to find out which % flag to use for a month in MM format; and which is MMM format.

     - What I'm thinking here is a simple pop-up box that allows you to create the parameter you want

     - Alternatively - provide a direct hint-text for the parameter in question or inline intellitext like Visual Studio or Eclipse

     - Overall though - the date functions seem to have grown up at different times - and so they treat dates in different ways - dateTimeDiff uses "Hours" which is pretty common, the DateTimeParse uses magic values like "%Y", and the new date time conversion tool uses the standard form used in Windows of MM-YYYY etc.   So it woudl be worth looking at a refactoring of the date functions to bring them all to a standard treatment of date parameters.

Thank you

Sean

Hi Alteryx 🙂

When you set maximum records per file, the filename gets _# appended.  Great!  But in reality you get:

Filename.csv

Filename_1.csv

Filename_2.csv

The first filename doesn't get a number.  I think that it should.

Cheers,

Mark

The v10 formula configuration window had two very small advantages.  First, it always had an extra 'line' for another output field (no pressing '+' required).  Second, it defaulted to letting you immediately begin typing the name of the next column (no need to press 'Select Column' then 'Add New Column').   I know these are minor, but every little thing counts when you're doing heavy development.

It has been brought up that the following comments were given during the beta.  While I appreciate the reasoning of requiring 'obvious intention,' my personal opinion is that it is overkill in this scenario.  Even for new users, the old design was quite intuitive.

"Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback! This touches a conversation topic that has been ongoing here at Alteryx. While we want workflow development to be as fast as possible, we also are  trying to address the overall usability of the tool and make sure it is very clear what we intend the user to do. We decided to have the UI ask for an explicit action (pick an existing field to edit or click to add a new field) to help make those options clear, as we have found that users don't always understand from the existing tool that this is the first decision they should make when using the tool. That being said, your feedback is definitely valuable. I will be sure to bring this up as we are making improvements to the new tool and see if there's a compromise that we can make on speed vs. obvious intention. Thanks for taking the time!"

I do a lot of work with SQL code in the PRE/POST SQL options and when I get an error, it usually returns the entire code and a little bit about what is wrong. These long strings are hard to read in the current tooltip format as if you hover over to see the entire error, the tooltip goes away after 5 seconds. So I am frantically reading through lines of error code 5 seconds at time. Can we make it so the tooltip just hangs out until I move my cursor off of it?

API Security requirements are constantly evolving and strengthening.  As API architectures migrate from traditional authentication models (Basic, OAuth, etc.) to more secure, certificate-based models, like MTLS/MSSL, leveraging Alteryx Designer will become increasingly difficult, especially for larger organizations trying to scale the use of Alteryx across a large user base, with vastly diverse skillsets.

I realize issuing API calls with certificates is possible via the Run Command tool.  We consider this a temporary workaround, and not a permanent, strategic solution.  The Run Command tool can be clunky to use when passing in variables and passing the output back into the workflow for downstream processing.

Therefore, I would like to request a more scalable approach to issuing MTLS/MSSL API calls.  Can an option be added to the Download Tool to allow for certificates to be passed on API calls?

Python pandas dataframes and data types (numpy arrays, lists, dictionaries, etc.) are much more robust in general than their counterparts in R, and they play together much easier as well. Moreover, there are only a handful of packages that do everything a data scientist would need, including graphing, such as SciKit Learn, Pandas, Numpy, and Seaborn. After utliizing R, Python, and Alteryx, I'm still a big proponent of integrating with the Python language much like Alteryx has integrated with R. At the very least, I propose to create the ability to create custom code such as a Python tool. 

I often encounter situations where I need to apply the same formula to several columns. Doing this requires copy/pasting the formula several times  and then updating the variable names in the formula for each output column. I wish there was a built in "Current Output Column" variable so that I could build one formula and use that for each column. 

For example: 

Please consider adding the ability in the Power BI Output Tool to create/modify multiple tables per dataset - having to work with only single table datasets in Power BI is very limiting.

Its definately not a good UX that the full browse is now in the output window.  I usually have my Output on autohide and its a few extra clicks to see the browses now... Can we have both the Browse Everywhere tab in Output and Configuration Panel?

I would like to see either the option to create a Venn Diaram within the current chart tool or an entirely new tool specifically for Venn Diagrams.

I often work with data from multiple sources and would like to better understand how much of my data is in multiple sources and how much is only from a single source. A great way to view this is with a Venn Diagram.

Hi there,

Would it be possible to use the ISO week date system, which everybody uses?

In numerous workflows, I used to define the week number of a date with the formula DateTimeFormat(d, "%W") and it was perfectly working till the 1st January, 2019.

But from this date, the week numbers defined by Alteryx are not the same than the ones in the calendar we all use!

Alteryx says that from the 1st to the 6th January, 2019, the week number is "00" instead of "01"!!! And so on until the week 52 which, for Alteryx, goes from the 30th to 31st or December, 2019: the week 52 has only 2 days!!

As the year 2018 begins with a Monday, there is no problem but for 2019 it is completely weird! And it will repeat in 2020...

The rule from the ISO week date system is pretty simple: "The ISO 8601 definition for week 01 is the week with the Gregorian year's first Thursday in it."

Please correct that

Simon

So far, Alteryx Products are offered in 6 different languages, which is a great thing indeed !!

However there is a lack of a toggle option to effortlessly switch the interface to a different language.

As a standard feature users should be allowed to switch language without re-installing the product (applicable to all Alteryx products)

 Ref: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/How-to-Change-Alteryx-Designer-Language/ta-p...

Today, any Alteryx tool with "Select" functionality has an option for "Dynamic or Unknown Fields" which, when checked, allows any new fields to pass through that tool.  This is a great function for most of the tools as you can allow workflow updates to pass through the tool without issue.

However, in the Join tool, there are some use cases where there is NEVER a reason to pass new fields from one side or the other into the tool, but you might still want new fields from a primary process.  Examples being something like a lookup/cross-reference to do an inclusive join, where adding new fields to the lookup might inadvertently pass these downstream.  Having the option to only allow unknown fields from one side through would greatly enhance this output.