Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi, I was using the Image Template tool and I noticed that the icons for import and export are switched.

Hi all,

I was recently helping a new starter assemble an app the included a long check box list in its interface, and stumbled upon a possible feature to be added to your interface tools. Here’s the situation in a nutshell:

• The analyst wanted to allow the end user to select a from a list of stores, so he used a List Box that populated from our store list in Oracle
• We have thousands of stores, so when rendered, the interface would be extremely long and cumbersome for the user
• I then suggested he use a Tree instead of a List Box for this part of the interface, as a Tree allows the designer to limit the Tree Window Height and display only XX lines to the user at a time

So, here’s my suggestion: Can a “Window Height” option be added to the List Box tool?

Given that Tree already has this functionality, I think it would make sense to include such a feature for List Box as well. As of v11.3, this feature does not appear to be included.

Thoughts?

Current option in Tree interface tool

When using an OUTPUT tool, you can currently only output to one (1) format.  My idea is to allow for a checkbox to create a YXDB file format when you output to another format.  In many instances a copy of the CSV data in YXDB file format is needed.  Creating another output requires another tool with nearly identical information.  This is my backup copy to what I sent the customer is an example.

Cheers,

Mark

Taking inspiration how you work with Jupyter notebooks and use the notebook to show your workings,  wouldn't it be great if you could document your workflows directly on the canvas more in a notebook style.

I think this essentially can be summarised down into two features:

1) Markdown functionality in the comment tool

2) Ability to import results from IRG and  / or browse tool directly into the canvas.

I have mocked up a version of what this could look like in the screenshot below.

Overall I think it would improve the experience of documenting workflows as you can show your workings in-line while building the workflow. Plus it solves the debate around team vertical vs team horizontal as you build using both! 

Currently I find myself always wanting to replace the DateTime field with a string or visa verse.

It would be nice to have a radio button to pick whether to append the parsed field to replace the current field with the parsed field.

I understand that all you need is a select tool after, this would be a nice QoL change especially where the field may be dynamically updated.

If I understand right, currently, Alteryx only accept projection defined with WKT, but not support WKT as an input or output spatial object.http://downloads.alteryx.com/Alteryx/Help/Projection_Support.htm

As a Tableau user as well as an Alteryx user, I suggest Alteryx can support WKT (Well-known_text) as part of its spatial format,  and support output spatial object in TDE file: 1. it can output spatial object into tde file directly, as Tableau use WKT as a spatial object format in its TDE file. 2. WKT is essentially a standard string, which can lower down barrier of handling and exchanging spatial data, and make spatial data more accessible. For example, it is easier to write spatil file to Exasol databse, which support WKT as spatial object.

For your information. I am aware that FME can output spatial object directly into tde file(for example: how-to-write-spatial-data-into-tableau-with-fme ; tutorial-preparing-data-in-fme-for-tableau ), while, currently, Alteryx don't have this function. So if one have a file with spatial object (eg.postcode-string, its polygon-spatial object), it is straight forward to get a file with spatial object ready to use with FME tde file creater, whereas, in Alteryx, it output the string part only. [Currently, I am outputing a spatial file, and combine the string with the spatial file, and let Tableau to transform the spatial object to WKT for me.]

A good article demonstrated how to work around before Alteryx can help to do this inside current spatial object output. I think it shouldn't be too difficult for the Talents in Alteryx to integrate this inside Alteryx, hope it is heard by the Alteryx people.

"Flights of the World: How to map great circle routes in Tableau 10.4

A short-cut. Writing directly into a TDE

If you know that you want to use this data in Tableau (and you have the Personal or Professional Edition of Tableau Desktop), you can take a shortcut and write your routes directly into a Tableau Data Extract (TDE) file using the TableauSDK (SDK = Software Development Kit). The SDK supports several languages (C, C++, Python, etc.). We used the Python version to turn the routes created using geographiclib into a TDE.

A benefit of writing straight into a TDE is that the files are much smaller because coordinates for each route are compressed into our spatial data format as you drop them into the TDE."

Many thanks

Hope this is something the community also support

Steven

(1) I would like to have more text formatting options available in the Comment Tool, such as:

• set different format for selected words (color, bold, underline, size..)
• indenting
• bullet list or numbered list

(2) Option to remove or recolor the blue outline of the comment box. (Especially when I have a comment in a color-filled comment box, I would prefer a comment box without a dark outline.) 

(3) UX -  Add an arrow cursor to indicate resizing functionality

Here's a reason to get excited about amp!   Create a runtime setting that gets Alteryx working even faster. 

when you configure a file input you see 100 records.  Imagine the delight that after you run your workflows all input tools are automatically cached.  You run so much faster. 

now think of the absolute delight that even before you run the workflows that a configured input tool causes a background read off the input data.  Whether it is a new workflow or an opened existing flow that reading can start ahead of the time button. 

what do you think 🤔?

The CompareDictionary([A], [B]) function in Alteryx is case insensitive so it returns an "Equal" response (0) for CompareDictionary("cat","CAT").

Could we please add a either a case sensitivity parameter like the EndsWith(String, Target, caseinsensitivity) function; or create a new function that allows for both case sensitive and insensitive comparisons between strings?

Hi there,

The download tool currently does not work if the user is behind a corporate proxy setup - and the only way to download web-content is using CURL.

This is a significant impediment because this prevents almost all corporate alteryx users from being able to access this capaibilty

Could you please look into using the proxy settings that the workstation uses to access the internet in a corp env?

thank you

Sean

It would be nice if AWS Glue had first class support in Alteryx. This would allow Alteryx to more seamlessly connect to data sources defined in the Glue metastore catalog. That alone would be handy and save on extra book-keeping. AWS Glue also has an ETL language for executing workflows on a managed Spark cluster, paying only for use. Integrating this big data tool with Alteyrx would be interesting as a way to execute in-database Spark workflows without the extra overhead of cluster management or Alteyrx connectivity

https://aws.amazon.com/glue/configuration.

Instead of using the arrows, I think it would be nice to be able to drag and drop the questions to rearrange them in the Interface Designer. This would go more hand in hand with the drag and drop experience of Alteryx.

Additionally, when a lot of interface tools are on the canvas, Designer really slows down if you need to rearrange the order of the tools in the Interface Designer. I would like to see if there is any way that this can be sped up.

Thanks!

https://orc.apache.org/

Apache ORC is commonly used in the context of Hive, Presto, and AWS Athena. A common pattern for us is to use Alteryx to generate Apache Avro files, then convert them to ORC using Hive. For smaller data sizes, it would be convenient to be able to simply output data in the ORC format using Alteryx and skip the extra conversion step.

ORC supports a variety of storage options that users may wish to override from sensible Alteryx defaults. We typically use the SNAPPY compression codec.

Hello Team,

Currently, in the select tool, we have to scroll up or down to check or see the list of the fields. In case, if the user wanted to change the data type, they can scroll into the list. Like, I am working on the mid-size data, and sometimes data contain 300+ fields, if I need to change anything in the data type I have to search by scrolling up or down. 

The idea here is, If you provide a search bar under Field, it will be a great help to all, in case if anyone needs to go for some specific field, the user just types the name in the search bar and make changes quickly. The select tool is important and we used much time while working on the flow. 

Thank you,

Mayank

Our company often builds applications where we need the ability for it to dynamically update dropdowns based on a user's previous selections. 

For example: 

• A user needs to select their Server, database, and table for analysis (3 dropdowns).
• When the user selects their server, a query is run to get a list of all databases on that server. Then the database dropdown will automatically populate with this list of databases. 
• The user then makes a database selection, and a query is then run to get all tables within that database. The table dropdown will automatically populate with this list of tables. 
• The user makes their table selection, and then runs their analysis using the server, database, and table variables with values that they have selected from each dropdown.

We can do this in other programs, but unfortunately the lack of dynamic selections/dependent dropdowns is a big limitation for us when building Alteryx applications. Our current workarounds are chaining applications together, or using PyQt within the workflow. Chaining is clunky and often causes unforeseen issues when uploading to Server with errors that are non-descriptive, and using PyQt comes with Python versioning issues. 

If this interactivity can somehow be added to Alteryx applications it would be a huge upgrade to our current Alteryx processes. Any suggestions for further workarounds would also be helpful!

Thank you, 

Amanda 

it would be great if the formula tool could expand the intellisense to the select column box. For example, I could start typing in the select column box and it would widdle down the list of fields down.let's suppose I wanted to update field 79A, I could type in 7 and it might show something like 

7

17

27

37

70

71

79A

79B.

So if I typed in 79 then, it would further reduce it to 

79A

79B

And i could select 79A.

Products Team: Could you tell me if this is on the future road map or not?

It's something that other software does utilize, and I've seen similar requests on this message board.

Many companies use per period, quarter, year, etc. that aren't equal lengths or same days each month.

By saying every 364 days, you can schedule a yearly report. If your 4 quarters are unequal length, you can schedule 4 times (1st day of each quarter) at 364 days, recurring.

We have lengths of every 28 days for monthly reports (not 30/31). Or every 90 days. Or 180 days. Or every 14 days.

Being able to Schedule Every N Days moves you from owning a scheduler, to a providing a Competitive Scheduler.

Hi, I'm currently feeding about 4,000 URLs into the Download tool.  Some of these may be old websites that are no longer hosted.  As the records get passed, if the process runs into one of these (random, 1 in a 100 chance), the whole thing stops executing and errors out.

It would be fantastic if I could just tell it to skip any records that error out, instead of having the whole thing error out because of one dud website.  I don't know which ones are duds until I pass them through the tool, so there's no way to filter them out upstream.  Real Catch 22 here!

I have a coworker who's going to tackle this in Python instead, and he says he can put in a "try, except block" into his code.  His words, not mine, and I know nothing about python code...but given what I know about Alteryx, there must be a way to build this into the tool!

Thanks!

AD/LDAP Authentication should be an option for the Mongo tool, and the ability to use Gallery Connections would also be great. Local SQL authentication is no longer allowed in most enterprises to simplify security configuration control.