Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I would like to see more files types supported to be able to be dragged from a folder onto a workflow. More precisely a .txt and a .dat file. This will greatly help my team and I do be able to analyze new and unknown data files that we receive on a daily basis.  

Thank you. 

It would be useful if enhancements could be made to the Sharepoint Input tool to support SSO. In my organisation we host a lot of collaborative work on SharePoints protected by ADFS authentication and directly pulling data from them is not supported with the SharePoint input tool, it is blocked. The addition of this feature to enable it to recognise logins would be very useful.

My specific use case relates to writing to AWS but am sure there are many other use cases for federated user session token support.

Specifically, using the S3 Upload tool or Athena Bulk Write (via SIMBA and Athena ODBC), the configuration works when using a IAM user, access key, and secret access key but when using a federated user via Okta there is no option to enter the session token and authentication fails.

Alteryx desktop should support federated users' session tokens.

In response to my question here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Singin-Error-to-Tableau-server-using-P...

The Publish to Tableau Server does not support SAML/SSO. I would like this feature to be added to this tool as it will make our business process more efficient.

Thank you.

Hi all,

Would it be possible to update the What's new page for 2019.4 to include the key features in this release (in my mind, one of the biggest features is the SQL formatting)?

Currently if you go to the What's new link in Designer, it takes you to the right webpage, but there is no content for 2019.4

Additionally - would it be possible to keep a few releases on this page - often people skip 2 or 3 updates so it's worth keeping the top highlights of the last 4 releases there so that people can see the new features and explore them.

The great thing about What's New pages is the ability to explore new features, so it's worth linking out to examples on a page like this if possible.

One of the common issues when you build macros is the error "the schema of macro output XXX has changed between iterations"

So the next step that we commonly follow is to put a select tool into the flow just before the macro output - and convert all the fields to a specific type; untick the "unknown" field; and then sometimes have to go into the XML to add the "Forced = true" flag into the XML so that it doesn't change over time:

Please could you add an option under the "Options" tab to force / lock down the type of every field with one click?     That would eliminate dozens of clicks on every creation of a macro.

Thank you 

Sean

Bring back the Cache checkbox for Input tools. It's cool that we can cache individual tools in 2018.4. 

The catch is that for every cache point I have to run the entire workflow. With large workflows that can take a considerable amount of time and hinders development. Because I have to run the workflow over and over just to cache all my data.

Add the cache checkbox back for input tools to make the software more user friendly.

There are circumstances where the python install section of Alteryx fails - however it does not report failure - in fact it reports success, and the only way to check if the Jupyter install fails is to check the Jupyter.log to look for error messages.

Can we add two features to Alteryx install / platform to manage this:

- If the installer for Python fails - please can you make this explicit in feedback to the user

- Can we also add a way for the user to repair the Python install - either using standard MSI Repair functionality, or a utility or a menu system in Designer.

Thank you 

Sean

It would be great if we could create more customization of the email output in the Events in the Workflow Configurations.  Currently we can output the number of error, warnings, etc. and the entire output log.  It would be great if we could only send the error messages in an email instead of sending the whole output log (similar to the output of a workflow run with errors in the Alteryx Gallery).  The customization in the Email Tool is great, but this isn't helpful when a scheduled workflow fails. I found this related thread on the discussion forum: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Customize-Events-Error-Message/td-p/42... Thanks!

I love the new Custom Format option with the DateTime tool in Alteryx 11.0, this makes working with dates SO MUCH easier... BUT it would be great if you could update an existing field rather than having to create a new column (e.g. DateTime_Out) and then use a select to put this back to the original Date field.

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

As seen in This Discussion Post,  the idea here is to be able to add a link to example workflows in macro descriptions - like the ones seen in native tools.

Filter Tool

Many thanks to @jdunkerley79 for demonstrating how this can be done by manually editing the macro's XML - specifically by adding a child element to the <MetaInfo> section, like so:

      <Example>
        <Description>Open Example</Description>
        <File>\\aSERVER\aRootDir\path\to\Alteryx\Macros\Date Wizard\Date Wizard Examples.yxmd</File>
      </Example>

One small caveat is that it doesn't support truly relative paths.  @PaulN explained in the discussion post that a relative reference here would search in the sample folders.

"Alteryx default behavior is to look for examples under .\Alteryx\Samples\02 One-Tool Examples or Alteryx\Samples\02 One-Tool Examples (or .\Alteryx\Samples\en\02 One-Tool Examples)."

Having said that, trying to reference a macro example in the same folder (using a relative reference) will throw an error given the following situation:

Package Structure:

Date Wizard.yxmc XML edits:

      <Example>
        <Description>Open Example</Description>
        <!-- THIS WORKS -->
        <File>\\aSERVER\aRootDir\path\to\Alteryx\Macros\Date Wizard\Date Wizard Examples.yxmd</File>
        <!-- THIS DOESNT
        <File>Date Wizard Examples.yxmd</File>
        <File>.\Date Wizard Examples.yxmd</File>
        <File>./Date Wizard Examples.yxmd</File>
        -->
      </Example>

This shows a link in the Macro description but yields an error (shown below) when it is clicked.

Example Link ShowsError

 Once again, this works fine with an absolute file path reference.  

Here is ultimately what I am suggesting:  Can we add an option to the Interface Designer (that updates the XML) and have it allow relative paths?  Allowing relative paths would obviously be essentially to maintaining the macro's ability to be "lift-and-shift" when packaged/moved/uploaded to servers/galleries etc.

I'm assuming the option could look something like this, similar to the "Help" file -only it would show link in the macro description...

Interface Designer Suggestion

In conclusion, this would be very useful in providing links to example workflows for custom macros that may be complex and/or not self-explanatory.

Cheers,

Taylor Cox

This idea is to fix one of the Power BI Output tool options for existing datasets.

Currently, if the 'Replace existing dataset' option is selected, the dataset is dropped and replaced with one having the same name.  Problem with this is that any reports or dashboards using that dataset become invalid (likely due to a changed internal identifier).

Idea is to change the 'Replace existing dataset' functionality to delete & replace the data within a dataset rather than deleting & replacing the dataset itself.

This behavior is described in the following thread & flagged as 'solved' although the workaround isn't practical as a true solution to the issue.  We'd like to see this supported more seamlessly via Alteryx.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Publish-to-Power-BI-breaks-linked-Powe...

Hello,

I would like to suggest the ability to manage our virtual environment for Python modules within Alteryx. Some current workflows I am building would be far easier and more secure if I had access to the virtual environment that the Python code would run in.

Uses for modifying the virtual environment:

     1) Setting environment variables in order to hide API Keys/DB credentials/etc.

     2) Installing private GitHub repository packages into the environment.

     3) Creating repeatable and easily maintainable ways to manage dependencies. 

It would be important that these virtual environments have a way to persist onto Alteryx Gallery, so that workflows behave identically on local machines as they would on the server. This could potentially be done though a requirements.txt file or some other environment initializer, but I'll leave the implementation to the experts. My preference would be for each workflow to contain their own virtual environment (as is best practice when developing Python scripts). 

Thank you,

I've had several of my users complaining about the Visual Query Builder view after the last couple of releases. When you maximize the window, half of the screen is taken up by blank gray space and there is no way to adjust it and it's very difficult for those who do not know SQL to build their queries in this very small white space. Need to be able to adjust the gray space.

There should be a quick way to delete all unwanted tools for specific output/browse tool in workflow. This would be useful when we have huge multiple cross connect workflow. By deleting all not requited tools, it would make it easy and faster to test as segregated.

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.

I think we would all benefit from having IntelliSense within Alteryx. Just think about how much quicker writing formulas wold be or any time you need to reference your data within the various tools.