Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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 

 

 

Right now it is not possible to open .xlsx files in Alteryx that has restricted access to specific users from the excel file, even when you are logged in to Alteryx and Excel with the same user. If it is possible to make Alteryx recognize which users/email addresses should be able to input a file to Alteryx I think it would be a great enhancement. To get around the problem we are currently changing the file restrictions through right clicking on it -> Properties -> Security, but this is time consuming and not a smooth fix. 

 

All the best,

Elin

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.

If progress bar or overall process completion percentage can be displayed somewhere, adds great value for the users running complex processes (with multiple databases/ files as input and complex queries especially spatial queries).

 

 

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.

First of, let me say that I really love that the render tool adds commas to your numbers when you output them to excel. You can even control the number of decimals!

 

However, there are those times that I wish I could turn the commas off. For example, I have a column that represents years. In this case, I want it to be a number, but I don't want commas. I can see this xml coming out of my table tool:

 

.de41ddeb2857c4579b858debce63bfbec tbody .column0 { numeric:true; decimal-places:0; } 

 

I would love an additional item like: separator:false that could be set in the table tool to shut off the separator. I've mocked up the table tool here:

In my limited knowledge, I'm guessing Alteryx would need to change/enhance the way their pcxml is structured.

 

Can we have an option to save a workflow in a prior version for backward compatibility? I think Tableau offers this functionality.

Example:

If I have 2019.4.8 and a colleague has 2019.1.x, I cannot share my workflows because my colleague will receive a notice that the workflow was built in a newer version. I want to be able to save my workflow in 2019.1.x and send to my colleague.

 

This is predicated on the workflow not containing any tools/features not present in the older version. In that case, give me a warning about the specific tools/features that are not backward compatible. Thank you.

Hi Dev team,

 

As well as this much needed UI feature to scroll through workflows https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Scrolling-functionality-added-to-Workflow-sh...

 

Could you please change the order of workflow names in the 'Active Documents' button to be ordered in the same order as the workflow tabs and not alphabetically as it currently is?

 

When you have more than 5 workflows open (or less if they have long names) it's so tricky to quickly and easily cycle through them to find the ones you need. This is especially important when demoing, training and presenting to others!

 

 

Thanks,

Joe

 

 

In order to make the interface tools more accessable - please could you add explicit documentation to the help-text that explains how the data is returned to the canvas?

 

For example - the text input tool is documented here: https://help.alteryx.com/2019.3/QuestionTextBox.htm

What is missing from this is whether the multi-line version will provide the data to the canvas as a semi-colon delimited; comma delimited; newline delimited etc?

 

Would be very valuable if the documentation could explicitly define how the output of checkboxes; multiline textboxes; tree views etc are passed to the action tool.

 

Hi Alteryx team,

The current UI options for building Alteryx Apps are very restrictive. Three simple changes could allow us to build much more feature rich apps.

1. Make the html sdk for building custom tools available for building Alteryx App interfaces.

2. Allow us to place objects from the interface palette next to each other (horizontally)

3. Allow the text in Labels and text box tools to be driven from incoming data fields, for instance in a chained app.

The new functionality of filtering within the results window is very handy but quite limited for date fields where you can only Filter by 'Is Null' or 'Is Not Null'

 

Can you please expand the functionality so we have the same options as within the Filter tool.

Dear GUI Gurus,

 

A minor, but time saving GUI enhancement would be appreciated.  When adding a tool to the canvas, the current behavior is to make visible the tool anchor that was last used on prior tools.  That being said, when I look at the results window, I might be adding a "vanilla" configuration tool to the canvas and stare at a BLANK results window.  When users are adding tools to the canvas, I suggest that the best practice is to VIEW the incoming data before configuring the tool.

 

I ALWAYS set the results to view the INCOMING DATA ANCHOR.

 

This minor change would be welcome to me.

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

Support for Markdown in Comment Tool

 

Allows for better formatting of comment and possibly include images and hyperlinks.

 

This will be great for workflow documentation.

 

Currently, the comment box can only be formatted as a whole and not on individual text.

Sometimes I want to test portions of a workflow, independent of other portions.  I find myself adding containers, just so I can disable some of the time consuming portions that are not part of my test.  It would be nice to be able to enable/disable any portion of a workflow, on the fly.  Or maybe just disable/enable any connection with a right-click.

Thanks!

Gary

I have reviewed a number of batch macros that work well for mirroring the "NetworkingDays" excel calculation but it would be great to add an interval type for "weekdays" to the DateTimeDiff formula ie

 

 DateTimeDiff ( [Date01],[Date02], "WorkDays")  where any Saturday or Sunday between the dates would be discounted.

I always end up sorting after the Summarize tool. It would be nice to have an option to sort on a field in the Actions section of the Sort tool. 

When Alteryx Designers are installed, I'd like to be able to disable the option for Designers within my organisation to 'Save to Alteryx Gallery' (The public Alteryx Gallery) - It causes confusion amongst users who are trying to interact with our internal Alteryx Server environments.

 

Thanks,

 

Ciaran

Hi, I have searched through the community, and I wasn't able to find a duplicate for this idea. If in fact there is, I apologize and please point me to that post. I think that it would be a good idea to have date options in the summarize tool that would allow for grouping at higher levels of the date. I often have a date field that is specific to the day (i.e. 2018-01-01), and I just want to group by the year or month. Currently in order to do this, I have to create a formula before the summarize tool that formats the date according to how I want to group it, and then I am able to group off that field in the summarize tool. It would be nice if in the summarize tool, I could select the date field, and then have the option to group it at year, month, week, etc.