Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

CI / CD is critical to any production level process, especially when multiple authors are contributing new features to the same workflow. Currently, multi-author editing of workflows is extremely difficult, and something that would be aided greatly by using git to control different branches of ongoing work. Luckily, that's something we can already do today! However, the ability to test before merging a pull request is critical to modern CI / CD pipelines. For this, it we need to be able to run a headless workflow from a CI / CD environment. Also, having the ability to pass in parameters to the workflow would allow for robust integration testing - something that isn't straightforward today without running on production environments. 

Hello!
I recently build a couple of workflows where i needed to union many parts of my data together. 

Take for instance, the following:

I appreciate this is an unrealistic workflow - but if i am splitting data, at any points, and doing different processes, i am going to need to union that data back together.

Now without my fix - the solution is to put a union tool onto the canvas, and drag each connection to the union tool. This is fine on a small scale, but when its 5+ connections this can become tedious.

My proposed solution, is similar to the 'cache and run' functionality, in that you can select many tools with Ctrl + Click, and at the bottom you have the option for 'Union Outputs':

And when clicked, a union is added to the canvas, following the furthest most right tool (or last clicked), and have a union setup, with all connections made:

Hope this makes sense!
TheOC

To embed the "Not ok" filter option in the browse tool

The original engine support expanding the formula tool with custom functions either in XML or C++. The new AMP doesn't support these yet.

There is a fair number of user who are using these in E1 and would be good to have this available in AMP

Currently, the Open Recent (from the File toolbar) generates a list of the 10 most recent workflows opened in Alteryx Designer.  It would be useful to show even more (20-25?) workflows through this method as there is enough open space on the screen to do so.

When you enter a search term in the results window, it would be great if it highlighted that term in the data results window. Otherwise, it still takes work to find where your search term is located in each row.

Please add support for windows authentication to the download tool.  I know there's a workaround but that involves using curl and the run command tool.  The run command tool is awful and should be avoided at all costs, so please improve the download tool so I can use internal APIs.

In the 'Select' tool, you have the ability to output the select configuration.  At this time that configuration file doesn't include the information (which you do in the check box of the select tool) on if it is a field that is output. Not a big deal if there are only a couple fields, but quickly becomes an inconvenience if there are a lot of fields and you have to compare going down the list to make sure you're accurately identifying which fields from the original select tool, are actually output.  That info should be part of the .yxft file that's output for the config file. 

Hi there,

When you use DB connection aliases that are saved in Alteryx, it's currently not easy to edit them when you move a database to a different location.

Can we do something simliar to the "Edit Password" function, but which allows the user to also edit the database or server, so that this applies to all workflows using this alias?

As pointed out by @Joshman108 in this post, you can lose some/all of your work in the table tool if the metadata is ever not flowing correctly. Losing your metadata can happen for a number of legitimate reasons (copying/pasting, crosstab tool upstream, python tool upstream etc.) There are a number of tools (including the table tool) where losing the matadata can prove catastrophic. 

Consider these 2 simple examples:

1) We have the dynamic box checked and apply a rule to field 1:

If our table tool loses its metadata, our row rule is completely erased! I would expect the tool to remember our row rule once metadata is reestablished.

2) We have the dynamic box unchecked, as well as Field4 unchecked. We setup the same rule as before that references field4.

Now when the metadata is lost and restablished, the table tool does a good job of remembering that Field4 is supposed to be unselected, and that I had a rule for Field1; however, the rule has now been changed! I would expect the rule to also remember that I was referencing Field4. Note that if my rule had reference a field that was included in the table, it would have remembered the rule. It's only because my rule referenced Field4 which was not included in the table that my rule got messed up. In my rule, it now references Row# which is completely wrong:

Dear Users, Fans, Compatriots, and Fellow Alteryx Nerds:

One of my favourite parts of using Alteryx is that in all the in-memory tools, there is a quick-and-dirty count in each of your tools' output nodes. You know, you use these all the time and when you switch back into SQL, you get frustrated with having to run the query two or three times just to see the count in each of your join outputs. 

One thing I'm missing as an INDB user is that I have to employ a manual workaround to see what is happening. INDB tools are a bit black-box in that we don't see the counts.

All I want...

I've been using this workaround for a little over a year now and I haven't found it to be incredibly taxing on my resources, so I'm wondering if Alteryx may be able to look into doing this on the back end to make the INDB experience that much closer to the in-memory experience. I just want those numbers above; I don't need to know the byte count, just the record count.

What I need to do to get it

Now, I imagine this is not implemented already for a Very Good Reason. But, enough is enough! Let's shoot for the moon and make this tool all that much better!! Anyone with me?

-Cedric Justice

Cambia Healthcare

Would be extremely useful if the Summarize Tool had an option in the numeric menu to Standardize the data.  More often than not, data sets will not have the same count of variables which makes the comparison analysis meaningless.  Currently, there is no easy way to Standardize the data without using the K-Centroids Cluster Analysis tool or standardize_unit interval supporting macro. 

Looking for a tool to replicate the Goal seek functionality built into Excel.

Seems it could be solved by using R or iterative macros however a tool would make life much easier,

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

Tableau allows users to do three very useful things to make data more usable for end users, but this functionality is not available with the Publish To Tableau Server tool.

Foldering of dimensions/measures

Creating hierarchies out of dimensions

Adding custom comments to fields that are visible to users when they hover

This functionality allows subject matter experts to create data sources that can be easily understood by everyone within their organizations.  

Please "star" this idea if you would like to see functionality in Alteryx that would enable you to create a metadata layer in the "Publish to Tableau Server" tool or in an accompanying tool.

I would like to request that the Python tool metadata either be automatically populated after the code has run once, or a simple line of code added in the tool to output the metadata. Also, the metadata needs to be cached just like all of the other tools. 

As it sits now, the Python tool is nearly unusable in a larger workflow. This is because it does not save or pass metadata in a workflow. Most other tools cache temporary metadata and pass it on to the next tool in line. This allows for things like selecting columns and seeing previews before the workflow is run.

Each time an edit is made to the workflow, the workflow must be re-run to update everything downstream of the Python tool. As you can imagine, this can get tedious (unusable) in larger workflows.

Alteryx support has replied with "this is expected behavior" and "It is giving that error because Alteryx is 
doing a soft push for the metadata but unfortunately it is as designed."

Currently if I drag a tool onto the canvas and it has multiple input anchors, Alteryx will try to connect to the first input anchor from the output of the nearest tool I am hovering near.

However the improvement I would like to see is where there are specific tools which are required to go into each input that it 'intelligently' connects to the correct input, for example on the gif below I have a PDF input and PDF template tool (pre-computer vision), and when I bring the image to text tool in, it will try and connect the output of the template tool into the D input anchor, when the correct input is the T anchor. What this leads to is me having to delete a connection and then re-wiring which slows down the development time.

When building a workflow with testing tools, you tend to want to be able to put these in container and then minimise this to improve readability of the workflow.

For example instead of this:

You might want to minimise the error checks like this:

However when running apart from reading through the results window, there is no immediate indicator that there is a tool inside the container that has errored:

So the feature enhancement request is to add in an exclamation marker to show the user that a tool inside has an error and you can then easily open it up and investigate further.