Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi there,

Apologies if Alteryx already does this - but I'd be curious to see if it would be possible to automatically add items to your favourites bar based on usage.

To test this, I've been doing a lot of macro work over the last few days, and given the frequency of using the Macro input and Macro output, I'd expect that they would have elected themselves onto my favourites list.

Again, apologies if the designer already does this

Sean

I would like to see the Publish to Tableau Server tool updated to include the option of authenticating with a Personal Access Token in addition to Username/Password.  The user would be able to toggle the login method and provided the necessary credentials for that method.

It would be helpful to differentiate between annotations that have been automatically generated, vs those that have been manually entered. This would help speed up "reading" workflows, and reduce any confusion that occurs when annotations have been manually amended - but might look like auto-annotations.

E.g. auto-annotations appear Grey, whilst manually edited annotations appearing Black? 

Alteryx should support horizontal scrolling!!!! urgently

My PC has Windows Precision touchpad (which might be a standard today), I can use 2 fingers to scroll up/down but moving left/right in Alteryx is another story, it's just impossible. That's extremely annoying when the licence cost for a user is so high. 

The desginer autosave feature is fantastic when you need it. However, it's pretty annoying when you don't need it as it seems like it:

• Autosaves blank workflows
• Autosaves workflows that are saved and haven't had any changes made to them

Hopefully all of the above can be filtered out from Autosave: 

The only workflow from the screenshot above that I'd want Autosaved would be the Parse Directory workflow as this is the only one which I made changes to:

- New Workflow1 - Completely blank

- PureGym Log In - Saved and no changes made

- New Workflow2 - Completely blank (however, I had dragged a tool onto canvas and deleted it, so something had changed)

However, Alteryx brings up all of the workflows:

I love the new right click and duplicate workflow feature, but I think the duplicated workflow that opens, should open next to the original workflow and not at the end of all of your already open workflow tabs...

cc: @jpoz @jeffv 

We have a need to be able to trace the lineage of fields being processed through Alteryx - and it has to be done at a field level to satisfy our regulator.   In essence, we have to be able to show exactly where a particular field came from, and demonstrate that we can trust this field.   NOTE: If we could do this - then we could also use this information to make EVERY canvas faster, by checking for unused fields and making suggestions to remove these unused fields early in the flow.

In order to do this - it would be great if there were an option to force explicit field names in the Alteryx XML so that we can trace a specific field.

• Alteryx currently only makes a note of a field name if it is changing that field which is very economical - but it makes tracing fields impossible.
• Desire is for every tool to write the field list to the XML definition for every field that it knows about (just like it looks in the UI)

cc: @AdamR_AYX @jpoz @Claje 

Example:

Here's a simple canvas:

- 3 fields coming in from an input

- Select tool with these 3

- output of three fields into a file

These three fields are not mentioned anywhere in the XML

The new Paste Before/After feature is awesome, as is the Cut & Connect Around.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Paste-Before-After/idc-p/510292#M12071

What would be even better is to allow the combination of the two. E.G. It is not currently possible to copy or cut multiple tools and paste before/after, as this functionality only works for a single tool that's copied.

Thanks,

Joe

I see many posts where users want to view numeric or string data as monetary values. I think that it would be friendly to have a masking option (like excel) where you could choose a format or customize one for display.  The next step is to apply the formatting to the workflow so that folks who want to export the data can do so. 

cheers,

mark

Hello,

In my company, we have our personal account (let's say myorganization\saubert) and, if we have the right to, a LOCAL admin account (eg : .\adminsaubert) to make install of sofware, etc...

So, the license is on my personal account

Now, I want to access the System settings :

And then  I have this very friendly message :

If i click on "OK", it opens the License manager.
If I click on "Cancel", it closes the windows and I'm unable to change my system settings.

I think changing these system settings shouldn't require a license.

Best regards,

Simon

Add an option to the tree tool generate custom lists similar to the list box.  When building apps for teams to use and we need them to select from either a product or store hierarchy it would greatly simplify the process if the tree tool could generate a custom list of the lowest level of the hierarchy that we could feed into a sql pull in the dynamic input tool.  On top making the workflow cleaner, I think it would make the user interface a lot cleaner, instead of a giant lists of stores/departments etc. they could drill down to the relevant area much faster.

Right now the Directory tool; Input tool; Output tool all do implied credentialing (for input and output it's implied for file-based data-sources).    This implied credentialing is not obvious because most people working on the desktop want the designer to pass on their own credentials as they access a file.

This is a significant data-leakage risk since an canvas running on the server can access the full content of EVERY network share that has any input files that are used in Alteryx canvasses.    

Please can you add explicit credentialing to all input and output tools in Alteryx, especially the Directory tool; Input tool (for files) and output tool (for files).    That way, teams will be able to use a teamID to access secure content, and the cross-team leakage risk on the designer and server can be closed out.

Many thanks

Sean

+  @Hemanth @marydest24 @Shreyasi @Sotoll @Kosi @revathi @Bethanyturner012  

I've been dealing with JSON since day one, and to be honest it isn't the best experience I've had.

Converting a hierarchical schema into a tabular one is't a straight forward process, but doing that everyday the old way is time and processing consuming.

What I'm proposing is a tool that can read JSON as input, then display a structural skeleton for the user, or the user can provide such skeleton for the tool, say let's say we have the following input:

{"menu": [{
  "id": "File",
  "popup": {
    "menuitem": [
      {"value": "New", "action": "CreateNewDoc", "icons": ["SAVE", "FLOPPY"]},
      {"value": "Open", "action": "OpenDoc"},
      {"value": "Close", "action": "CloseDoc", "conditions": [11,8,4]}
    ]
  }
},
{
  "id": "Edit",
  "popup": {
    "menuitem": [
      {"value": "Cut", "action": "TextCut", icons: ["CUT", "SCISSORS"]},
      {"value": "Copy", "action": "OpenDoc"},
      {"value": "Paste", "action": "CloseDoc", "conditions": [5,17]}
    ]
  }
}
],
"error": false
}

now to parse this into a table of menuitems we need to use:

• JSON Parse: convert JSON into one long key:value table
• TextToColumns: split key into multiple columns
• Filter: make sure we only get one level from the tree
• CrossTab: Convert it back into a column based key values.

All of this will give us the most primitive table we can have as:

and now if we want to have the parent menu id along side with the menuitems, we will do that again as:

• Filter: for parent values only
• CrossTab: for parent values into a table
• Join: to join Parents with Sub items and add the Parent.Id

Now all of this is done with Concatenating of child items, as cross tab will allow us to only do Concat/First/Last for items with the same grouping values.

And now if we want to process children, count them, or extract their data into another table, we have to add more Filters, more CrossTab and more Joining to get parent IDs for future linking.

So what's I'm proposing?

I'm thinking of a Tool with an interface that give me the ability to choose:

• Target Branch: which is the main table to be extracted from the branches, in this case it would be menu->popup->menuitem.
• Parent Values: what values to be appended from parents of the previous table, just like menu->Id and others if exist.
• Children Data types: selecting the proper and expected data type for children instead of using strings or the existing different columns way.
• Children Arrays Process: what to do with children branches? either stopping their process and return them as is (Stringify), exclude or do other process like count.

the tool may extract the structure or let the user input such config as the following:

Or Input the Structure as a YAML formatted config or any other way.

This will allow the user to have a quick native tool that does what he wants as it should, and user can use it as much as he want for children and nested values. you just Stringify and repeat and only parse what you need every time.

I hope you consider this for me to replace tens of macros and tools into single tools such so.

Thanks for your help and time and all the best!

One of the tools that I use the most is the SELECT tool because I normally get large data sets with fields that I won't be using for a specific analysis or with fields that need re-naming. In the same way, sometimes Alteryx will mark a field in a different type than the one I need (e.g. date field as string). That's when the SELECT comes in handy.

However, often times when dealing with multiple sources and having many SELECT tools on your canvas can make the workflow look a little "crowded". Not to mention adding extra tools that will need later explanation when presenting/sharing your canvas with others. That is why my suggestion is to give the CONNECTION tool "more power" by offering some of the functionality found in the SELECT tool.

For instance, if one of the most used features of the SELECT tool is to choose the fields that will move through the workflow, then may be we can make that feature available in the CONNECTION tool. Similarly, if one of the most used features (by Alteryx users) is to re-name fields or change the field type, then may be we can make that available in the CONNECTION tool as well.

At the end, developers can benefit from speeding up workflow development processes and end-users will benefit by having cleaner workflows presented to them, which always help to get the message across.

What do you guys think? Any of you feel the same? Leave your comments below.

Hi Alteryx,

Can you add the search functionality in the dropdown (Apps) where the user enters specific text and the dropdown list gets filtered accordingly?

It would enhance the user's experience while using large lists in dropdown.

Using other data viz tools like Tableau, we often plot yearly timeseries of data onto the same line chart so we can quickly compare year-on-year differences.  All data viz tools seem to have complexities but the logical approach is the same.  What you do is map all the years data to a relative year, i.e. this year, and then give each year it's own title.  See the example below snipped from a Tableau dashboard:

In this example 7 years of data have been plotted on the same chart.  Note the x-axis,  In Tableau we are able to format the X-Axis labels to only show month and day (Mon-D).  This removes the common relative year, i.e 2019.

As expected, Alteryx is awesome at preparing data to do this kind of thing.  Using the interactive charting tool you can build really nice charts.  However there is currently no way to format the X-Axis label, you must show the relative year too, as shown in the picture below (snipped from the browse tool, outputted from the interactive chart tool):

It was really easy to prepare the 5 year min, max and average lines, which is almost impossible to do in Tableau!

My idea in a nutshell is, please change the interactive chart tool so that the labels on the axis can be formatted to the user's choice, i.e. in this case formatted from datetime to "%B-%d".

Please note, the workflow i'm building in this case, is creating 3 line charts of related data, each by year.  The end product is a daily email sent to users.

Thanks, nick 

Hi Team,

I would like to make some suggestions for future release. I am a big fan of the "retro" alteryx look and would like the option to select that look under User Settings. There should also be some other set themes for user to use. a "Light" version, "Dark" (for the true developer feel) and some grayscale standards or color blind adapted themes. 

I have a number of reservations to the new look design (I can put those in a separate post if the team really wants to hear them) but please put the 'retro' button in user settings for me and I will be a happy analyst.

Keep up the good work!!!