Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

There would be great usefulness in having event triggers in 2 different places:

- Similar to Informatica - it would be useful to have event triggers for workflow - specifically "trigger when file arrives" or "trigger when value exceeds X"

- It would be also useful to have an event trigger component with an input so that we can use semaphore type flags to control sequencing in complex sets of flows.    For example:

    - When the ETL is done - mark the "Completed" flag as true

    - The reporting job is running, waiting for a completed flag to complete

Overall, it would be useful for Alteryx to have event-driven triggers.

Is there a way we can turn on and off any tools in the workflow. This way we can run the tool and when a certain tool is marked off it is not executed. This way we can test the workflow and check different output without deleting the tools existing on the workflow, we can just turn then on or off.

The default data type for new columns used to be Double, and now it is V_WString.  Is this user-configurable?  I find that, at least in my work, needing a formula to output a Double is way more common than a V_WString.  I'm curious of other community members' thoughts here.  If there isn't a consensus, it would be great to have this be a user-configurable default.

When I proceed with this command in a python tool:

from ayx import Package

Package.installPackages(package='pandas',install_type='install --upgrade')

in Alteryx it only updates to 0.25, but the Latest version is 1.1.2.

When I would like to upgrade from the Python side i get the following:

ERROR: ayx 1.0.54 has requirement pandas<0.25.0,>=0.24.2, but you'll have pandas 1.1.2 which is incompatible.

Can you please make sure we can upgrade to the latest version of pandas without any compatibility issue?

This is important because of json_normalize. Really useful tool, available from pandas 1.0.3!

I often encounter situations where I need to apply the same formula to several columns. Doing this requires copy/pasting the formula several times  and then updating the variable names in the formula for each output column. I wish there was a built in "Current Output Column" variable so that I could build one formula and use that for each column. 

For example: 

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.

I believe that in addition to the already suggested idea of having an option to avoid sending one email per record, the attachments capability should be overhauled. Sending multiple attachments in a single email is a common need, but the only Community idea is a partial address of the issue by requesting an ability to use semi-colon separated paths in a single field as the attachment criterion. This doesn't seem to be an optimal method given the potential usefulness of the tool and ease of use considerations. 

I think that a full solution should include:

• The capability to select a (file paths) field of all desired attachments which can then be uploaded into a single email
• The ability to use wildcards or directories in the file input mode (as you find in the Input Tool) in order to upload multiple attachments to a single email)

This would be a transformative solution to a common email need, and I think greatly appreciated!

Hello,

Well, the title is pretty simple : it appears that the tendancy right now is to  have web version of any software on a server.

A few notes about that :
-a lot of Alteryx competitors are already in this mode and it's hard to sell you're still with a desktop-only mode for design, even if the product is far better.
-a good idea is the one used by Qlik with Qlik Sense : they still have a desktop and a web version of Sense but the desktop works mainly as an hidden browser plus an engine. The web version is cool too because you can make your own application, or your own data connection etc..
-the main interest of a web implementation of Alteryx would be to reduce installation on client computers (and that means packaging the installer, managing the data connection, the paths, the access to macros... etc) and to have a better control of the users.

PS : this idea is soooo simple and so obvious I'm surprised I didn't find it. It may be a duplicate.

Team Drives are shared spaces where teams can easily store, search, and access their files anywhere, from any device.

Unlike files in My Drive, files in a Team Drive belong to the team instead of an individual. Even if members leave, the files stay exactly where they are so your team can continue to share information and get work done.

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. 

Often I need to add filters or other tools early on after the workflow is already been mostly built. If a tool connects to one tool I can drag the filter over the connecting line and add the filter seamlessly. However in large workflows there is often this situation:    

The Filter will only connect to one of the lines I'm hovering over. If I could connect to all lines simultaneously and drop in the connection to achieve this (would be awesome):

A recent post solution (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Can-somebody-tell-me-where-is-quot-Choose...) by @patrick_digan alerted me to a loss of functionality of the Input Tool.  In order to define a range of data via SQL to Excel (e.g. Sheet3$A1:C10) you need to know a work-around instead of just modifying the SQL.  The work-around is to modify the XML.  I would like to see that functionality returned to the Input tool.

Cheers,

Mark

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 

When using the Sharepoint Output tool - we have seen a few situations (which are widely reported in the designer discussions thread) where the write to sharepoint fails, but no error is raised.
This often happens because of mismatch in data types, but we've also seen this for other reasons (e.g. we had this once due to column ordering).   In the worst case - this can end up with the sharepoint list being emptied out if the write fails on the first item, again with no error indicator.

The Sharepoint Input and Output are very widely used as a way of giving users a very simple UI to input data that can flow into an Alteryx Canvas - so this is a very commonly used pattern in our environment.

Could we request that the Sharepoint output tool be changed to include explicit errors and warnings on write, so that the user has a guarantee that either the write took place or there was an error to reflect the issue?

Thank you.

How about a quick method of disabling a container.

Current state - Click on the container, pan the mouse all the way over to the tiny checkbox target in the configuration pane and click disable.

Future state - little icon by the rollup icon that can be clicked to disable/enable, differentiated by perhaps a color change of the minimized pane perhaps?

I know what you're thinking, "talk about lazy, he's whining about moving the mouse (which his hand was already on) 2 cm along his desktop and clicking"... but still what an easy usability win and one less click to do a task I find myself repeating frequently.

As of Version 10.6, Alteryx supports connecting to ESRI File GeoDatabases from the input tool but it doesnt support writing to a geodatabase.  This is something we would really like to see implemented in a future version of Alteryx.  Those of us working with ESRI products and/or any of the ESRI online mapping systems can do our processing in Alteryx and store large files as YXDBs, but ultimately need our outputs for display in ArcOnline to be in shapefile or geodatabase feature class format. Shapefile have a size limit of 2 GBs and limitation on field name sizes. Many of the files we are working with are much larger than this and require geodatabases for storage which are not limited by size (GDB size is unlimited, 1 TB max per feature class) and have larger field name widths (160 chars).  Right now, we have to write to one (or many) shapefile(s) from Alteryx, then import them into a GDB using ArcMap or ArcPy.  This can be an arduous process when working with large amounts of data or multiple files.

The latest ESRI API allows both read and write access to GDBs -- is there a way we can add this to the list of valid output formats in Alteryx?

This idea is an extension of an older idea:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/ESRI-File-Geodatabase/idi-p/1424