Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Sometimes we may have polygons, such as county boundaries, and need to split the polygons into smaller areas using polylines, such as roads. Please consider adding a polygon split by lines tool. I imagine it could be like the Poly-Split tool, but accept two inputs of a polygon field and a polyline field.

At TargetSmart, we create a lot of CSV deliverables for our customers. Since Alteryx differentiates between blank strings and null values (a good thing), the CSV output is not consistent between the two without an explicit multi-field formula step to set all null to empty strings (or vice versa). This is an easy fix for us. However, in some cases we have very large files with thousands of fields and millions of records. For these instances, the workflow run-time is greatly increased by the multi-field formula. If possible, I was wondering if adding a checkbox option to CSV output steps (“Make null/empty consistent” or “Never quote empty/null values”) would possibly be a more efficient approach as the check could be part of the output step (which I assume is native C++) versus the Multi-field formula (which I assume has some level of inefficiency in interpreting the formula dynamically).

There is a great question in the Designer space right now asking about saving logs to a database: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Save-workflow-messages-log-in-database...

 

This got me to think a little more about localized logging options in Alteryx.

 

At a high level, there are ways to accomplish this in Designer at a User or System level by enabling a Logging directory and then parsing those logs with a separate Alteryx job.  However, this would involve logging ALL Designer executions, which seems like it may be overkill for this need.  A user can also manually save a log after each execution, although this requires manual intervention.

 

I think adding an option in the Runtime settings for Workflow Configuration to Enable Logging and (optionally) specify a Logging directory would be a great feature add for Designer.  In my opinion this should not apply once a workflow runs on Server (Server logging should be handled in a fully standardized way), but should apply to designer "UI" execution.  Having the ability to add a logging naming convention (perhaps including a workflow name and run date in the log name) would be icing on the cake.

 

This would allow for a piecemeal logging solution to log specific flows or processes that might be high visiblity or high importance, while avoiding saving hundreds or thousands of logs daily of less important processes, and of dev test.  It would also reduce or eliminate a manual process to save these logs individually.

Please create the ability to Concat a field in the In-DB Summarize Tool similar to the regular Summarize tool. This would enable much faster processing on concatenating fields using the database's processing power vs. the local machine.

We would like to have the ability to overwrite sheets in macro-enabled Excel workbooks.  Several of our scorecarding templates leverage macros for Excel events, protection, and interaction, and the ability to directly overwrite data in these workbooks would be a huge benefit of  using Alteryx.

It would be awesome to default a container color depending on what tools you were using within that container. For instance:

 

Mostly input tools - container defaults to green

mostly prep tools - container defaults to blue

Mostly output/reporting tools - container defaults to orange

 

Along with this, it would be neat to be able to customize those colors depending on which tools mostly fill the container.

 

-AD

I recently cam across a limitation in Alteryx, where we can't download non-CSV files using Amazon S3 download tool. There is currently support only for CSV, and couple of other formats but we are using JSON files (.jl) extensively and not having the tool download the files into the workflow is disapointing as now i have to build a custom code outside Alteryx to do that before I can start my workflow.

Can this be please given prompt attention and prioritized accordingly.

An option to import field descriptions would be really handy if I could import filed descriptions while working with datasets where filed (thousands) names are type of codes and there is a spearate alias table with filed descriptions.

Hello.

 

The category word  is a SQL Keyword (at least on hive). However it is put in quote ( this quote ` ) and the workflow will work without a single issue to the end. The blue color may be misleading to some users.

I have an app that contains 4 check boxes.  Each check box is independent, and when checked, two other prompts open up to the user (in this case, text boxes which are also independent of the other check boxes).

I would like to be able to "Check All", so that with one click, ALL four check boxes are checked, and their prompts all open up.

The field selection pane in Multi-Field Formula is very small and not resizeable. It is difficult to select anything other than all variables when only 4 1/2 fields are displayed at a time. Making this pane resizeable would be very useful.

Often we run into two pretty common situations:

• You want to move a Select, Formula, or Filter to a different point in your workflow
• You want to remove a tool entirely, without affecting the workflow in any other way.

In both cases, I would prefer that I can set the default behaviour of ctrl-x or delete like the way 'Delete and connect around' behaves.

 

Thanks,

Ruud

This should be quite easy to implement. I think it would be great if could we have:

1. A User repository for macros in the Users folder, e.g. My DocumentsMy Alteryx Macros

This would make it easier to install macros without needing any administrator rights

2. A right click operation on a yxmc file (or a menu operation in Alteryx) that Install the macro ie. will move any macro into the folder above.

This would make it very simple to show new users how to install any macro you send them

Both these ideas will make it easier for partners and the Alteryx user community to share macros.
 

Shapefile generate 4 filetypes (shp, shx, dbf, prj). When Alteryx generates a shapefile, the latter 3 file types are in uppercase, only shp is in lowercase. Can you change all 4 filetypes to lowercase so we don't have problems reading them in linux?
Thanks!

I really like the new toolbar & tool palette. I think that the toolbar would be improved by a couple of (hopefully) minor tweaks:

1) The ability to 'lock' the Favorites toolbar so that it is always visible, no matter how far you have to scroll

2) The ability to move tool sets within the toolbar so that those less used are further off to one side

I just upgraded to the new Alteryx 8.6 which I'm looking forward to using, however, it is quite frustrating that none of my customized user settings are maintained during the install process. I make a few customizations:

• Vertical layout
• Showing the grid and the XML
• Turning off the "module complete" pop-up
• My 'panes' where I put them
• A few favorite tools in the "Favorites" toolbar

And there are so many other customizations that I don't go near (but might if they were maintained during upgrade), like:

• Default temporary path and Logging
• Dataset defaults
• Zoom levels
• Startup page & Distance units

Please implement a way of maintaining these settings!!

It would be very useful to be able to add trendlines (linear, power etc) to charts (particularly scatter graphs) as in Excel.

Whilst not quite as efficient, the ability to overlay a line graph onto a scatter would enable the user to achieve a similar result as the points for the line can be calculated.

Hello,

This is a popular feature on other tools, such as Talend (now Talaxie) : the ability to export the workflow as a vectorized screenshot in svg.

Why ? it helps to build documentation, svg being vectorized, it means the picture can be zoomed in without losing quality.

Of course, that would mean before that Alteryx use svg for icons as required here https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Ideas/svg-support-for-icon-comment-image-e...

Best regards

Simon

 

 

Allow users the ability to add a delay on the connection between Control Container tools. I frequently have to rerun workflows that use the control container because the workflow has not registered that the file was properly closed on outputting from one output tool to the next. The network drives haven't resolved and show that the file is still open while its moved on to the next control container. Users should have an option in the Configuration screen to add a delay before a signal is sent for the next container to run. 

 

In the past I was able to use a CReW tool (Wait a Second) in conjunction with the Block Until Done tool to add the delay in manually. But I have since converted all of my workflows over to Control Containers. Since then half of the times the workflow has run I encounter the following errors.