Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Passing data to the next app running in a chain from the gallery varies from challenging to impossible. An impossible situation I've found is when the same user needs to run multiple instances of the app simultaneously. Very difficult is just allowing two different users to run simultaneously without risk of passed data mixing between the two.

This idea would add the capability to pass values from one app in the chain into user variables in the next app in the chain.

It was great that Alteryx that read all the worksheet include hidden tabs.

but, in some situation, people just hide the unused worksheet like last month data.

Hence, It is good that Alteryx able to have a option to remove those hidden worksheet.

Hello Alteryx Support,

I’m a Business Analytics Manager at Evernorth. My team and I use Alteryx Designer 2020.2 x64 for daily data preparation + analytic purposes; primarily, the desktop version but also have access to the company Alteryx Server ‘Gallery’ as well. Recently, we ran into a challenge and after asking around we still couldn’t find a solution.

Our Need:

We are seeking a solution to ‘add an example link’ in our custom built macro.

Our Challenge:

We don’t have the proper permissions to save and/or write to the “C:” designated folder location required to host the file as specified within the Alteryx Community help documentation (e.g. outlined below). --> We understand this is an internal IT obstacle that will take time to work out from a corporate data governance perspective, which is why we are seeking Alteryx Support.

At the end of the day, we are reaching out to see if your team can help us understand if there are alternative solutions that we can explore. Making the assumption, that is…that we can’t take the suggested approach in the documentation. See below for details about what we are trying to achieve.

Current macro state (…as viewed by Alteryx Designer users in the user-interfaces top tool panel for viewable macros):

Desired future macro state:

***Help Documentation***

What we currently know: (According to…How to add an example link in the custom tool - Alteryx Community)

Prerequisites

1. Alteryx Designer

Procedure

1. Place the sample workflow in the %ALTERYX_INSTALL%\Alteryx\Samples\%LANG%. A separate folder can be created to store the workflow. An example of a directory: C:\Program Files\Alteryx\Samples\en\MyTest
2. Add in the "Example" tag with "Description" and "File" child tag in the tool configuration file of the custom/user tool.

Example:
 
    <metainfo>

 ...
     
            Open Example
            Path to the workflow
       

... 

Limitations

1. The sample workflow can only exist in %ALTERYX_INSTALL%\Alteryx\Samples\%LANG%. The link will fail  if the file is located in a different path.
2. The sample workflow needs to be distributed separately from the custom tool installation since it has to be stored in %ALTERYX_INSTALL%\Alteryx\Samples\%LANG%.

Thanks for your support and consideration to create a feature enhancement that allows Alteryx Designer users to 'add an example link to their custom tool' without having to go to the C:\ file location in order for it to work!

Respectfully,

Corey

For the Image Input Tool please add:

   1) A wildcard input for filename.

   2) A check-box to choose sub-folders.

Hello,

I think the option Overwrite File (Remove) shouldn't throw an error if the file is not present

Or, I don't know, make 2 options : one with fail if file is missing, the other to not fail.

This idea is the same than https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Overwrite-Table-for-output-write-indb-should... but for files.

Best regards,

Simon

Provide Desktop Automation with Workflow REST API to have the ability to start workflows from other corporate systems without expensive Server license in a small environment.

My request is to allow tool containers to be enabled or disabled through an action on a Batch macro, just as they are with a Standard macro. This issue was originally raised in Jan-2013. 

At that time @MargaritaW  of Alteryx responded "the tool containers can’t be enabled or disabled through an action on a batch macro, this works fine on a standard macro (this issue has bee added to our log for a fix as high priority)."

It is 8+ years later and I can't find the fix. Using the Detour tool was offered as a workaround, but that is not useful in many cases. Looking at Alteryx own tools developed with macros, Tool Container activation/de-activation is used much more frequently than the Detour tool.

For my particular use case, we receive sets of four files from multiple customers each week. Each file in the set has a different structure.

Requirement:

1. Process each file in a directory, one at a time.

2. Activate/utilize one Input tool based on the file type

3. Execute a file specific workflow 

Here is a link to the original issue that was marked as "solved". The Detour tool workaround does not constitute a solution.

Solved: Enable tool container in batch macro - Alteryx Community

Alteryx please follow through on this 8-year old high priority issue.

Thanks,
Ken

Hello all,

Despite a few limitations, Alteryx is great when you work with full table (i.e when you rewrite entirely the table). But in real life, very few workflows work like that :

Here are some real life use cases that should be easy to deal with on Alteryx  :

-delta on a key

-delta on a key + last record based on a date

-update records

-start_date and end_date for a value

etc



Best regards,

Simon

Hello all,

In help, we can read that :
https://help.alteryx.com/current/designer/write-data-db-tool

Update/Delete is currently only supported for SQL Server ODBC connections.

 I don't know about you but SQL Server is well used in transactional workload but in analytics... well... I have only used once in several dozens of context !

Maybe it would be cool to make it work on many more database?

Best regards,

Simon

Hello!

I recently had a use-case that needed me to start using the text mining tools for a reporting based workflow, and i had pretty good success. However, my workflow does not always have data being brought through it, and when 0 results are supplied to a Text Pre-processing tool, it produces a bug and log file. I imagine this is a small fix, just a weird one to run into.

Steps to replicate:
1- Add a text input tool with some dummy text values as part of a field

2- Add a text pre-processing tool to the workflow, and configure it to use this field and English.

3- add a filter tool, prior to the text pre-processing tool, to filter out any valid results

4- Run the workflow

As the data cleansing tool does not behave similar, I fully believe this to be an unintended outcome.

Hi All,

Did you all experience when building a iterate macro this situation?

When you have no idea why the output is different from what you want,

hence, you remove the rows/ data to force the data run only 2 iterate, review the result.

then, you add back the rows/ data to force the data run only 3 iterate, review the result 

then 4, 5 and etc... until we found the issue.

so it was important that we can view how the result of each iterate to enable us to identify the issue quicker and more efficient.

Example output

The output may like below: (with a option to let user to choose of cause)

if input data is 3 and the macro is to multiply 2 and power of 2 every iterate. (1st iterate=3*2^2, 2nd iterate=12*2^2)

just add one column in front to show the iterate and rest is the result.

Hi All,

Issue: 

When input <List of Sheet Names>, Alteryx will assign data type and size accordingly.

Example: 

It become a problem, when input with multiple files with wildcard (Input file Book*xlsx).

It will be skipped due to "has a different schema than the 1st file in the set and will be skipped"

Solution:

Very simple, always same data type and size, like in formula tool. V_Wstring, with size 1073741823.

I want to jump to expression #3 of formula (3), when I see following error message. Now I can jump to formula (3), but only expression #1 is opened, not #3. If I have 30 expressions, it is hard to find #20 in 30s.

Instead of using the arrows, I think it would be nice to be able to drag and drop the questions to rearrange them in the Interface Designer. This would go more hand in hand with the drag and drop experience of Alteryx.

Additionally, when a lot of interface tools are on the canvas, Designer really slows down if you need to rearrange the order of the tools in the Interface Designer. I would like to see if there is any way that this can be sped up.

Thanks!

Hello,

I do not want to go to quick access and then to the downloads folder. Mostly we search on the community and download workflows as well as companying files. to reopen the files which are placed in the downloads folder i have to go there. 

to speed this up, please put a downloads folder quick link to the left bar:

thx

Dear Community,

could you please change the path processing of the alteryx app interface so that we can paste path links with quotation marks without getting an error by the alteryx app?

this would enhance workflow speed because one cannot save folder location for the interface to search for first when browsing files. it always begins at the pc level or something. 

so the workaround would be to just paste the file location path in the browser window of the interface, then pressing browse again to just scroll through the wished folder. 

this idea is not only for the purpose of the workaround but also for itself worth it. 

in windows one can easily copy file paths by holding down shift and right mouse click and the clicking on "copy path" . the copy is in the clipboard which i would like to pass to the alteryx app just like this without the necessity to remove the quotation marks as this costs time and is difficult when paths are long. 

thank you

Can we have a comparison tool in Alteryx as we have in Adobe Pro for PDF comparison.

It will be of a great help to multiple people across globe.

I am working with another program that can only output .MIF (MapInfo Exchange Format) spatial files with spatial type "Rectangle". I need to read these .MIF files into Alteryx, but apparently Alteryx doesn't support "rectangle" objects when reading .MIF files.

@RithiS ,

I'm a fan of using DETOUR tools in Alteryx.  I often place "test" code into a standard workflow and opt to use it or not based upon a detour.  The challenge is that adding a detour and detour end invariably leads to having to re-route connectors (default of adding tools is to connect to the left).  Here's a picture:

What I'd like to do is SELECT the tool or tools that I want to connect around (in this case, just the formula tool).  I'd like to right-click and DETOUR.  The detour and detour end would be added (putting the selected tools in the path of the RIGHT option.  This would greatly speed up the tool configuration process.

If you want to go for extra credit, you could modify the GUI to express which direction a detour is travelling in a standard workflow (e.g. make connections wireless or dashed when not selected).

Cheers,

Mark

@Claje @Hollingsworth @SeanAdams