Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

When creating a workflow I generally open a "TEMPLATE" first and then immediately save it to the "NEW WORKFLOW NAME".  My template includes all my preferences that aren't set naturally within the user settings and won't get RESET by them either.  It has a comment box and containers as well as logos and copyrights.  It would be nice to have ready access to this feature.  Maybe others have standards that they want applied to all users and their workflows too.

Thanks,

Mark

Please add Parquet data format (https://parquet.apache.org/) as read-write option for Alteryx.

Apache Parquet is a columnar storage format available to any project in the Hadoop ecosystem, regardless of the choice of data processing framework, data model or programming language.

Thank you.

Regards,

Cristian.

Hello all,

According to wikipedia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_(SQL)

CROSS JOIN returns the Cartesian product of rows from tables in the join. In other words, it will produce rows which combine each row from the first table with each row from the second table.[1]

Example of an explicit cross join:

SELECT *
FROM employee CROSS JOIN department;

Example of an implicit cross join:

SELECT *
FROM employee, department;

The cross join can be replaced with an inner join with an always-true condition:

SELECT *
FROM employee INNER JOIN department ON 1=1;

For us, alteryx users, it would be very similar to Append Fields but for in-db.

Best regards,

Simon

Connecting to Smartsheets using Alteryx Desktop (and by extension, Alteryx Server) is extremely cumbersome. If a user wants to read data from Smartsheet, they are required to get an API token (preferred) or use a username/password

Then do one of the following to read data from Smartsheets:

1. a. Install a ODBC driver

    b. Configure a DSN connection for ODBC
    c. Use the input data using a generic ODBC connection
or
2. Use python

To write data to Smartsheets, a user can use Python or upload the data using an API call - both very hard for end users to use especially if they're not Python developers.

Regardless, all of these are problematic. On the server I manage, I have over 15 ODBC connections to Smartsheets and it's getting very hard to upgrade the server hardware because of them. Creating a native connector for input/output of data to Smartsheets will eliminate a headache of managing ODBC connections, and make it simple for Alteryx Desktop users to read and write data.

hello,

version 2021.4 does not allow workflows to run if any of their input files are open.... would be great to have an option for the input tool that switches on/off the ability to read from open files. Some of my input files have frequent data changes and i tend to keep them open while testing/simulating results

Thank you,

abdou 

As per a recent discussion (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Geopackages-Can-Alteryx-Open-GeoPackag...), please add the GeoPackage datatype to the Input tool.

For reference, the open-source project ogr2ogr has this functionality. (https://gdal.org/programs/ogr2ogr.html)

Thanks!

When we create new workflows, we like to have them in our company template, to stnadardise documentation. This makes it easier for a supervisor to review, and for a colleague to pick up the workflow and understand what is going on. For instance, we have all data input on the left, and all error checks and workflow validation on the right, and a section at the top with the workflow name, project name, purpose etc. We have a workflow that we use as a template with containers, boxes and images all in the appropriate places

It would be great if there was an option to select a workflow as a template. When a new workflow is opened, it would load this template rather than having a blank canvas.

I love Workflow Meta info, especially the ability to put the Author, the search tags,the version, the description, etc...

But why can't we use it as Engine Constant? It doesn't seem very hard to implement and it would change life for development.

When working on a complex, branching workflow I sometimes go down paths that do not give the correct result, but I want to keep them as they are helpful for determining the correct path.  I do not want these branches to run as they slow down the workflow or may produce errors/warnings that muddy debugging the workflow.  These paths can be several tools long and are not easily put in a container and disabled.  Similar to the Cache and Run Workflow feature that prevents upstream tools from refreshing i am suggesting a Disable all Downstream Tools feature.  In the workflow below the tools in the container could be all disabled by a right click on the first sample tool in the container.

Many users will probably follow best practice style guides with Alteryx to use comment boxes under tools to describe in detail what is happening with these tools - such as this one shared by @BenMoss.

However a limitation of this is the comment boxes do not move with the tools, so if you have a well documented workflow but then need to add a new tool, you need to adjust all the spacing and re-align the tools, which with a large workflow can be time consuming. 

Therefore the improvement would be to have an ability to lock comment boxes to individual tools (similar to a group function in Office).

In the community and in mixed teams - it's very common for people to be caught on the error that "This document was created in a more recent version".   Although there are several workarounds (e.g. this one from @WayneWooldridge  here https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Adjusting-Alteryx-Files-for-Different-Versio...), this seems like it may be an easy problem to solve more permanently.

Could we add an option to Alteryx to save the file with the lowest compatible version number?

So - for example - if i'm only using components that shipped with version 10, then please mark the file as version 10.   If I've used a tool that shipped in 11.0.6 then that needs to be the version number.

This way - files will be back-compatible as far as is possible by default unless using newer components.

Many thanks

Sean

If you forget to put a name on a new column in the formula tool - the error message is 

The field "" is not contained in the record. (Expression #1)

Please could you replace this with a user-friendly message which is self descriptive like:

"Please provide a name for the new column created in expression 1"?

Hello all,

I really appreciate the ability to test tools in the Laboratory category :

However, these nice tools should go out of laboratory and become supported after a few monhs/quarters. Right now, without Alteryx support, we cannot use it for production workflow.

Example given :
Visual Layout Tool introduced in 2017
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/Tool-Mastery-Visual-Layout/ta-p/835...

Make columns Tool also introduced in 2017
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/Make-Columns-Tool/ta-p/67108

Transpose In-DB in 10.6 introduced 2016
https://help.alteryx.com/10.6/LockInTranspose.htm

etc, etc...

Best regards,

Simon

Currently if one wants to compare different alteryx files or different versions of the same file - one needs to compare the XML files. If you are not very familiar with navigating XML, this poses a risk as one may not be able to identify all changes.

It would be a great addition to Alteryx to integrate Alteryx with Git, Subversion, CVS, Mercurial, and GitHub as this tool is becoming the go-to tool for data processing for data analysts and even programmers.

This additional functionality to compare previous versions (diff) and also to merge alteryx workflows if two people are working on the same workflow, and also to easily see what changes have been committed/ made by other developers and when would make Alteryx a much more powerful tool and would open doors to other types of users, as essentially you can run anything through Alteryx.

When configuring a FILTER tool, the results of your formula are uncertain until you RUN/PLAY the workflow.  Compare that experience with the configuration of a FORMULA tool where you see a "Data Preview" of the first record results.

TRUE or FALSE could readily be added to the Filter Tool and save the execution time for the workflow.  

When you get to HTML tool versions, you could check many rows of data and potentially give back counts of TRUE and FALSE results as well.

I'll put this on my x-mas list and see if Santa has me on the naughty or nice list.

Cheers,

Mark

I personally think it would work better to tab from 'Select Column' to 'Enter Expression Here' and not the 'Functions' List as probably people who are tabbing would immediately like to start typing the formula rather than going through functions, fields, etc.

As of today, for a full refresh, I can :

-create a new table

-overwrite a table. (will drop and then create the new table)

But sometimes, the workflow fails and the old table is dropped while the new one is not created. I have to modify the tool (setting "create a new table")to launch it again, which may be a complex process in companies. After that, I have to modify it again back to "overwrite".

What I want :

-create a new table-error if table already exists

-overwrite a table-error if table doesn't exist

-overwrite a table-no error if table doesn't exist (easy in sql : drop if exists...)

Thanks!

Hello,

I work for a company with circa 250K employees. We are in the process of shifting all documents over to OneDrive and I've noticed that when I have an Alteryx workflow that uses inputs stored on OneDrive the connection can be very intermittent. I use the UNC file naming protocol for my input/directory tools, but more often than not I need to run a VBA script that accesses OneDrive before Alteryx tools will connect.

There's a couple of posts on this community about this, but nothing in the ideas board. I believe the SharePoint connector is being updated for v11, but nothing for OneDrive.

I'd like there to be better integration to OneDrive for business and SharePoint Online please.

Thanks,

John.