Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hey @apolly 

You and the team have been doing a lot of innovative changes to the results window for data.

Could I ask for an uplift to the results window for Workflow Messages?

Summary: Error messages in the workflow results window cannot be fully viewed - have to be copied into Notepad and then reformatted before you can read.

Request: Allow user to double-click to see full readable version of a workflow result message

Detail:

If you have an error message in a workflow result - it gives you a message that is often longer than the window allows and there is no cell-viewer option

As a result, there is really no way to get to the important part of the error message to understand what's going on, other than to use Notepad

Step 1: Copy into Notepad

(you can see the end of line characters being misunderstood)

Step 2: Manually clean this up by breaking on the line breaks

And now you can see the important part of the result message..

Could we rather add the ability to double-click on a result message in the result window and bring up a modal window that formats the error message for you (similar to the modal window used for XML editing of a tool).   That would eliminate this entire wasteful effort of trying to read an error message and having to use Notepad?

Bring up a modal window, similar to this one; so that I can see the error without having to go to Notepad

It will be great to have the same columns filter option than Excel under the Browse view that display column content and allows to check/unchecked multiple data.  See picture before for references

AD

My idea is to have the AlteryxEngineCMD.exe to run a workflow as part of the standard Alteryx license.

Use case - be able to run Alteryx from the command line without the need to buy the entire Scheduler package (at $6,500/seat).

I understand why certain features are add on, but the ability to run AlteryxEngineCMD.exe (I feel) should be part of  the standard license which is already $5K+. For those who only need to be able to run a command line execution of a workflow $6.5K is a lot of money!

A great feature would be for CASS to provide the address type as Residential or Business.  Better yet, further breakdown of address type into single-family, apartment, retail, office, commercial, warehouse, etc.  This would be very beneficial when analyzing address data from the Tom Tom Address Points Calgary database and can allow a end-user to filter prioritize addresses in their analysis based on the type of address.

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

When using the output data tool, it would save me and my cluttered organizational skills a lot of effort if the writing workflow was saved as part of the yxdb metadata. 

I've often had to search to find a workflow which created the yxdb. I tend to use naming conventions to help me,  but it would be easier if the file and or path was easily found. 

cheers,

 mark

@JeffA posted an awesome blog about how UI automation testing is being done within Alteryx using the Selenium library and the Python SDK.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Engine-Works-Blog/Total-Automation-Badassery/bc-p/509096#M2105

This would be a TREMENDOUS addition to the core product - especially given that the alteryx team have already built these into a series of generic tools that can be dropped onto canvasses.

Example of where this would be super powerful for the Alteryx platform:

- the data I need to analyze is on a legacy system with no API; or behind a web login wall

- the data I need requires a user to hit a series of steps to download Excel or CSV (again, no API)

- I've found an outlier - can I submit this to an application so that someone can act on it?

This would be a very valuable addition to the core product; and really increase the scope of analytics capability - please could you consider adding this to the standard downloadable version as a brand new tab full of automation tools?

The performance profile option outputs a list into the results window. It is difficult to check the tools and continuously scan back to the profile. Make it easy! Put the times and percentages in the connection progress tooltips of all the tools.

The reporting tools do not currently support HTML structured or unstructured lists https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_ul.asp

All vertical combination creates tables which group the lines together.    Even if you manually create this - you get an error saying that ul (or ol or il) are not supported in composer

This creates a challenge in 2 ways:

a) When creating lists in reporting outputs - you lose the functionality of structured lists (numbering with letters; numbers etc)

b) additionally - selecting the text in tables behaves differently than selecting data that is created in lists.

Please could you add the ability to create lists in addition to tables in the reporting tools by supporting the ol; ul; and il tags?

NOTE: this could initially be done just by supporting the tags; and then later this could be a summarize option on the summarize tool; and a bullet option in the text tool.

Summarize using tablesdesired: summarise using listsList rendered with the list tags

Environment variables act as a shortcut so that different computers can be configured in different ways, but a particular path will still point to the right place.

For example if you open up explorer and go to %TEMP%\  - you will open up whichever folder is set up as Temp on this machine.    This is super useful so that you can use a particular logical folder without knowing the actual placement on every machine (for example the Windows Directory)

This works partially in the Directory / input - when you put in the environment variable, it is able to search possible subdirectories (screenshot 1) but it does not work once you run the workflow (screenshot 2).

It seems as if the designer hits the Windows API directly, but it does not work within the engine.

Please could you alter the engine to be able to make full use of the environment variables on the machine in question in the directory path or input tool path?

Screenshot 1 - works in designer

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.

The eMail setup for the eMail tool and the eMail notifications are subtly different - in that the eMail notifications screen does not offer an explicit location for port.    This is important if the SMTP server does not use the default port.   You may be able to do this with : notation, but it would be better to create an explicit field for this.

No Port available on the eMail settings for EventsPort is available on eMail tool

Currently when you add an event to notify you of workflow failure / success - you have to enter the SMTP settings every time.    It would be more efficient to set this up as a user setting which can be used for the default across all canvasses that this user creates.

Could you expose a link to the Keyboard Shortcuts (which is here: https://help.alteryx.com/2019.4/HotKeys_Shortcuts.htm?Highlight=keyboard%20shortcuts) on the primary help menu (screenshot below)

This will allow people to get quicker in Alteryx by exposing these shortcuts to more users.

Hi all,

Would it be possible to update the What's new page for 2019.4 to include the key features in this release (in my mind, one of the biggest features is the SQL formatting)?

Currently if you go to the What's new link in Designer, it takes you to the right webpage, but there is no content for 2019.4

Additionally - would it be possible to keep a few releases on this page - often people skip 2 or 3 updates so it's worth keeping the top highlights of the last 4 releases there so that people can see the new features and explore them.

The great thing about What's New pages is the ability to explore new features, so it's worth linking out to examples on a page like this if possible.

Hello,

As of today, if you want to add a PostgreSQL in database connection, you may feel embarrased :

However, the help states that PostgreSQL is supported by in-database.

https://help.alteryx.com/current/In-DatabaseOverview.htm

Whaaaaaaaaat?

oh, I forgot to mention : with a little luck, you can find tis help page : https://help.alteryx.com/current/DataSources/PostgreSQL.htm

Yep, you have to configure a "greenplum" connection if you want to use a PSQL.

i think this is not user-friendly and can lead to mistake, errors, frustration and even lack of sales for Alteryx :

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Do-you-use-generic-in-database-connect...

Also, Greeenplum and PSQL will have separate features so I think having two separate entries in the menu is pertinent.

Best regards,

Simon

Passing Access and Secret Keys to connect to AWS S3 poses a security risk. It would be great if the Amazon Redshift Bulk Connection tool was enhanced to include an authentication option to use a Native IM group instead of keys.

Hi Team,

For a small workflow the current setup is okay to handle but with big workflow where input file count comes 25 at multiple locations then it is difficult to check every input.

The idea is: There should be some mechanism to check input/output before running the complete workflow 

• If any of the input file is locked then ask user to continue or not
• If any output file is locked then ask user to continue or not
• Or above this message can be combined together

Once this done the workflow can do further processing.

From my experience, this will help to improve work process and time to fix the issue.

Ashis Sanpui