Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

It would be great, if an ISO Weeknumber furmula was added to the Formula Tool. That way it would be easier to manage data and to get them in synch with other programs/databases, for example with Excel. Incorrect date usage between different systems can cause serious misunderstandings and inaccurate reports, thus resulting in negative impact on business decisions.

Nathan Coffee was kind enough to create a very complex Formula Tool which can produce that particular format, so the logic could be taken as an example or even a direct implementation point. Please find the WorkFlow attached.

Today I have some workflows which have certain steps that occur after files are output.  I have these set up inside of Tool Containers so that I can easily enable/disable them as I am working if I do not want to produce output for this particular run.  However, sometimes if I need to troubleshoot on a workflow that I haven't worked on for awhile, I can neglect to disable these, which can cause errors.  This is usually harmless, but annoying.

Having two more options on Tool Containers could really help to improve this!

Disable When Browse Tools Disabled would be useful for any analysis/debugging steps that I only want to run when I am browsing to find data, but should not run otherwise.

Disable When Output Disabled would be really useful to ensure that these tools are turned off alongside the "Disable all tools that write output" option in Workflow-Configuration-Runtime.

This would save me a lot of unnecessary error messages and moments of panic, and would make these types of workflows easier for other users to debug without extensive notes.

I find that to do a simple concatenation of multiple fields, it takes multiple tools where it seems one would suffice. For example, if I had an address parsed into multiple fields (House Number, Street, Apt, City, State, Zip Code, Country), to combine these into a single address field, I'd have two options: Formula that manually adds each field with +' '+ in between each field, which is a lot of typing and selecting...Or Transpose data and then Summarize (concatenating) the values field with a space delimiter between each record.
 
Seems to me that a simpler solution would be a concatenate tool that might look and feel much like the Select tool, allowing you to choose a name for your concatenated string, input a delimiter, select the fields to concatenate, and re-order them within the tool. Bonus if it automatically converted everything to string fields (or at least allows you to designate whether you want to concatenate all your fields as numbers or strings, and then translates accordingly). Extra bonus if you also had the option to put a different delimiter after every field...
 
Not a super complex thing to do this task with the given tools, but it does seem like a fairly straightforward add that would likely save a whole bunch of folks at least a few minutes here and there.

I would like to see a way to partially execute  a workflow (specifically for an App) for the purposes of allowing user to make selections based on a dynamic data flow.

Ex:

1. Database Selection Interface

Click Next

2. Select from available columns to pass through to the output file.

Click Next

3. Pick from selected fields which fields should be pivoted.

Output file and complete run time

This was a simple example to explain a case, but the most common use I could see is for APIs. 

With complex ETL jobs, we often have a very similar ETL process that needs to be run for multiple different tables (with different surrogate and natural key column IDs)

While you can do a bulk-replace by opening this up in notepad (in XML format) - it would be better if the user could do a find/replace for all instances of a table-name or a columnID from the designer UI (a deep find/replace into all the tools).

This can also be used when a field is renamed in the beginning of the flow, so that we can update this for the remainder of the flow without having to do this by trial/error.

In the browse tool, and the cell viewer attached to the browse tool - the standard control keys (control A for select all; control C for copy) do not behave as they would normally - in order to select all in the cell viewer, you have to right-click and say "Select All".

Please could you include these capabilities in the basic browse tool (control-A and control-C)?

Many thanks

Sean

it would  particularly interesting to develop a WMS support in Alteryx.
To include other Maps like bing, google, HERE instead of CloudMade to display geo informations.

Mathias

In Dec I had an issue where I could not uninstall or upgrade Alteryx. As part of troubleshooting and the eventual solution I had to manually delete any registry key related to Alteryx. As these were hundreds of entries this took a long time. It would be handy if Alteryx could provide a tool that cleaned the registry of all Alteryx related entries. Related: "Case 00088264: Unable to uninstall Alteryx"

Would be nice to have the regex tool allow you to drop original input field and report and error if any records fail to parse.

I would love to have a User Setting Default where it allows the "Show All Macro Messages" to be on for all workflows instead of having to turn it on for each workflow.

Advanced User Settings

The data view of any anchor is searchable. I want to search the metadata view please.

The regular filter tool is great because I get the true and false returns. When doing ad-hoc analytics it would be super helpful if the date filter did the same thing.

In the example below, I had to create an "IF" statement that returned a T/F value and then fitler out based on the output of that formula.

In the previous tools the information lab had build for publishing to Tableau server, they had the incremental TDE refresh option available. I would like to see that included in the Publish to Tableau Server Macro. We often just want to add previous day data to a YTD data extract without running the full data set from our Datawarehouse. The full set takes long and a daily increment / add only would take a couple minutes.

Hello!

I have a very regional problem, when we use reporting tools, they seem to be encoded in ansi, but in France, we use a lot of accents, and when we want to use the mail tool, we have to "write wrong" with e instead of é for instance, would it be possible to make it possible for us to use accents, I saw a solution in this post (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/French-Characters-in-an-Email-using-Re...) but if it would be possible to have the option directly in the reporting tools it would be a lot easier for us to use them in an automated way!

At the moment one of the Union Tool errors reads: "The field "abc" is not present in all inputs".

It would be useful if the tool said "The field "abc" is not present in Input(s) #x,y..."

If there are a lot of inputs on the tool it can take a while to find which input is missing the field.

I test the  10% percentile for {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}, whch alteryx gives 1.8, while it should be 1.
According the help, it should return the value of the target row, which shall not result any decimal in this case.

For deeply structured XML - it would be very helpful to be able to search XML (as you would using the DOM).     Even better would be to implement XML Query capability (a visual tool) within Alteryx so that XML data can be directly queried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuery

Hi Team,

Can we use IN DB to connect to Sybase IQ to optimize data extraction and transformation.

If your "Dedicated Sort/Join Memory Usage" setting is set higher than the actual amount of RAM available on your machine, you will get a message in the Results window like this:

My understanding is that the Alteryx workflow will continue to limit itself to the lower memory level throughout the entire duration of running that workflow, even if more memory opens up while the workflow is running. If Alteryx were to check the amount of available RAM periodically while running workflows, Alteryx could take advantage of additional RAM that may open up, resulting in getting results faster. This is particularly valuable for Server environments when many jobs of all sizes are running concurrently.