Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Would be useful to convert an auto field component to a select component, after at least 1 run, by right-click-->convert to select

Hello,

Regarding the Amazon S3 tools in Alteryx Designer, only 4 file formats are supported.

We would like to see also the following formats: .xls and .xlsx 

Regards.

Request is to add in the parameter to control sampling level in the Google API connector. I'm getting very different results pulling the same report from the API and the GA UI. The API data has significantly more variability which is evidence of sampling. We have a premium 360 account and are still getting the sampling results, I believe its just necessary to add in the parameter in the outgoing script providing: 

samplingLevel= DEFAULT, FASTER, or HIGHER_PRECISION.

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/v3/reference#sampling 

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/v3/reference#samplingLevel

- Zach

We are trying to utilize Alteryx Workflow migration workflow to setup proper SDLC environments and ensure we have less human intervention in the process. For example, if we create a gallery data connection XYZ in multiple Alteryx environments and try to run the migration workflow, the connection IDs are different in those environments regardless of how we name them. So even if we migrated the workflow, we still have to manually go to each environment, update the connection(s) and upload it again. That sort of defeats the purpose of migration concept itself.

Suggestion is to use gallery connection name/alias as connection ID so that when workflows migrated, connections are mapped accordingly. 

The interactive results pane is great, but wouldn't it be cool if you could interact directly with the result pane to do things like filtering.

There are a few too many steps with the method at the moment, where you need to either copy the value or type it into the filter pop up. A simple right click and filter on selected value would be a big ux improvement.

Would be nice to select a bunch of consecutive fields, and cut them and paste them to a different area.  Currently, the only options are to Move to Top or Move to Bottom.  If you want to move somewhere in between, you have to scroll through the whole list.

When you download a workflow from the Alteryx Gallery to edit, the first typical step a user will take to debug is to run their workflow. This is potentially dangerous, as your user may not know what input data they are loading into what may be production data tables (as an example, when you are building apps you will typically have placeholder data in your inputs).

It would be great if the default option when editing a workflow stored on the gallery was that the 'Disable Tools that Write Output' button is checked, meaning people do not accidentally post incorrect information.

Ben

Similar to the post from @MarqueeCrew here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/In-Database-Update-and-or-Delete/idc-p/72744#..., there is a need to increase the ETL functionality of Alteryx to allow this to serve the needs of an enterprise BI audience.

Specifically: 

- Bulk file sync.   Similar to SSIS, the abilty to very quickly bring a file in a staging area up-to-date with the latest in the source

- Dimension update.  Built in macros to make dimension update (especially for slowly changing dimensions) easier - these would take care of the various time-dimensions, and checking for surrogate keys - and also add in translation tables

- Central registry: register a central list of shared dimensions, shared fact tables, etc

- Symantic layer: where several teams use different identifiers for a particular concept, such as customer.   By marking a particlar field as "Customer", the Alteryx engine can make more intelligent decisions about how to normalise these to a confirming dimension

- Simpler logging of ETL errors (similar to the ETL logging recommended by Kimball)

A focus on large-scale BI & ETL applications like this will really help to allow Alteryx to bridge from point solutions to a broader spectrum of opportunities in large-scale enterprise BI.

Hello,

I'm using the latest Alteryx Designer version 2021.1. When I drag an Input Tool, before I can proceed with anything, it asks me to choose a pre-saved, named, data connection from the Gallery. This named connection is pre-configured with a USERNAME, target SCHEMA NAME to connect to, with a PASSWORD. This is also known as a PROXY CONNECT method as follows:-

USERNAME[SCHEMA_NAME]

Once I have selected a named, data connection, the assumption is that in the next screen, if I click on the Tables button, that it would ONLY load the tables inside that target SCHEMA_NAME and not take 10 mins to load thousands of tables that exist in the entire Oracle Database, some of them I would not have access to even connect to, so then why load and make us wait for that long?

The same thing should apply WITHOUT a PROXY CONNECT method. For instance, if a saved, data connection only has a USERNAME and PASSWORD, it means the user would like to strictly connect to their own personal schema.

Again, when this connection is chosen, the Tables button should strictly ONLY load the tables that exist in this personal schema by the name of that USERNAME and no need to load thousands of tables that exist in the entire Oracle Database.

I know the workaround would be to select SQL Editor to open by default which is what I'm currently using but seriously, this has to be fixed as the performance hit and showing of table names for which a user may not even have access to connect to is not good.

tl;dr It would be great if auto-detected assets on output tools were included when exporting/saving to the gallery.

Suppose I have an output to my C drive and try to package that file when exporting or saving. It gives me the option to package my file:

The only problem is, that file isn't actually saved with the package; instead, it just creates an externals folder where it will write the file to. But the file itself isn't included. The current work around is to go to your output tool and add that file manually as a user asset:

Notice that I had to manually add the same file that was already auto-detected. Now when I go to export, I get the same screen as before:

The big difference is that now that I've added the file as a user asset, the file itself is included in the export.

In conclusion, it would be great if auto-detected assets on output tools were included when exporting/saving to the gallery (so that it has the same behavior as user-added assets).

With the new keyboard shortcuts in 2021.1, I would love to see this same functionality added to the global search. I would like for

1) The global search bar to be accessible via a keyboard shortcut

2) You can navigate through the results with the arrow keys and

3) I can click enter on a tool and it will add it to the canvas just like the tool palette now functions in 21.1.

cc: @A11yKyle 

I'm sure no one want's to do double dipping on huge data sets even if it's in-db...

So can we have,left and right joins in the in-db join tool as well to further develop workflows from these two additional outputs?

Ps: the idea originally belongs to another Alteryx client mentioned this in IT central; https://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/alteryx-review-38876-by-prometheus-tito-amoguis-ii

Best

I would like to see a Full Screen View under View on the Menu Bar.  Once selected your workflow would show full screen with out all the other side and bottom windows.  You could leave just the Menu bar showing so the workflow could be ran.  This would be nice for presenting/teaching.  Also, maybe have it default to cntrl 0 so the entire workflow is showing.  Zooming in and out could still be done.  Then to Exit. Go back to View and uncheck Full Screen.  This would be easy and, I think, helpful.

I don't know if this has been implemented or talked about, but it would be a pretty nice QoL change to add a select all button when appending fields to record via the find and replace tool. 

For example, I  have a dataset where I will end up with 1000+ fields needed to be appended. Going through and clicking 1000 times is not ideal. If this is already a feature or has a hotkey, please let me know.

Currently the R predictive tools are single thread, which means to utilise multi-threading we need to download separately a third party R package such as Microsoft R Client.

Given this is a better option, should this not be used as the default package upon installation?

#Deployment #LargeScale #CleanCode #BareBonesCode

Request to add and option to strip out all unnecessary text within a Workflow / Gallery App when deploying to the Alteryx Server to be scheduled or used as a Gallery App.   Run at file location still causes the reading of unnecessary information across the network.  

Often the workflows are bloated with un-used meta data that at a small scale is not an issue, but with scale... all the additional bloat (kBs to MBs in size) - sent from the controller to the worker does impact the server environment.

The impact explodes when leveraging the Alteryx API to launch the same job over and over with different parameters - all the non-useful information in the workflow is always sent to the various workers to handle each one of these jobs.

Even having a "compiled" version of the workflow could be a great solution. #CompiledCode

Attached is a simple workflow that shows how bloated the workflows can become.

I appreciate your consideration.

Hello,

In cases where more than one field is being used in a join, the "Join (Tool ID) String fields can only be joined to other string fields" error message could be improved by indicating which field has a mismatch.

For example, if I'm joining Fields A, B, C, D... to fields Z, Y, X, W... in Join tool 24, and for some reason Field Z gets changed from String to Double, it'd be nice to see a message like:

"Join (24) (Field 1) String Fields can only be joined to other String fields"

or

"Join (24) String Fields can only be joined to other String fields (A)"

So that I know I need to go to a select tool and change the type of either A or Z.

Otherwise I look at the Join tool output and try to figure out which pair no longer has matching types, which can take a minute when dealing with a multiple-point join.

Thank you!

The Dynamic Input tool fails when attempting input a set of Excel files with the following error:

Error: Dynamic Input (1): The file "Test2.xlsx|||<List of Sheet Names>" has a different schema than the 1st file in the set.

Each spreadsheet contains two tabs and all tabs contain the same columns.

The root cause of the schema error is that maximum sheet name length in the two spreadsheets is different.  The first spreadsheet uses "East" and "West" for sheet names.  The second spreadsheet uses "North" and "South" for sheet names.  The Dynamic Input tool uses the longest sheet name when defining the effective Schema.

Excel limits sheet name length to 31 characters. It would be helpful if the Dynamic Input tool used 31 as the minimum string length when defining a schema from Excel sheet names.

The Input Data tool exhibits similar behavior when using a wildcard in the filename and the "Import only the list of sheet names" option.

A batch macro can be used as a workaround.

The ability to integrate a HTML page as content in the layout, insight and render process.  At the moment I create a range of advanced visualisations in Python and save them as HTML.  I would like the ability to open these pages and treat them as specialised content which I can apply reporting workflow to including:

• Layout: arrange in a page layout
• Report Text: add report text as heading or comments
• Render: include in a render process
• Insight: include in an interactive dashboard as a standalone widget