Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Originally posted here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/Input-Data-Control-Log-of-actual-workload-generated/m-...

Hi all,

Many people don't have access to SQL profiling tools to see what is ACTUALLY being run on the server, in order to be able to index the tables to optimize - So - it would be very helpful to understand the full set of transactions that are executed against a SQL server.   Tableau does this by having a performance mode, where you can see what queries were run and the time that each query took.

This would allow us to pump these through the SQL Database Engine Tuning Advisor (which takes a batch of SQL workload, and optimizes the DB for this workload through strategies such as indecies; partitioning; statistics; etc.

It may take a while to make this available in the UI, is there any way in the shorter term to make this available in a log file somewhere that we can unpick?

Many thanks

Sean

Would be amazing if we can use a wildcard to input data from multiple sheets within an Excel workbook. 

This would be particularly useful when dealing with older Excel spreadsheets such as .XLS and .binary spreadsheets such as .XLSB.

The current filter tool allows for a single clause to be applied without writing the code. 

Is it possible to have the ability to make a selection, for example "Y>X" then click AND or OR and then have the ability to simply add another filter clause without having to select "Custom" and lose the wizard functionality? 

I think I raised this before but I couldn't find it.

This seems like it would be a simple implementation.

M.

ps - Shoutout to @DataG8 for bringing this to my attention again.

When choosing "In List" values in a CYDB input, the normal Windows functions do not work (shift+click, ctl+A, ctl+click, etc.).

When having to choose, say, 20 values, it is a big annoyance to have to click each value (20 clicks). 

Have been told this is a bug so I wanted to put it on your radar for a fix.

Alteryx needs to package SAP, JD Edwards and ADNIS and BPCS connectors as part of it's native offering. This will increase the value proposition of Alteryx designer from just data blending to full self service ETL. Most of the large organizations have data extraction challenges and will experience business user empowerment and big productivity gains if native connectors and data extraction across major ERPs is enabled. Some of these productivity gains can in turn be used to make a business case for Alteryx designer licenses.

Exactly as the subject says: It would be incredibly useful to be able to change the colour, and possibly the line thickness of the connectors between tools.

We have workflows with huge amounts of stuff going on, as I'm sure many people do.

Being able to colour code the connections between tools would help us to trace things from place to place when stepping through the workflow.

Currently, Input tool, Flat File format, only support String and V_String field data type.

Note: UTF-8 is a supported character set.

I would like to request W_String and VW_String be supported, given UTF-8 is a supported character set.

There is a workaround to do this, meaning Alteryx already does this, albeit through CSV input format, using a non-existent field separate, e.g., | is what I used, or in this link, the NUL or \0 character.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer/flat-file-import-with-unicode/m-p/537001#M115000

Sometimes, as a sanity check, I would like to be able to model only the mean of my data set, i.e. I would like to use a predictive tool with no predictors included. The result would be a model with only an intercept, and this value would be the mean of the target variable. This would not be an important feature for final models, of course, but when starting to look at a data set and build up a model, it can be useful to first ensure the model is producing the expected output in the simplest case. 

Note, this can be achieved when just one predictor is included, but it takes some math (see below), so it would be nice to be able to have this as a built-in option.

Hi All,

My company has been using Alteryx designer for several years now but recently started a pilot for Alteryx server. One of the issues we have found is users keep trying to publish workflows that have aliased data connections. As our current Gallery Admin, i do not have permission nor do I know the wide range of connections that the users are trying to connect to. W would like to give users the ability to create/publish an aliased connection directly to Gallery. When this happens, it would automatically add that user to the data connection. They would also be given the ability to share the data source just like they can share a work flow.

One of our goals with this pilot is to promote self service, but having users wait on Admins to create the connections slows their process down.

I'm really liking the new assisted modelling capabilities released in 2020.2, but it should not error if the data contains: spatial, blob, date, datetime, or datetime types.

This is essentially telling the user to add an extra step of adding a select before the assisted modelling tool and then a join after the models. I think the tool should be able to read in and through these field types (especially dates) and just not use them in any of the modelling.

An even better enhancement would be to transform date as part of the assisted modelling into something usable for the modelling (season, month, day of week, etc.)

The beauty of workflow constants is that a user can change a value in one place and it will be effective everywhere in the workflow where the constant is used. I want to be able to update the workflow constant value itself using an App interface. If I use interface tools to update the constant value wherever it appears, the constant loses its value and beauty. This becomes a maintenance nightmare and an interface tool clutter. Can I have a new tool or a current tool in the interface palette which allows me to change workflow constants in the interface? Thank you.

When building macros - we have the ability to put test data into the macro inputs, so that we can run them and know that the output is what we expected.    This is very helpful (and it also sets the type on the inputs)

However, for batch macros, there seems to be no way to provide test inputs for the Control Parameter.   So if I'm testing a batch macro that will take multiple dates as control params to run the process 3 times, then there's no way for me to test this during design / build without putting a test-macro around this (which then gets into the fact that I can't inspect what's going on without doing some funkiness)

Could we add the same capability to the Control Parameter as we have on the Macro Input to be able to specify sample input data?

Hi there,

We have a relatively large table that we are trying to analyse using the data-investigation tools - however the Field summary tool's interactive output seems to fail on this data set producing no output at all.    It produces no error message - just a blank output on the interactive output (the other two outputs are normally populated).

The table is 104 columns wide; 1.16M rows long; and 865 Mb in size excluding indices.

We put a random row select on this - and if we passed any more than 13100 rows into the Field Summary tool (with all 107 columns), then the interactive tool output is blank.    If we scale this back to 13000 rows or fewer, the Field summary interactive view works as expected (providing a frequency histogram on each field).

Is this a known issue - there was no warning provided to indicate that there was an overrun or anything similar?

Thank you

Sean

Please could we add Qubole to supported data sources,

https://www.qubole.com/

It is possible to connect to Qubole via ODBC Connection

However, this error message is often returned on a query: InboundNamedPipe GetOverlappedResult: The pipe has been ended 

I've been advised by Alteryx Support that this is likely due to the ODBC driver. 

If it's possible to add Qubole to supported data sources it would save a lot of time committed to troubleshooting this error.

All the best

Hello Alteryx Team

I would be great if you could enhance the emailing function to Include sending emails using the Microsoft Exchange Web Service (EWS). And not just SMTP as there are companies that do not Allow sending emails using SMTP but EWS is allowed.

Regards

Markus

Hi Alteryx -

It would be nice if we could include some of the sampling functions in the Input tool. For example, I am creating a random 10% sample from a large data set but in order to do this I need to first input the entire data set then create the sample. This takes processing time and effort.  Ideally, in the Input configuration I would like to see the option to create samples without having to load in the entire data set. Similar to Record Limit but with added functionality. 

Thanks, 

Derek 

Disabled shouldn't mean hidden.

I find the Disable All Tools that Write Output option very handy but sometimes when I have the tools disabled I want to be able to check the file name of the output or perhaps change it. Disabling the tools blanks out the configuration window, so you can't see the destination or make adjustments.

I would prefer the tool to be disabled but I still want to be able to adjust the configuration.

When utilizing the alteryx 'publish to tableau server' tool, only the name of the folder (project name) is visible for selection of where to publish the .hyper file on the tableau server.  When there are multiple folders with the same name under different parent folders, i.e. a 'weekly updates' folder under North America parent, a weekly updates folder under South America parent, etc... there is no way to differentiate between the 'weekly updates' folders in the tableau publish tool. 

In this case, you essentially have to publish test files to all the folders and write the results on a piece of paper for future reference.  

This request is to enable the navigation, or at least view, of a hierarchical folder structure within the 'publish to tableau server' tool.  

I am trying to generate the multiple sheets in the same Excel using Render tool. one of the sheet having around 100 columns and other two sheets are having only 20 columns. If am configuring paper size to 50 inches in render tool, its affecting the other sheets too and Report doesn't look good since columns width are getting extended to some extent. 

So, it will more helpful if there is an option to configure each sheet paper size or a rule kind of thing.

Please let me know if there are any option to that.

Thanks in advance...