Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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... 

When developing in Python using custom objects - you often use print( object) or str(object) to see what's in this object quickly.

For example 

myDictionary = {
'CarType': 'Ford',
'Cost': 20000}

this defines a dictionary.   If I want to quickly look into these to see what's there I can use:

print(myDictionary)

# gives {'Cost': 20000, 'CarType': 'Ford'}

str(myDictionary) 

"{'Cost': 20000, 'CarType': 'Ford'}"

This is incredibly useful for debugging and to understand how these custom objects / classes work.

Please could you add an overload to the str() method to allow this kind of simple debugging and understanding for all the classes used in the Alteryx Python SDK (https://help.alteryx.com/20193/developer-help/sdks/build-custom-tools/python-engine-sdk/classes)

For example:

str(record_info_in) which is of type <class 'AlteryxPythonSDK.RecordInfo'>) gives you <AlteryxPythonSDK.RecordInfo object at 0x000001A2C48C3190> which is not very helpful.

Much more useful would be to flatten this into a string format or dictionary so that users can see what's in the RecordInfo object that they're working with to make delivery and debugging easier.

cc: @Ozzie @BlytheE 

In the designer - when you attempt to open a canvas from your company server - you're given a search screen to find your canvas.

This search sometimes does partial string match and sometimes not - this inconsistency is confusing (full worked up solution in the screenshots below).

For example - if you search for the word "full" it will bring back "main - full download" but will not bring back "main - checkFullDownload".

Please can you change this search process to work on any substring of the canvas name - that is the intuitive behavior that users would expect.

Thank you.

I should be able to find this one if I use the word "Full" right?Nope - Full only returns canvasses where Full is at the beginning of the name; or after some whitespaceIt would be better if this worked with any substring

When developing HTML GUI for an alteryx tool - it has to be done in hand-code.

There are 2 main challenges here:

a) it is not approachable for new folk.   If we want the HTML SDK to be adopted more broadly, then it needs to be a graded learning curve where people without coding experience can use it and grow in confidence

b) it's not efficient.   the only way to know if you've done something right or wrong is to type it up in notepad, and then try it in Alteryx and see what breaks.

Could we instead move to an IDE type approach like Visual studio (screenshot below)?

Here:

• the user can drag & drop tools from the toolbox (left)
• position them visually in the design surface (center)
• while still having the ability to set custom properties or behaviours (right)
• and jump straight into code if you're comfortable (bottom)

And when you're ready to test it, you hit "start", and any errors or issues are reported at the bottom of the screen.

cc: @BlytheE 

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!

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

Give us the ability to connect a control parameter to an interface tool so that I can change interface elements based on previously entered data when chaining analytic apps together.

This would enable us to:

- have dynamic text for a radio button/checkbox.

- have dynamic text for a dropdown box prompt or a listbox prompt.

- pre-populate a text box based on inputs from a previous selection

- change the min/max and default values on numeric up down input

- default base map, zoom level, reference layer, draw properties

- select the default selected date on a date box as well as changing the prompt for a date box

- change the default file types for a file browse tool

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.

On the RedShift Bulk Loader add support for Redshift options:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/copy-parameters-data-conversion.html

• TRUNCATECOLUMNS (automatically truncates any fields to the defined in the table)
• IGNOREBLANKLINES
• FILLRECORD
• TIMEFORMAT
• TRIMBLANKS
• ENCODING
• EMPTYASNULL
• DATEFORMAT

...

Can Alteryx create a native connector to connect to SSAS TABULAR Cubes.