Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

 The Download tool is so much more than Downloads. Think about the situation where you are using the Download tool to upload invoices and try explaining that to co-workers. "Oh yes - I'm going to implement the API to upload the invoices using the Alteryx download tool..." Could we call it the Curl tool or something?

It seems that there is good value in a "SuperCleanup" tool that could take commonly used ways of writing information and cleaning this up automatically.    This would work well if the tool reviewed the data in the column, and made a recommendation about the cleanup to apply.    The tool could cleanup the data; and then pop any non-conforming values into a separate column for you to explictly clean up.    

 

For example:

- 01 Jan 2015: this can be automatically cleaned up into a date

- 11:15 pm: this can be cleaned up into a time

- 40.7128° N, 74.0060° W; or 40° 43' 50.1960'' N and 73° 56' 6.8712'' W:    Both could be auto-converted to a centroid

- $ 55.20 or  £2,000,000.00 can be automatically converted to currency

- India; United States; Mongolia - can be automatically cleaned up as a country (there are only about 200 or so in the world, so it's a very finite list)

- NY; AZ; MI; can be cleaned up as US states

NOTE: if we make this extensible -then companies can auto cleanup SKUs; or location codes; etc

 

There are dozens of simple cleanups like this that we could add - which would each relieve BI people from the drudgery of having to clean these up each time themselves.

Before Designer 2019.4 there was a "bug" in the workflow statistics collection that under the "SampleModule" data from the UsageGallery collection the name of the workflow run from within Designer was available.  We used that information to determine the common workflows run in our community as well as generating a measure of community growth.  The "bug" was removed in 2019.4 and now we can only determine the number of runs, but not the number of distinct workflows that were run.  This idea to do return the workflow name run to the information stored in the Mongo database.

 

 

Other applications I work in reguarly utilize right-click menus.  Sometimes those menus seem annoying, but in working with Alteryx, I realize it’s actually quite smart because it eliminates unnecessary wrist movement.  In the screenshot below, I have highlighted a bunch of fields.  The boxes were previously unchecked and I wanted to check them to bring them into my workflow.  I highlight them, and if I were in a different application, I would just right click and get access to everything that is in the options menu, but in Alteryx, I have to actually move the mouse to the options menu.  This might seem super nitpicky, but as someone who is currently suffering from overuse injuries in my wrists and hands, I really appreciate minimal wrist movement.

Support richer copy/paste functionality within the text input tools.  Specifically allowing multiple records to be pasted at one time when bringing in lists from an unsupported file sources.  

 

Currently when multiple rows or cells are selected and copied.

   

 

Only 1 value is copied into the text input record:

 

 

Adding and selecting multiple rows results the same - only 1 record pasted.  

       

In working through challenge 77 it became apparent that here are a few useful formulae that would help with work like this:

OffsetFromPosition

Input: Point; Bearing; Distance; Units

Output: New point

 

Degrees to DMS:

Input: Degrees as floating point

Output: string with Degrees; minutes & Seconds

 

DMS to Degrees:

Inverse of the above

 

 

Can we get a more robust read.Alteryx function for mode="data.frame"?   If it is reading the stream as a data frame, can we have the option  stringsAsFactors = FALSE?

 

I am getting tripped up a lot because the code will execute in R Studio, but will get mysterious behaviours when it runs within the R Tool.   I am manually converting variables to character strings in my R Tool code which I don't have to do in R Studio.   However, I'm not a highly detail oriented R developer, so I will miss variable data type conversions and have spent a lot of time going down the wrong path.  Also, It makes it difficult to maintain two different scripts for the same routine.

 

I have started using the glimpse() function in R Tool code, to help catch some data conversions since it writes the output in the message log.  

 

Rob Campanell

Currently, when multiple tabs are created in the Interface Designer, Alteryx will require the user to click through all tabs before running the app.  Many times, extra tabs are there for advanced settings that may confuse the average user.

 

I propose a check box in the Tab Configuration to allow the tab to be a "background, or silent" tab, that is not clicked through in the process of running the app.

A connector tool for the GSuit API that would enable us to import email contents, attachments, and other Google apps data into Alteryx.

I understand that Server and Designer + Scheduler versions have the option to "cancel workflows running longer than X”.

 

I'd like to see that functionality in the desktop edition as well.

When you add a tool in the canvas, the annotation is automatically set (for example the formula, or connection configuration etc). You can then customize the annotation text in the "Annotation" tool's tab. But sometimes it can be useful to revert to the "automatic" annotation, and it doesn't seem possible once you set it to something different.

 

Apparently there is currently no way to reset a tool's annotation text to the automatic value.

 

I've found a way to do it by editing the xml content of the file : as far as I know you just have to delete the <AnnotationText>[...]</AnnotationText> tag and reload the file, and the annotation gets back to the default "automatic" value, which is still present in the <DefaultAnnotationText> tag.

 

I think a simple button in the tool's annotation tab to reset it would be nice.

 

Thank you!

I enjoy using Alteryx. It saves me a lot of time compared to manually writing scripts. But one of my frustrations is the lack of 'intelligence' in the IDE. Please make it so that if I change a name of a column in a select tool or a join, every occurence of that variable/column in selects, summarises, formulae and probably all tools downstream of the select tool renames as well. In other IDEs I believe this is called refactoring. It doesn't seem like an big feature to make, it would save enormous amounts of time and would make me very happy.

 

While we're on the 'intelligence' of the IDE, there is a small, easily fixable bug. When I have a variable with spaces in the middle, for example, 'This is my column name', and start writing in the code field "[Thi" then the drop downbox suggests "[This is my column name]". All good so far. But if I get a little further in the variable name, and write instead "[This i", then the dropdown box suggests "[This is my column name]", and I click this, the result is this: "[This [This is my column name]". Alternatively, I could write "[This is my col" and the result would be "[This is my [This is my column name]". Clearly this could be avoided by my using column names with underscores or hyphens; but I wanted to highlight to you the poor functionality here.

Kind regards,

Ben Hopkins

I think it would be really good if we have the option to cache data for few days, as currently cached data gets deleted when you close the workflow.

 

It’s useful to catch data when developing reports with input data from data warehouses or big data platforms , as sometimes it can takes a while to extract the data.

 

If we have the option to cache data for few days or delete when it’s not required anymore, it can save a lot of time, the next time when you open the workflow to complete the development or make changes to your workflow.

While exporting a report to Excel via the Table/Layout/Render tools, it would be helpful to have the ability to manually adjust the size of specific columns within the report table.

 

Currently, Alteryx auto-corrects the column widths based on the data in the columns and the selected paper size, even if you select specific column widths using the Table tool. This is a great feature for reporting, however in my use-case my output report contains two blank columns which will be manually edited by my team. Because these two "manual update" columns are blank in Alteryx, the column widths on the output are quite small compared to the other columns, and this will require manual column width formatting within the Excel sheet to both accommodate the (often lengthy) manual updates that will be entered into these two columns, and to keep the report within the paper size parameters.

 

Thanks!

Taryn

I have two use cases here:

1) A single tool that I want to connect to several tools (e.g. an input connecting to a number of selects)

2) Several tools that I want to connect to a single tool (e.g. several inputs connecting to a single union tool)

The current interface requires that I establish these connections by connecting the tools individually. It would be great to have the ability to have a right-click option. Simplistically, it might work something like this...

1) Select the tools that you want connected to a single tool (e.g. all the selects); Right-click; Get connection from Tool...{drop down list}

2) Select the tools that you want to get their connection from a single tool (e.g. all the inputs); Right-click; Connect to Tool...{drop down list}

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

Providing access to the Oracle Cloud for OTM would allow users to connect to the API's to deliver data sets from the Cloud and use it for workflow and other data management activities.

Quite often, I would love to be able to use Browse tools already while the workflow is still running, if that specific Browse tool has completed (green box around). This would help to debug and save a lot of time.

In this case, the lower Browse tool would be enabled already now.

 

Adding "Lightning Bolt" connectors to the standard workflow tools to allow dynamic automation of the settings would be a game changer. I believe that this would enable us to create universally dynamic and adaptive workflows which could be used as drop in solutions for most datasets. This would turn the standard tools into a dynamic ones and dramatically reduce the tool count to accomplish dynamic tasks, and make complex workflows much easier to internalize. Making standard workflow tools more dynamic would allow us to easily dynamically incorporate conditional tests / values / fieldname selections / bypass / etc into tools like detour / filter / formula / unique / transpose / crosstab / summarize / Outputs / etc. I would also like to see the ability to utilize a bool field to bypass any given tool in a workflow. That way we could do things like conditionally bypass an entire formula tool which would dramatically simplify complex formula construction, turn on and off inputs / outputs, simplify error avoidance, etc.

 

In order to build complex dynamic conditional workflows with the current tool capabilities, most of us are forced to use custom macros (often a multitude of workflow specific ones as well), constantly add and remove formula created fields for message relay, and create complex multi-routings / tests / unions in a standard workflow with large numbers of tools and containers. This hides many of our tasks within short-term use fields / custom macros and it makes the rest of our workflows voluminous and less intuitive.

 

On the User Interface side, I recommend a simple approach. Next to the standard tool setting there should be a dynamic input option which allows you to select the source field in the lightning bolt connector. Next to that, there should be an icon that can be clicked on to pop up a short text description and a basic screen shot of data in the correct format for dynamic input. I would also like to see a check box at the bottom for manual tool "bypass" which can also be dynamically controlled. (This would especially be helpful on outputs, but it would also be helpful to allow formulas and filters to be kept in place for future use even when they should not currently be used) Turned off tools could be highlighted in a red background or something.

 

This would be useful for anyone creating dynamic and adaptive workflows, but it would especially expand Alteryx Designer's capability to attract more custom software developers like me.  It would dramatically reduce the need for a large number of complex workflow specific macros that clutter our systems. Users that find the traditional workflow tool approach easier for them could easily use the tools as normal by simply using the standard manual settings. Advanced users could simplify the creation of universally dynamic and self adaptive workflows.