Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

A workflow of one of our Alteryx business users ended with a timeout, and only part of the data was written in the output. This leads to wrong data for the reports. 

The goal should be: 

It is not allowed that output data is only partially written the output. Either the output is written completely or no output will be created. Would it be possible to achieve this?

This behavior ( Either the output is written completely or no output will be created) is already available in Qlikview and expects the same to be available in Alteryx as well. 

Database systems, and seemingly Quickview, have the ability to create "transactions" that will either write all data or no data.  They can do this because the database has full control over the database.  

Alteryx Designer is writing to different file types and doesn't have this ability because it's not in total charge of the files or databases.  For example, if it's updating 1 million records in a database, it's not saving the previous values of the field being updated, so it would have to way to undo those updates if the workflow experienced an error later in its processing.

Alteryx product team should consider this and implement it in the future to solve many problems. 

As a best practice, I label a Control Parameter with the exact field name that I want to map to in the workflow. This takes any guesswork out of maintenance down the road. I want the macro questions to automap the labels to field names, just like a Join tool automaps the right side to the left when a field name is chosen from the left side drop down.

Would like to use arrows and other shapes for documentation. Moreover, having "anchors" (i.e., like in a wiki) would really facilitate moving about large workflows. I imagine the former is not hard to implement, though uncertain about the latter.

Check out the mock-up workflow for an admittedly bad example.

If progress bar or overall process completion percentage can be displayed somewhere, adds great value for the users running complex processes (with multiple databases/ files as input and complex queries especially spatial queries).

The most difficult part about quickly sharing Community Questions and Solutions is constructing representative "Dummy" data values as static Text Inputs that can be packaged in a workflow. Most of us are almost exclusively working with sensitive client and company data that cannot be shared. It would be great to have a tool that converted values over to dummy values based on the type of data in that field. Kind of like a dynamic find and replace that randomizes values, replaces occurrences with similar dummy values, or scrambles string values in an indecipherable way.

The tool output could directly update a connected "Create Text Input" tool, or it could be connected to a browse tool that could quickly be converted to a Text Input.

I haven't been able to find a similar idea, but I have a scenario were I'm fully joining a dataset but I get a mismatch of column names.

When using the column renaming functionality in the Join tool, data sent through the Left or Right connector is not renamed. When I'm performing a Full Join the Union tool is adding these columns to the resulting table.

The renaming column functionality of the Join Tool should apply to all join types for consistency. My workaround has been to avoid renaming columns in the Join tool if aiming to perform a multi-join.

Hey @A11yKyle and Alteryx Accessibility Team! It would be great if we could add alt text (dynamic based on input data would be even better!) and set the tab order of rendered PDFs so we could create reporting outputs that are digitally accessible.

With a module that contains a lot of tool containers, it would be nice to have an option (similar to Disable All Tool That Write Output in the RunTime TAB) to disable all Tool Containers and then I can go pick the one or two that I would like to enable.

If I have a .zip file with multiple files of the same format and layout included, would like to be able to have those read in with 1 input tool.  I also have several large national files split by state that are zipped separately in a folder, so it would be nice to have the ability to use the wildcard functionality in 1 input tool to read all separate files.

When I publish using the tabcmd publish command in an event or using the Publish to Tableau Server Macro, the extract becomes LIVE. I do not want it to become LIVE, because when it does, I cannot refresh the extract using the tabcmd refreshextracts command or setup a refresh schedule in Tableau Server. Is there anyway to make this tde stay an extract after Alteryx rewrites the file? When the extract is live it will not refresh until I manually select Refresh in Tableau Server when I am in the Workbook that is connected to the data source I am publishing.

I posted the above question and was told this would be good to add to the New Idea module. Thanks!

We often build very large Alteryx projects that breakdown large data processing jobs into multiple self contained workflows.

We use CReW Runner tools to automate running the workflows in sequence but it would be nice if Alteryx supported this natively with a new panel for "Projects"

Nice features for Projects could be:

• Set the sequence
• Conditional sequence
• Error handling
• Shared constants
• Shared aliases
• Shared dependencies
• Chained Apps
• Option to pass data between workflows - Input from yxmd Output - no need to persist intermediary data
• Input/output folder/project folder setups for local data sources in dependencies window
• Ability to package like "Export Workflow" for sharing
• Results log the entire project

I'll admit it, I'm a coder, a keyboard guy, a sublime text typing junkie; but I love Alteryx.  Currently if I open a new workflow and start typing what happens? nothing... Wa wa.  Now lets imagine I'm already pretty familiar with Alteryx and I'm 5 moves ahead of my click and drag. 

Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could click a whitespace and start typing?  Typing would bring up a context menu search with tools found by the search (similar to the "search all tools" in the upper left corner, but next to the cursor, and vertical).  I could continue typing until one tool was left or select a tool using my cursor keys. Hitting 'Enter' would insert the tool where I had originally clicked and open another tool search window, selecting the next tool would automagically connect the two and on down the line (if multiple leg outputs exist for the tool the context menu would appear allowing me to select the leg I want it to connect to, hitting Enter would again bring up the tool search...

Now get this, go back to just after my first search... if instead of Enter I hit the "Tab" key, boom, it would take me to the configuration panel and allow me to fill in/tab through the configuration.  Hit enter again and I'm off to the races with another tool search.

All you click and draggers don't lose any functionality, and we keyboarders can swiftly race through development with ease.  How about that?  (the standard syntax check/path validation would need to be paused to keep development quick until I clicked again on the workflow which would execute the Rapid development mode.)

@MarcH I'm putting your name on this one:

Yesterday I was working with @Cedric via WebEx and we were building a macro together.  We were making several field substitutions and and Cedric stated the obvious, "Alteryx should make this easier".

Contains([Field_X],"XYZ")

He would double click [Field_X] and the result is a partial selection:  [Field_X].   The brackets don't get selected.

I'm sure that there is a good explanation for why this happens, it just doesn't make the UX wonderful.

Cheers,

Mark

This is a suggestion for improving the current Apache Avro output support. It would be nice to have a way to also output to a JSON file the Avro schema associated with the Avro data file.

- In the output tool, provide a file browse option to optionally write out the Avro schema JSON file

- Introduce a new tool or function to extract an Avro schema document from an existing Avro file and then save it to JSON

Hi, when using the Join tool, I sometimes wish there are separate "*Unknown" fields for each of the left and right input.

I have occasions where the left input can be dynamic(modified upstream), but the right input fixed.

It's annoying to fix all join tool's selection when there are modifications in the upstream part.

As well as using keyboard shortcuts, many of us are using a mouse / keyboard with program specific assignable shortcut buttons. It is a serious boost to productivity. The ability to instantly enable / disable would be a great tool large complex workflows. In general, it would be great to expand the keyboard shortcuts to offer more Alteryx specific advanced functions.

it's not easy for an Alteryx Admin to keep track of all the versions & downloads they need to keep updating for their user base.

In our corporate environment, we also have to wrap any installers in a specific wrapper for them to be pushed out to user workstations, and many of the downloads on the alterxy site are not directly available but instead have to be done via the Alteryx Download Manager - as soon as the download manager tries to download the actual installer, this fails on our security firewall.

Please can you make all the key addins available on the downloads page http://downloads.alteryx.com/downloads.html as a final download rather than as a reference to the download manager, with clear version numbers

- Tableau Starter kit: the actual final installer is called Starter_Kit_for_Tableau.exe

- Starter kit for Microsoft

Additionally - it would be VERY useful if on the Downloads page, you could add a 3rd party section, and include a link to the latest tested drivers for :

- SQL Server

- DB2

- Apache (Spark/Kudu)

- R tools for Microsoft

etc.

This would really help Admin teams to keep on top of the responsibility for keeping the environment up to date.

cc: @avinashbonu @Deeksha @Ari_Fuller