Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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... 

Hi Alteryx Designer Dev Team,

There are times where you want to create a variation of a particular pipeline and the data transformations in the beginning of the pipeline are similar but need slightly different configurations. To save time, can we have a right-click context option for each tool to be able to copy/paste or duplicate tool with existing configuration. This saves time by only having to change a few options in the duplicated tool. This is common for tools like, input, output, joins, groupings and reporting tools. An example where this functionality is handy in reporting: you may have a particular way that you always do your charts and instead of configuring the chart options from scratch each time, you copy paste the chart tool with current configuration and then you only have to make minor changes such as the data connections. 

Thank you

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!

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.

It would be great to have the ability to use a word file as a template and create a pdf as the output which can be emailed to a list of emails through alteryx.

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.

Given redshift prefers accepting many small files for bulk loading into redshift, it would be good to be able to have a max record limit within the s3 upload tool (similar to functionality for s3 download)

The other functionality that is useful for the s3 upload tool is ability to append file names based on datetimestamp_001, 002, 003 etc similar to current output tool

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 would be incredible helpful if Alteryx canvases auto-populated some metadata about each canvas to track its origination and updates.

The metadata fields I'm specifically thinking about are:

-Author

-Date Created

-Date Last Updated

When I put a map snippet into a report, there is no border. Therefore, road segments just terminate into whitespace.

Please add an option to create a border around the map snippet.Map With No Border

Map With A Border

Similar to how there is a functionality to use pip through the ayxinstallPackages, there needs to be a way to upgrade python itself. There are important packages such as keras that have errors in Python 3.6 that are not present when used with 3.7 so it should really be up to the user as to which python package to use. Another solution could also be to allow the user to point to their own local installation of Python so that the user can maintain consistency between their own local site-packages and the one that Alteryx has.

In the output window, numbers should always be displayed right aligned by default. Also the font should be fixed width type so an 8 and 1 both take equal width and we dont see numbers as below.

11111111

88888888

1. It instantly tells the user that its data type is numeric without having to check metadata.

2. Readability of the values is greatly increased.

I think it would be great to add metadata to a yxdb. For example, I was back tracking and trying to figure out which module/app I used to create an old yxdb. Now I use Notepad++ and do a "Find In Files" Search. Wouldn't it be great it the module path would be available when you look at the properties of a yxdb in Alteryx?

Would be nice if could use something like $Field rather than repeating the field name in the Condition and Loop expression within the Generate Rows tool