Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Alteryx Designer is slow when using In-DB tools.

We use Alteryx 2019.1 on Hive/HortonWords with the Simba ODBC Driver configured with SSL enabled.

Here is a compare In-DB / in Memory : 

We found that Alteryx open a new connection for each action : 

- First link to joiner = 1 connection.

- Second ling to joiner = 1 connection.

- Click on the canevas = 1 connection.

Each connection take about 2,5 sec... It really slow down the Designer : 

Please, keep alive the first connection instead of closing it and creating a new one for each action on the Designer.

The option to open Hyper files in 2019.4 is great! For some of our use cases it would be even better, if we would be able to directly open Hyper files that have been published to Tableau Server.

It should be possible to achieve this by combining the Tableau REST API method Download Data Source, which returns a Tableau Packaged Data Source (.tdsx), which then would need to be converted to a Zip file to be able to navigate to the contained Hyper file.

First: Including mapbox in 2019.4 is GREAT!

That said, one of the great features of mapbox is the ability to customize your own map layers. 

It would be great if this was an option to use a custom map as the alteryx reference map similar to what is available within tableau. We in our organization have several custom map styles built with mapbox and I'd love to use them as a reference in the report map tool, or any other scenario where maps become useful.

Can we have an Alteryx environment that is like a free sandbox similar in nature to Tableau's Tableau Public? It will really help people wanting to get Alteryx certified prepare for certifications without paying the expensive AUD7,795. Please help the jobseekers who would like to pick up Alteryx but cannot afford your hefty price tag just yet.

In instances where many tools need to be connected to one tool, I think a "Connect All" type of function might be useful.

For example if you had 4 threads of data that all ended in a select tool and needed to be connected to a Join Multiple tool, you could grab all of the select tools and the Join Multiple tool, right click, and then select "Connect All" which would connect each select tool to the Join Multiple tool.

I think this could be implemented a few ways:

1) Right-click and select action

2) Keyboard shortcut

3) Holding shift on a selection of origin tools and then clicking on the shared destination tool

I've added a screenshot of a quick Photoshop representation of this idea.

In Alteryx Designer Version 2019.3:

Input Data has a feature to ignore/exclude the top rows by using "8. Start Data Import on Line".

Suggests that to add the similar kind of feature to ignore/exclude the last rows (when we do not know the last row number of each file). 

It could be beneficial in many cases when we import system generated *.CSV and *.xls/x files. 

Below is a scenario when we get extra lines in the end:

I love this tool,  but think it would be improved by including an option to create a column per delimiting character.  This could be added in the number of columns selector box.  In the case where 1 row has more delimiters than another, null columns can be created.  Without this option you have to Regex count the delimiters, select the max and then embed the Text to columns tools in a macro and then pass the max columns as a param.  Would be nice to resolve all this in the main tool.

Thanks, nick

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.

Hi Alteryx,

Today, Alteryx is can connect to AWS Aurora DB, but it is only for MySQL.

How about AWS Aurora PostgreSQL ? Will it be included in the next release ?

Best Regrads,

Samuel

I suggest that it would be beneficial to add in a column filter that can automatically remove columns based on a condition, such as removing columns where all values are NULL or if they contain something in the values.

Should have a True and False output, like the normal Filter tool, so you can check what is being removed.

e.g. Would help with when you get poorly formatted excel sheets that add in hundreds of redundant columns, or if your workflow has generated NULL columns that should be removed, without having to Transpose, Filter, Cross tab etc to clear them out.

Thanks,

Doug

Dummy/garbage text is required in the "Write to file or database" field to be able to write files from fullpaths using the "Take File Table name from field" check box and dropdown (also horrible UX/UI IMO). Without which you get a uninformative "Cannot access the folder" error message.

This isn't obvious and makes no sense and should not be required. The User experience here is very unintuitive, can you review this component?

I'm really struggling with the documentation/examples and the UX around node configuration. I often will spend an hour or more trying to solve really basic issues despite looking at the examples.

Sifting through relevant threads on the forum is a chore.

A link to a subforum or even better a wiki subtopic would be helpful, placed beside the Open Example link in the top ribbon.

eg

It will be great if we have a round down or round up function just like excel in Alteryx. I know we can use the left function after converting the number to string, but it becomes difficult when the decimal value is huge.

I love the ability to setup the UI with the different windows (results, config etc) in the places that I want. However, once I have them setup I generally don't want to move the positions much again, resize windows in place, yes, but not move them all together.

I would love the ability to lock the window configuration in place so accidental drags on a title bar doesn't move the windows stay in place. I still want to be able to resize those windows in the space though.

Cheers

In the Report Map tool - you have the ability to select units - KM vs. Miles

You also have the ability to put a map buffer around your zoomed points - either in % or distance.

However - if you've selected your units as KM - the "Expand Extent" is still in Miles - see picture below.

Please can you make this consistent?

The Alteryx.Flexnetoperations.com  license management site needs major work.

On the View Licenses page it shows all licenses going back several years. A basic need is to show only licenses which haven't expired, but that is not an option.You cannot even sort on the expiration column while you can sort on most others columns.

The most simple need is to see a list of my current active license users - but I do't see a way to do that.

I tried an "Advanced Search" and chose  expiration date after 2019-10-29 and none of my licenses which expire in 2020 appear - I get a blank list.

Similarly on the administer machines page you cannot filter to hide expired licenses or even on the licenses column (which doesn't sort either).

The help link on the page doesn't bring you to help specific to that page but the general activation help front page. After several clicks I found this page:

https://help.alteryx.com/licensing/current/Administer/AdministerMachines.htm?tocpath=Administer%7C__...

But  the help is incomplete (doesn't list Machine types or the difference between Active and Inactive)

Also, there is no export capability - copy and pasting into Excel is a formatting headache as it brings in check-boxes.

Lots of room for improvement here.

Cheers,

Bob

P.S. I understand that work is being done on this, but an ETA would be greatly appreciated.

Hello,

In my company, we have our personal account (let's say myorganization\saubert) and, if we have the right to, a LOCAL admin account (eg : .\adminsaubert) to make install of sofware, etc...

So, the license is on my personal account

Now, I want to access the System settings :

And then  I have this very friendly message :

If i click on "OK", it opens the License manager.
If I click on "Cancel", it closes the windows and I'm unable to change my system settings.

I think changing these system settings shouldn't require a license.

Best regards,

Simon

For Snowflake Bulk loading only AWS S3 is supported.  ODBC works but has slower performance.  Adding the Google Cloud Storage option would allow more customers to use this feature.

Most organizations are moving to the cloud and Microsoft is the biggest one in the game.

I pleased that you have updated the List tool to connect to SP 365 but soon all of the shared drives will be online and if its vital for Alteryx success to be able to communicate, pull and export data to those locations. 

With the Desktop, there is a way to make it work by authenticating and for the previous SP version by logging on to SharePoint first on the server then the scheduler would run successfully. Now the scheduler isn't able to take advantage of the authentication already established. 

If Alteryx isn't able to keep up it will soon find itself behind in innovation and tool of choice.