Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

TIBCO Data Virtualization is a Data Virtualization product focused on creating a virtual data store consolidating data from throughout the enterprise.  It can be accessed via a SQL query engine, and has a variety of supported connectors, including an ODBC driver.

This data source can be connected to via ODBC in Alteryx today, but error messaging is unclear/unhelpful, and attempting to use the Visual Query Builder causes Alteryx to crash.

Adding TIBCO Data Virtualization as a supported ODBC connection would empower business users to leverage this product and easily utilize this enterprise data store, enhancing the value of the Alteryx platform as a consumer of this data.

When selecting a HANA view in Alteryx that has a required prompt/parameter/variable Alteryx does not pre-populate the SQL with the required HANA prompt code.  Instead it give a SQL Error.   Requesting an Alteryx enhancement that would read the HANA view and determine the required HANA prompt SQL required and prepopulate the prompt or ask the user to fill in the prompt/variable box.  This may work similar to how Tableau work when connecting directly to a HANA view that requires a prompt (it would pop up the prompt and allow you to select, when you convert Tableau to custom sql it would save the SQL code required for the prompt.

Hello,

According to wikipedia :

A partition is a division of a logical database or its constituent elements into distinct independent parts. Database partitioning is normally done for manageability, performance or availability reasons, or for load balancing. It is popular in distributed database management systems, where each partition may be spread over multiple nodes, with users at the node performing local transactions on the partition. This increases performance for sites that have regular transactions involving certain views of data, whilst maintaining availability and security. 

Well, basically, you split your table in several parts, according to a field. it's very useful in term of performance when your workflows are in delta or when all your queries are based on a date. (e.g. : my table helps me to follow my sales month by month, I partition my table by month).

So the idea is to support that in Alteryx, it will add a good value, especially in In-DB workflows.

Best regards,

Simon

It would be nice if Alteryx was able to directly output data and the workflow into an Excel PowerPivot data model for people without Alteryx access to pivot the data.

Report text tools currently only give the option to allign left, right or center. Would be great if we could have the option to have a true 'Justify' option also as it makes chunks of text look so much cleaner

My team uses a shared macro repository (say F:\AlteryxMacros), and we recently ran into an issue with the default save location for macros. While we save most macros to our repository, there are times when folks save their macros elsewhere (let's say C:\MyAwesomeWorkflow). The issue we've encountered is that if you go to file >> save as with a macro, it will ALWAYS default to the macro repository, even when my macro is currently saved elsewhere (C:\MyAwesomeWorkflow). Speaking for a friend, people have accidentally saved things to the macro repository by accident. Or, they waste time navigating from the macro repository to the their current folder.

If a macro is saved somewhere, please change the file >> save as to default to the current folder. Thanks! 

I built some workflows which will input full or sample data in multiple Input Data tools based on changing the value of a user constant. These workflows have email events enabled after run.I want to change the email subject based on whether the workflow ran in full or sample mode. That's my use case. I know that I could do this using the Email tool and that's not going to work in my use case. If the workflow fails, there won't be an email. Also, I don't know if the Email tool is blocked by just my Gallery or by all Galleries.

To generalise this, I want to dynamically change email event subjects, bodies, and more by either using expressions/constants from the workflow or by having an expression editor directly in the event itself.

Thank you.

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