Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Data profiling feature in the Browse tool is a great feature, however, when your working with an extremely large data set, it can a large amount of time to fully render.

 

My idea is if Alteryx can make a pre-determination whether the data is so large that it'll take a substantial amount of time to profile the data. If it does, to not profile immediately, rather, display a message where the profile info would be letting the user know that it may take a while to generate with a "Generate Profile" button if the user needs to see it.

 

Another option would be to only profile a sample of the data and present the user an option to profile everything.

 

Thanks,

 

Jimmy

 

 

Alteryx creates a Livy Session when connecting to Spark Direct 

 

I just want to identify easily the session.

I'm loving the ability to read from a zip file! However, I would love the ability to read all file types. For me, I don't see .accdb or .flat, and I assume other folks might be missing other file formats that they use. I find it confusing that the input tool accepts a lot of file types, but selecting the zip format then limits my choices. I believe @Aguisande mentioned this issue in the 10.5 beta.

 

Thanks!

I came up with an idea while replying to @Deeksha. An interesting option to secure the data would be to encrypt the data sets and "license" it to

• specific users
• specific time spans or
• people with certain credentials

just like we do by encrypting the workflow...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes I find myself having to union too many tools together and get bothered with the drag-and-drop repetition. It'd be nice to be able to select multiple tools and have a "Union All" in the right-click menu that creates a union tool that is connected to the output of all the selected tools. 

 

It's kind of like a smarter "Insert After"

I have used the SharePoint List Connectors with our SharePoint 2010 (on prem) instance for some time now. It works great and has become invaluable. Unfortunately, I have been told that these connectors do not work with a Cloud instance or an instance that is not on prem. We need this capability since Microsoft is pushing coporations to move to the cloud instance and there is talk that on-prem may not be available past the 2016 version that is coming soon. Many companies including mine have either completed or are close to completing a full migration which has rendered the current SharePoint Connectors useless. While this is the most important part, another piece that is missing is a SharePoint Document Library connector (similar to the Amazon S3 Download/Upload). Currently I must use the UNC path to my SharePoint folders and an easier more reliable way to save files out to OneDrive and SharePoint Online would be very beneficial.

When working with R code and errors occur, the application needs to show which line the error happened on.

In Excel you can use an Indirect function to create strings to return a valid cell reference.

 

For example if in column A you have a list of sheet names e.g.

 

A1 = New York

A2 = Paris

A3 = London

 

Then you could create a formula which is Indirect(A1&"!B2") to reference the cell B2 in the New York tab.

 

An example of where I'd want to use this in Alteryx is to create a dynamic value based on a variable field.

 

For example based on this data:

 

I write [car make]+"_"+[car model] in the formula it will return the following

Volkswagen_Golf

Pontiac_Firebird

Audi_TT

Subaru_Outback etc.

 

However if I want it to be dynamic in an app or macro to allow the user to choose a suffix via a drop down this is not straight forward.

If I set up the tooling in this way:

 

What I get is the [#1] will bring in the field name and not the field value. So it would come through as Volkswagen_car model.

 

So my suggestion is that you have the ability to something like

[car make]+indirect("["+[#1]+"]") which would evaluate to [car make]+"_"+[car model] when car model is selected in the drop down.

 

The current workaround with help from @JonathanSherman is to use a dynamic select where [Name] = [#1] then join that onto the original dataset and use a dynamic rename create a new dynamic suffix field that can then be used.

 

 

Which while a nice design pattern, isn't as intuitive as indirect for those coming from a strong Excel background.

 

 

At work I use a laptop and two external monitors. (L, EX1, EX2) <- that's how it's set up

 

When working in Alteryx I put my main window of Alteryx on EX1 and Results/Configuration tab on EX2

 

Sometimes I need to unplug my laptop, go to the meeting - or, what I have been doing lately, go to one of the meeting rooms and use standing desk to work there.

 

Problem is when I disconnect my laptop from the docking station (where external monitors are connected) other windows "jump" to the laptop screen, apart from Alteryx external tabs - meaning I can't "reach" it, even if I disable/enable or restart Alteryx.

 

It's not really a complaint of any sort but just a discussion if there is a way for this to be improved?

Up to version 10.0 I could open pretty much all analytics tools as a macro, to tweak things in R or in the macro workflow to get the results in a way most useful to us.

 

But apparently with Alteryx 11.0 the newer tools does not have that option, Although we can still access the older versions of those tools and still open them as macro but I don't understand (may be because they have interactive report option) why that is being killed in the newer versions? 

 

Most of the newer versions have new features, like Linear Regression now support elastic net and cross validation etc.. but I still want to be able to go in to them to tweak them.

Hi,

 

we use a lot the in-db tools to join our database and filter before extracting (seems logic), but to do it dynamically we have to use the dynamic input in db, which allows to input a kind of parameter for the dates, calculated locally and easily or even based on a parameter table in excel or whatever, it would be great to be able to dynamically plug a not in db tools to be able to have some parameters for filters or for the connect in-db. The thing is when yu use dynamic input in-db, you loose the code-free part and it can be harder to maintain for non sql users who are just used to do simple queries.

You could say that an analytic application could do the trick or even developp a macro to do so, but it would be complicated to do so with hundreds of tables.

 

Hope it will be interesting for others!

Currently the Save Field Configuration, when used with fields in a different order does not give any indication that the ordering will not be saved and reused. It is possible people may use this option without realising.

 

This should be in the help at a minimum, perhaps in a warning box when used too, but ideally the renames and types should be applied to the columns they came from by Name - not just based on the order of the fields.

It would be great to dynamic update the next Analytic App based on an interface input. This mean I have a chained app. In Step 1 I ask a Yes/No Question. The Answer to this question will determine to open in Step 2 Analytic App A (with it's own interface Inputs) or Analytic App B (with other interface inputs).

Many users are facing this issue when they want to create an tool (e.g. for mapping purposes) that contains two datastreams/flows with different interface input requirements.

Adding this feature would allow us to create different dataflows with different input requirements. This helps us to differentiate between different mappingsschemes and increases userexperience (currently they have to fill a lot of unnecessary interface inputs). Thanks.

 

H.

it would be great to have an Azure SQL DB or/and Azure SQL DW Connector. In the moment it is only possible to connect with the Standard SQL Db connector. To be successful a username and password is always required.

It would be perfect, if you can use your Azure AD User and Password and connect against the relevant Database within the Azure environment. 

Goal: My goals is to pull Marketo Lead Data via the Marketo Input SOAP API Connector and have specificied only 3 columns to pull for 1 day. 

Issue: It appears that the Marketo Input SOAP API Connector needs to go through all 500 + columns of lead object data before it filters out the specific request I indicated.  What this means is that to process 1 day of lead data for 3 columns of data, it takes 45 minutes plus and not ideal.

Client Services indicated that there is a limitation with the Marketo SOAP API tool and it would be best to utilize the Download tool and build a custom connection to the CRM System (Microsoft Dynamics) to get a predefined list of Lead IDs and then use that as a filter via the Marketo Input SOAP API connector. 

Request:
1.  Add Microsoft Dynamics Connector
2.  Try to innovate a better Marketo Service Connector to just grab the defined fields as opposed to go through the entire processing for all records to only filter back down to. 

Eric  

Hello Dev Gurus - 

 

Populating a parent / child relationship into a RDBMS in Alteryx is a lot harder than it should be.  The hacks workflows must go through to do anything other than populating single tables makes Alteryx extremely cumbersome to use for any non-trivial ETL process; especially if you live in an existing database environment using database housed, sequentially generated primary key values.

 

Consider a workflow that generates data to the point where you create a cascading set of rows:

 

• One super parent.  Table A. 
• Two children rows in Table B. 
• Two children rows to rows in Table B, into Table C.

In Alteryx, the only way I have found to do this is by altering my tables to have UUID columns, populating them and then using dynamic selects afterwards, i.e.: 

 

• Populate my row bound for table A with a UUID column I generate in stream.  
• Make a new insert into Table A. 
• Perform dynamic selects from Table A where GUID == current row GUID.
• Get the primary key back out from that data set. 
• Add the primary key to the data bound for Table B. 
• Generate a UUID column for the data bound for Table B. 
• Repeat. . . . 

Not only this, but this 'technique' mandates you either use a block until done and a batch macro to insure your data going to Table A finishes up, or block until done using WaitASecond tool for the lazy among us (like me).  It is amazingly clunky.  

 

In my coding days, there were a variety of ORM tools that would let you do an insert and then immediately make back available to you the primary key that was generated, whether the key was created via database or by the code library itself.  If Hibernate 3.0 released 12 years ago can make this work, I'm pretty sure that the people creating Alteryx tomorrow can do the same thing one way or the other.  

 

Basically what we need is an output-insert tool that has a data stream back out that comes with the data stream and the fancy new primary key that is to the row.  Easy mode is to have it only operate for tables that have sequentially generated primary key values.  Alteryx 2022.1 mode is to give the user some key generation technique options at tool configuration time.  

 

Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk regarding improvements to the output tool to make ETL operations more efficient.  

 

 

It seems odd to me that Alteryx has so many connectors for complex data sources but lacks a built-in tool for standard FTP and SFTP which is arguably the most common external data source of all.

 

I've searched around the community and of course there are all kinds of methods involving using the download tool or command line, but all these require quite a bit of setup and advanced understanding.  Why not just setup a built-in tool for FTP that would allow users to easily download and upload to FTP?

 

Alteryx is all about simplicity and democratization of the data shaping role, so the need for a simple FTP tool seems key to that product vision.  Thanks for considering...

 

Sometimes when creating a workflow, or a chained application I create fields or parameters in a formula tool and need to be able to quickly copy and paste the entire formula output column into another formula tool across a different part of the workflow / entirely different workflow.

 

This most often happens when standardizing fields across different data streams. We have the ability to save expressions, but if you save too many that can quickly get messy. We also have the ability to copy and paste a formula within a formula output column...so why not extended the functionality slightly to copy/paste the entire formula output column?

 

In this proposed enhancement a user could right click on the 3 lines at the top left of the formula section and copy/cut a formula output column between formula tools: