Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Oracle (https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28318/datatype.htm#CNCPT413😞

• DATE = yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss
• TIMESTAMP  = yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.ssssss (6 decimal seconds .. and timezone?)

Alteryx (https://help.alteryx.com/2018.3/Reference/DataFieldType.htm😞

• DATE = yyyy-mm-dd
• DATETIME  = yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss

In an ideal world the Alteryx DATATIME would map to the Oracle DATE ... and only to the Oracle TIMESTAMP if it had fractional seconds.

Currently DATETIMEs get mapped to Oracle TIMESTAMP.

As of today, we cannot choose the field separator when we read a csv file. In France, the common separator for csv is the semi-colon (;)

It leads to this kind of thing in a filter :

It is very difficult moving from Alteryx functions to SQL In-Database as a business user, I need to learn a whole new language.

In the short term Alteryx should provide a simple function reference, as similar as possible to the Formula tool, for building formula in the in-database tools.

Longer term I'd like there to be a parser from Alteryx Formulae to SQL so I can just write in my favourite Alteryx formula (or a subset thereof) and Alteryx handles the conversion to SQL. 

As a change to Designer UI in 2021.2, when in the filter box, I used to be able to use my mouse to click a little X in the corner to clear the filter or sort that had been implemented and it would immediately clear the filter.  It's not working as of 2021.2.  Now, I must navigate to the last cascade to get to the word Clear and click on it to clear the filter. 

This feels like another very tiny move in the wrong direction. These small UI changes cause 2 or 3 additional steps and slow the diagnostic/navigation process in moving around the Results Grid in the Browse Tool or at any point in the flow where the Results Grid is used.

Can the X in the top level of the Filter/Sort box in the Results Grid be restored in 2021.2?

Related to submission:

Small fix for the UI in the Results Grid (or Browse Tool)

Small Keyboard fix for the browse tool's filter

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.  

We are starting to use Alteryx as a full ETL DW build tool (and blogging about it too..)

Compared to other tools in the market there do not seem to be the usual SCD(slowly changing dimension) and other "standard" tools or templates to start building.

It would be great to have a template/Macros/guide to starting to build a DW solution. It is rather daunting starting with a blank page!

Database driver versions are a constant trauma for the admin team and for our Designer users.   We have situations where drivers are different between two peers who are working on the same flow, or where the flow breaks as soon as it's posted to the gallery etc.

What would really help is if Alteryx were able to create a driver pack (working with the major vendors), which contains the latest version of the major database drivers.    We could then roll this out to all the designer & server machines to make sure that we have consistency across the user base.

This would need to include:

- DB2

- MS SQL

- Mongo

- Sybase

- Postgress

- Apache Kudu / Spark

Plus a few others, I'm sure

This is a pain for Alteryx to do this centrally, I know, but it's orders of magnitude less painful than having to do this manually (by searching for the latest drivers on every manufacturer's sites) on every designer workstation across the firm.

When using the Cross Tab tool, the Count option under Method for Aggregating Values only appears when the field selected for Values for New Columns is a numeric field. I can add a numeric RecordID before the Cross Tab and then count on that, but why can't the Cross Tab count non-numeric fields? The Summarize tool can.

I often receive .xlsb files from clients that have different sheetnames that I'd like to incorporate in input batch macros.

I think it would be awesome if I could read in the list of sheetnames from .xlsb files as well in order to be able to build such batch macros to input data from multiple .xlsb files.

J

Please create an In-DB version of Dynamic Rename Tool. Or at least, suggest some alternative.

Renaming 45+ columns manually is just insane.

In-DB version are very fast & there isnt any need to stream-out or stream-in. So i hope to do this ETL in-db

I suppose I could just bookmark this page, but that wouldn't help others.  I frequently forget (I'm getting old) the format strings while creating custom datetime formulas.  Is there a quick way to get to these format strings when in the context of creating a datetimeparse/datetimeformat formula?

Cheers,

Mark

It would be nice to have a visual cue for a detour tool's configuration. This is especially the case when testing with several detour tools in a workflow - see the cleanse.yxmc screenshot below. I added an annotation to one of the detour tools as a possible solution.

Any of these options that would save the additional click would be appreciated.

• Default annotation shows "Detour left" or "Detour right"
• Detour outgoing wire highlighted (mentioned in Detour dashing)
• Detour direction outgoing anchor that is NOT used is grayed out
• Detour direction outgoing wire that in NOT used is grayed out
• Detour tool has a left/right toggle
• Detour tool changes color when set to detour right

Personally, I prefer that the outgoing anchor and outgoing wire not in use be grayed out. But even the default annotation stating the direction would be helpful.

Does anyone else have a preference or other ideas on the visual cues?

Passing data to the next app running in a chain from the gallery varies from challenging to impossible. An impossible situation I've found is when the same user needs to run multiple instances of the app simultaneously. Very difficult is just allowing two different users to run simultaneously without risk of passed data mixing between the two.

This idea would add the capability to pass values from one app in the chain into user variables in the next app in the chain.

Writing SQL to set primary keys in Alteryx before outputting the data is tedious, right?

I propose that you guys could incorporate my macro as a tool (referenced here:http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/Variables-used-in-Input-Path/m-p/38199#M2604).

It sure is a lot faster than going through this process: http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Create-Database-Table-Primary-Key-in-Alteryx/...

Even though we have many form of inputs like alteryx database (.yxdb), calgary database (.cydb) etc, to select a .tde file as an input and analyse that data is not available in alteryx designer. That would be great if the feature is enabled, because if something goes wrong in tableau reporting, it will be easy to take that .tde file and analyse in alteryx rather than checking in tableau.

At TargetSmart, we create a lot of CSV deliverables for our customers. Since Alteryx differentiates between blank strings and null values (a good thing), the CSV output is not consistent between the two without an explicit multi-field formula step to set all null to empty strings (or vice versa). This is an easy fix for us. However, in some cases we have very large files with thousands of fields and millions of records. For these instances, the workflow run-time is greatly increased by the multi-field formula. If possible, I was wondering if adding a checkbox option to CSV output steps (“Make null/empty consistent” or “Never quote empty/null values”) would possibly be a more efficient approach as the check could be part of the output step (which I assume is native C++) versus the Multi-field formula (which I assume has some level of inefficiency in interpreting the formula dynamically).

Request: Google Drive Output Tool to be able to set the maximum records per file and create multiple files

For the regular Alteryx Output Tool, we're able to set maximum records per file. This is helpful in a variety of ways - we use it as part of a workflow where the output gets uploaded into SalesForce and we can only load 5,000 records at a time. I also use this to split up large csv files to be under Excel's ~1M line limit so my teammates without Alteryx can open their reports and not lose data. 

The Google Drive Output does not have this ability to split based on the number of records. If I use the RecordID Tool plus a Filter, it crashes Alteryx due to a Bug with RecordID + GDrive Output (it's currently in Accepted Defect stage)

It would be very helpful to have this same functionality that we can with the regular Output Tool

Now that spell check is implemented ( https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Spell-Check-in-Documentation-Tools/idc-p/343... ), it doesn't work like I expected.

To quote Jpoz :

The language check is based upon the language you selected in the installer when you installed Alteryx.

However, on my computer, Alteryx is set in French. On some project, documentation is also in French, on some others, especially when I have to work with foreign coworker, it's in english.

Can we imagine a language by workflow file, with a default coming from the settings. Something like that :

UI language (User settings)

Default WF language (User settings, if not manually changed, coming from UI language)

WF Language (linked the ywwf/yxmd/yxmc file coming from Default WF)

Hi All,

Did you all experience when building a iterate macro this situation?

When you have no idea why the output is different from what you want,

hence, you remove the rows/ data to force the data run only 2 iterate, review the result.

then, you add back the rows/ data to force the data run only 3 iterate, review the result 

then 4, 5 and etc... until we found the issue.

so it was important that we can view how the result of each iterate to enable us to identify the issue quicker and more efficient.

Example output

The output may like below: (with a option to let user to choose of cause)

if input data is 3 and the macro is to multiply 2 and power of 2 every iterate. (1st iterate=3*2^2, 2nd iterate=12*2^2)

just add one column in front to show the iterate and rest is the result.