Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

In a browse tool, sometimes I need to check any metrics haven’t been lost or omitted in different summarise tools (eg the totals still add up with different group by).

I would LOVE the quick win of selecting some cells in the browse tool results pane, and a label somewhere shows me the sum, average, count, distinct count, etc. I hate to use the line but ... “a bit like Excel does”. They even alow a user to choose what metrics they want to show in the label by right clicking. 🙂

This improvement would save me having to export to Excel, check they add up just by selecting, and jumping back, or even worse getting my calculator out and punching the numbers in.

Jay

The Interactive Chart configure window cannot be resized.  I'm using a single, large monitor, and this window occupies the entire monitor so that I am forced to switch between windows to see other applications.  Most of the space used by the configure window is wasted white space.  Please update this to allow this window to be resized.

 

I'm using a 32:9 monitor running at 5120x1440, and the attached screenshot shows the size of the configure window on this monitor - 4986x1286.

I have an app that contains 4 check boxes.  Each check box is independent, and when checked, two other prompts open up to the user (in this case, text boxes which are also independent of the other check boxes).

I would like to be able to "Check All", so that with one click, ALL four check boxes are checked, and their prompts all open up.

Hi

 

The native email tool is great up to a certain volume, but at high volume it makes more sense to use sendgrid to take advantage of its features like deliverability etc

 

Would be great if there was a ready-made connector tool for SendGrid

 

Thanks

I would like to be able to pause a module A, run module B then restart A at a later time.   

More and more applications in R are written with tidyverse code using tidy data principles.  According to rdocumentation.org, tidyverse packages are some of the most downloaded.  Adding this package to the default offering will make it easier to transfer existing R code to Alteryx!

 

Hi all,

 

Within the last days I was confronted with a problem in a production workflow, which was not working as expected. The main problem was, that the input tool was collecting data from a MSSQL database, but some parts of the strings disappeared on the way.

 

One column was specified as a VARCHAR and contained some special characters (e.g. '…', not '...'). The input tool now drops all characters which are not included in the Latin-1 table, but this does not seem to be a good behaviour from my perspective. This is not the case for NVARCHAR fields, they are automatically imported as V_WString, which contains those special characters.

 

The solution was to just cast in the SQL query (redesign of the database layout would also work). Shouldn't this be solved a little easier, or are there good reasons to force using a V_String?

 

Best regards

Max

When we rename a field in canvas it breaks a lot of formulas or config on tools like select tool or unique tool or summarize tool. If designer can automatically update these new field names in all the further tools if will save us a lot of time.

 

Thanks,

Sanju

The Legacy Excel output Driver has the ability to Delete Data & Append as an output option for Excel files.  This is useful to retain custom formatting and conditional formatting on a worksheet.

 

However, the new Excel Output Driver and Macro-Enabled Excel Driver do not have this option.

I think this would be very helpful for a lot of our business needs, as we still use Excel for a lot of our reporting needs.  I know that Tableau is a very powerful tool for exactly this sort of situation, but we do not yet have any widespread adoption at our company.

Particularly, conditional formatting would be a fantastic option, as it would save a lot of post-run manual process.

I want modification of the Email Tool to support running it at a specific point, defined by developer, within a workflow where currently "The Email tool will always be the last tool to run in a workflow". 

 

We use the tool to send notification of completion of jobs and sometimes attach outputs but we would like to be able to also send notifications at the start or at key points within a workflows processing.  Currently the email tool is forced to be the last tool run in a flow, even if you use block until done tool to force order of path execution to hit the email tool first.

 

If we could add a setting to the configuration to override the current default, of being the last tool run, to allow it to run at will within a flow that would be awesome!  And of course we would want the same ability for texting, be it a new feature of the email tool or a new tool all its own. 

 

The Texting option refers to an issue in Andrew Hooper's post seeking enhancement of the email tool for texting, search on "Email tool add HTML output option" or use link...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Email-tool-add-HTML-output-option/idi-p/92114...

 

It is great to see the ability to stage data for bulk loading into Databricks in s3 and ADLS.  Previously this only appeared to allow staging in Databricks DBFS. 

 

However the current connector included in Designer 2022.1 has a key gap in functionality with ADLS Gen 2 

 

The only authentication method provided to the ADLS storage is though a shared key. 

Shared keys provide access that is

1. Too broad and allows access to the entire storage
2. Limited or no auditability and traceability to who is using it 

We do not provide users the shared key for the ADLS storage, thus our users cannot take advantage of this new feature. 

 

The preferred method of authentication to ADLS would be

1. RBAC - Role Based Access Control
2. ACL - Access Control lists

Either of these options can be provided though a service principal with a tenant id, client id and client secret as inputs to the bulk load tool

 

This request would specifically be to allow the ACL authentication. ACL would help empower our our self service data analysts and data scientists who could have access to a specific container. 

 

For example

 

storageAccount/Container/directory

 

The ACL access in this tool would allow the Alteryx tool to follow the same access patterns where fine grained access was provided at the directory level and not at the storage account or container level.  This would provide self service analysts and data scientists to use Alteryx as they need within their directory without providing higher level access.  

 

Access control model for Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 | Microsoft Docs

 

 

 

In the summary tool, we often use the summary tool to concatenate strings - we love this functionality.

 

However, we would also like to be able to concatenate just the unique values of strings. This could be done if we ran the preceding text field through the unique tool first, and then concatenate. But when we are doing this for multiple text variables and when we need to summarize other types of data at the same time, this becomes a very un-natural combination of joins & macros. 

 

Thanks for considering,

Jeremy

Pre-v10, I could set a default tool for each tool palatte.  For example, for the Summarize tool pallate, I could make the Summarize tool the default (that already was the default, but you get the point).  I could then simply drag the tool palatte icon onto the canvas and the Summarize tool would be there.  Now, I have to navigate to the tool pallate and drag my tool on the canvas.  Yes, I know I could add it to my favorites, but screen real estate goes quickly after adding just a few favorites to the already defaulted favorites.  It would've been nice if this functionality wasn't removed with v10. 

After evolving my workflows to provide email alerts after they run with errors I thought it would be a good idea to include conditional alerts. Meaning: incorporating formulas(if then) to determine when the alert will run. Currently, the only options are "Before Run, After Run, After Run with Errors, After Run Without Errors, Disabled".

The field selection pane in Multi-Field Formula is very small and not resizeable. It is difficult to select anything other than all variables when only 4 1/2 fields are displayed at a time. Making this pane resizeable would be very useful.

When a user connects the Input tool to a database, the Tables view lists the tables the user can see. Please add a search feature and an option to export the list.

Hello!

I had found this quirk whilst working on a fairly large workflow, where i had multiple tools cached to keep things quick. I had moved one of the tools on the canvas to a pre-existing container, and it removed the caching on my whole workflow.

Steps to reproduce:

1) setup a super basic workflow (or any workflow):

2) Cache part of the workflow:

3) drag one of the tools (in this case the formula) into the container:

As you can see, the workflow is no longer cached and i have to re-cache it.

 

This would be a welcome change as that is an unexpected behaviour to me, and so I would imagine others too. A workflow no longer being cached can cost the developer a lot of time (and potential resource, if hitting a Snowflake instance, for example). 

 

 

Thanks,
TheOC

 

Can there be a User or System setting option for Desktop Designers to save the default SMTP server to be used for all email functionalities?

 

I recently upgraded from 2018.1 to 2019.1 version and with that lost the "Auto detect SMTP server" option in the email tool. 

The existing workflows still seem to work. However the email tool errors out when I make any enhancements to those existing workflows. Dictating the email tool to use the default SMTP server pre-configured by the user in the user/system setup options will be extremely helpful.

It would be super cool to run a regular workflow in "test mode" or some other such way of running it just one tool at a time, so you can check tool outputs along the way and fix issues as they occur, especially for big workflows. Another advantage would be that if, for whatever reason, a working module stops working (maybe someone changed an underlying file - that NEVER happens to me lol), rather than running the whole thing, fixing something, running the whole thing again, you could just fix what's broken and run it that far before continuing.

 

Actually, that gives me an even better idea... a stop/start tool. Drop it in the workflow and the module will run up to that point and stop or start from that point. Hmm... time to submit a second idea!