Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi all,

I was wondering if any of you have achieved "Transaction rollback" type of feature in alteryx.

Following is the usecase:

If a workflow that writes data into multiple outputs (could be relational tables / files) is failed half way through in writing to one of the outputs, is there an option to rollback the partially loaded data & reset the process to the original state (i.e., before the execution of the workflow)? (OR) does this needs to be done programatically?

There is a workflow level property - "Cancel Running Workflow on Error". This stops the execution but doesn't perform rollback.

Thanks,

Sandeep.

I think it would be extremely helpful to have an in-DB Detour so that you could filter a user's information without having to pull it out of DB and then put it back in for more processing.  A time where this would be useful is if you have a large dataset and don't want to pull the entire dataset out of the DB because it will take a long time to pull it.  This would be applicable for filtering a large dataset by a specific state chosen by the user or possibly a region.  The Detour in the developer tools actually seems like it would do the job necessary, it just needs to connect to the In-DB tools.  

It would be a nice time-saver to allow for multiple fields to be selected and / or deselected at the same time in the Transpose tool...the Select tool and Summarize tool already allow for this.

Very wide survey files in particular would benefit from this kind of feature.

There might be a  data sensitivity concern due to a potential exposure to the admin groups if data is written into the Alteryx DB , especially  if the   database  used to run  Alteryx in your organization is maintained  by  a group of specialized DBAs in a different group.

To ensure data protection  in  a scenario like this  - Can you include an option  to check that a valid network path/ output system   is provided for the output files?

This would ensure the data is  exposed only to the business user groups that own the data.

Many features are in the form of categorical variables. It would be amazing to have a set of tools for clustering and dimensionality reduction on categorical variables.

The current tool set in Alteryx is fantastic for working with continuous variables (k-centroids, KNN, PCA), but falls short when working with continuous variables.

There are some ways to do dimensionality reduction on categorical variables (Multiple Correspondence Analysis, PCA with gower's distance, etc.) and some ways to cluster categorical variables (k-modes, working with medoids instead of centroids--PAM, etc.).

Some key considerations on which algorithm to use are time complexity, validity of results, and whether the algorithm can work on variables that are only categorical, or both categorical and continuous.

- Michael Dyatchenko

Please create a hotkey to close a container. I have to scroll over and up to close a container and it wastes a lot of time.

Hello,

Many mouses (mice?) allow you to tilt the mouse wheel either left or right. It would be great if this would scroll the canvas left or right, similar to rolling the wheel to scroll the canvas up or down. This would be especially useful considering that users have been nudged to create their workflows horizontally.

Thanks!

Idea:

Some well known scoring methods use optimal binned variables for added robustness. Let's add this capability to Alteryx.

Retionale:

Here's a basic link on why to do that; http://documents.software.dell.com/statistics/textbook/optimal-binning

Current status in Alterys as I'm aware of:

Tile tool or Multi-field Binning tool for completing same task as Tile tool on multiple fields, splits the variables by 5 methods;

• Equal Records or Intervals or Sums

• Smart Tile

• Unique Value 

• Manual

Unfortunately "equal something" binnings are bad idea, as the values are categorized "blindly" irrespective of the effects on the predictive power of the models. 

What to do:

What's needed is to bin both numerical and categorical variables optimally such that the Weights of Evidences (WoE) should present a monotone increasing or decreasing pattern. Maybe at most a V or U shaped "convex" structure.

Quick win:

Without constraining ourselves with monotonicity or convex cases, the easiest practice would be running a C4.5 or CHAID tree algorithm (produces multiple splits rather than binary splits in CART) for a single variable and select the target as the dependent variable and all the resulting nodes will be the bins we are looking for. Doing this for multiple variables at once is the key to the tool to be generated.

Clients:

This capability is sought by risk management departments building robust, stable Basel compliant models in financial industry, especially by banks.

It would be great to be able to output a report to Adobe Illustrator (.ai).  This would allow us to refine the presentation, or hand it off to a graphics department to do that for us.  It would especially be great for the map reporting tool, as many GIS people finish maps in AI to give a more polished result.  This would allow Alteryx to compete better with Esri as far as map creation.

I can only really speak to map creation, but please comment if you have another use case.

Currently you can just give a name to a connection:

But I would like to see the ability to apply additional formatting to a connection, most importantly color. 

Currently you can click on an individual tool and the incoming and outgoing connections will be color coded, but when working in a complicated workflow color coding would make understanding the connections easier, without the need to click on individual tools.

Just like the ability the right click on a tool and say "Make (incoming / outgoing) connections wireless" you should be able to right click on a tool and specify the formatting of all  incoming or outgoing connections.

Please add support for an interface tool that will allow for drop down and text entry. This will be useful for my team as we are converting from an excel template in which this is supported and it will allow for users to copy and paste into entries in addition to searching through a drop down of provided options.

Text input scrolls left-right by entire column widths rather than by fixed pixel amounts that one would expect.  This is especially annoying when a column contains lots of text which makes the columns are huge.  The user is forced to maximize the window or detach it.

I know you can add a field for "today" and then use that field to append the filename, so the output ends up as Ouput_Date.xlsx, but it would be great to be able to do that without adding a new field for the current date. If it were simply an option in the filt output settings dialog, that would be great.

Knowing how Alteryx simplifies things for Business Folks, having a function like Fiscal Calendar would be of Immense help, Attached a simple Excel fle, Thanks Sourav 

Many of us use auto-increment primary keys in our tables, but these PK's don't exist in the raw data as a natural key.  So when we get new raw data, we cannot use the Update / Insert if New method which keys off the Primary Key.

Imagine if you could select ANY unique key on the table instead?  

There's no reason not to allow this from a SQL perspective, though it might be a little less efficient for some DB engines.  But it would make things so much easier!!!

Right now, I instead load to a temp holding table and then do deletes and inserts using the Post Create SQL statement.

We have the ability to cache data during the initial data pools. Great! That saves us a lot of time for manipulating! But what about using In-Database functions? Or a Dynamic Input tool with lines and lines of varied SQL to be run (Caching only works for one line)?

INTRODUCING THE CACHE DATA TOOL! Where you can place it in strategic places of your workflow to be able to re-run and apply different scenarios without having to wait a LONG TIME for your workflow to start over! Place it right after your In-Database Data Stream Out so you can pick up from that point every time! Put it at the very end if you're trying to figure out the best output for your data! When you're done? Switch it off, or remove it!

This tool would be EXTREMELY helpful for me.

Filtering values is a task used quite often and one way to speed things up would be to use the results window combined with some drag and drop.

1. Select the values in the results window that you want to filter on. In this case I want to select all rows where [State] = "England" OR
[State] = "Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-Charentes".

Select values

2.  Alteryx automatically creates the filter for you to put in the workflow.

Create filter

There should of course also be options for excluding values, setting ranges and min/max values(in case of numeric values) and so on.

Sometime I use the save button within the browse tool to save a copy of the data. This does not work if you wish to overwrite an existing file though.

For example if I have a Tableau extract called mydata.tde and then using the browse tool I save the data and try to overwrite this file I am asked if I want to replace this file and on choosing 'Yes' Alteryx tries to save the data but then shows me an error about 'duplicate table name'. It should simply replace the file with the new data.

My company uses a network drive to store our macros and macro packs (like CReW). This way, all our designers can add the directory to the Macros tab in their User Settings and have the macros available to them instantly. We use macros more than many of the standard tools, so we add them to our Favorites toolbar. However, if we are working in Alteryx offline (not connected to our network), Alteryx can't find the macros. That's expected and totally okay......but when we reconnect to the network, Alteryx doesn't add the macros back to our Favorites. I would appreciate if Alteryx could make the Favorites smart enough to "remember" the file path of the macros that should be there so it can search for them each time Alteryx loads and show them if we are connected to the network.