Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Ideas:

1. In the workspace (i.e. the white space) the perimeter is not fixed so when working with tool containers near a border and you place a tool inside the container the container expands outside the workspace, which makes the container useless since you can't select it
2. The ability to disable multiple tool containers at once

 R

I have several .yxdb files that I’ve been appending to daily from a SQL Server table in order to extend the length of time that data is retained.

They’re massive tables, but I may only need one or two rows. 

I had hoped to decrease the time it takes to get data from them by running a query on them (or a dynamic query/input) as opposed to using a filter or joining on an existing data set which would have equal values that would produce the same result as a filter.

Essentially, the input of .yxdb would have the option of inputting the full table or a SQL query just like a data connection.

Description: I have configured a number of customized MapServer files rather than having to manually configure each layer in the ReportMap tool.

For reference, these are stored in the <Alteryx Data Install Folder>\AlteryxMap\TomTom_US_2015_Q3, for the TomTom US - Current Vintage reference base map. Below is a picture of the many versions of the .map configuration file I have created.

Rationale: Using these different files is cumbersome and inefficient. To switch out a map file, I have to rename the current .map file to a dummy name. Then I have to rename the desired file to be the name that the existing file was. Additionally, I can only have one .map file in use at any one time and all of the workflows running use the same one.

Idea: Allow user to choose which .map file to use from within the Report Map tool.

I'm converting some old macros that were built in 8.6 for use in 10.6 and found something that could potentially be changed about the Alteryx .xlsx drivers. Specifically this refers to the field types passed from a Dynamic Input tool when the data fields are blank when using an .xlsx file as the data source template. 

When the new .xlsx file has fields populated, it works fine. If data is not populated in the new file, the field types are converted to Double[8]. This doesn’t cause a problem for the Dynamic Input, but it can cause problems for downstream tools. In the second case below, the field names are retained but the downstream Join tool errors when trying to join this now double field to a string (rather than returning no results from the join output as desired). This also occurs when a single field is empty, only that field will be converted to a Double[8] field. When the legacy .xlsx drivers are used, the field types are retained from the data source template.

File Source Template vs. file that is returned upon running

There are other solutions for this scenario such as using a Select tool with a loaded .yxft file of the correct field types, or selecting the Legacy .xlsx drivers from the File Format dropdown when configuring the Dynamic Input. However I thought this is something that could be improved about the Alteryx .xlsx drivers. 

When running an app (not in the Gallery), the status bar appears to complete for each tool, then start over for the next tool.  It'd be great if while it was doing that, the tool name that it was running displayed.  Now, I know for most processes this will be instantaneous and your eye won't even catch it.  But if we have, for example, several join/sort tools with lots of data going through them, it would be nice to know which one it's on.

Chaos reigns within. Repent, reflect and reboot. Order shall return.

For those of us really old school, this would be a novel Easter egg to add

when using the R-Tool for simple tasks (like renaming files, for example) in an interative macro - there's a delay on every iteration as the R Tool starts up R.

The following are repeated on every iteration (with delays):

Can we look at an option to forward scan an alteryx job to look for R Tools, then load R into process once to eliminate these delays on every iteration?

This wasn't pretty (actually, it was challenging and pretty when I was done with it)!

My client receives files that include a static and dated name portion (e.g. Data for 2018 July.xlsx) within the file there are multiple sheets.  One sheet contains a keyword (e.g. Reported Data) but the sheet name also includes a variable component (e.g. July Reported Data).  I needed to first read a directory to find the most recent file, then when I wanted to supply the dynamic input with the sheet name I wasn't able to use a pattern. 

The solution was to use a dynamic input tool just to read sheet names and append the filtered name to the original Full Path.

[FullPath] + "|||<List of Sheet Names>"

This could then feed a dynamic input.

Given the desire to automate the read of newly received "excel" data and the fluidity of the naming of both files and sheets, more flexibility in the dynamic input is requested.

Cheers,

Mark

I need support for outbound data streams to be gzip compressed.  Ideally, this would be done by a new tool that can be inserted into a workflow (maybe similar to the Base 64 Encoding tool).  Just including it in the Output Tool will not address my needs as I will be sending gzip payloads to a cloud API.  There are two main reasons why this is necessary (and without it, quite possibly a roadblock for our enterprise's use of Alteryx):

1. Some APIs enforce gzip encoding, therefore Alteryx cannot currently be used to interact with such APIs
2. When transmitting large volumes of data across the Internet, gzip compression will significantly decrease transmission times

This appears to be a bug with either the Layout Tool or the Render Tool. When I setup two Tables using the Horizontal Layout Tool and export to Excel using the Render tool, the font size of the bottom-right cell of the first table is too large. No amount of changing the font properties within the Alteryx Reporting tools appears to fix this.

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 :

I think it would be a nice feature if a user were able to export the list of tools and annotations in a way to use as the foundation of a process memo (or simply listed sequentially in an appendix). We're using Alteryx for tax data prep processes and documentation of the process is important.  So I believe getting the workflow into words would be a great addition.

It would be nice to have the ability to double click the top area of a container to either show or hide the container's objects. Only being able to show or hide containers using the arrow icon in the top right is quite cumbersome for large containers because it requires a lot of horizontal scrolling in order to change the desired view of the modules workflow.

There is MD5 hashing capability,using MD5_ASCII(String) and MD5_UNICODE(String) found under string functions

it seems to be possible to encrypt/mask sensitive data...

BUT! using the following site it's child's play to decrypt MD5 --> https://hashkiller.co.uk/md5-decrypter.aspx

I entered password and encrypt it with MD5 giving me 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99

Site gave me decrypted result in 131 m/s...

It may be wise to have;

SHA512_ASCII(String) and

SHA512_UNICODE(String)

Best

Altan Atabarut @Atabarezz

I've found that double-clicking in the expression builder results in varying behavior (possibly due to field names with spaces?)

It would be great if double-clicking a field selected everything from bracket to bracket inclusive, making it simpler to replace one field with another.

For instance:

Current:

IF [AVG AGE] >=5 THEN "Y" ELSE "N" ENDIF

Desired:

IF [AVG AGE] >=5 THEN "Y" ELSE "N" ENDIF

In some corporate instances that I have encountered, browsing to the internet is not supported. What I've also seen is private instances of wiki media and yammer. Perhaps we could extend the browse to support these types of instances.

Cheers,
Mark

Please asses the value of using d3js javascript library to create vizualisation.

D3 gallery examples

Thank you.

Regards,

Cristian.

The Workflow configuration window currently has "Canvas" as the default tab when clicking on whitespace in a workflow. 

Since workflow orientation, annotation settings, and progress settings tend to be consistent for a user, I think it makes more sense to have the default tab on something that might be more relevant to the user.

Workflow provides information that is useful...location of the workflow and constants related to the workflow.

Runtime has settings that can change often as the user is developing out the workflow.

So either of these would provide better access to more important info that that found on the Canvas tab.