Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Per my initial community posting, it seems that in environments where the firewall blocks pip the YXI installation process takes longer than it needs. My experience was 9:15 minutes for a 'simple' custom tool (one dependency wheel included in the YXI).

Given the helpful explanation of the YXI installation process, it seems the --upgrade pip and setuptools is causing the delay. Disconnecting from the internet entirely causes the custom YXI to install in 1:29 minutes.

My 'Idea' is to provide a configuration option to install the YXI files 'offline'. That is, to skip the pip install --upgrade steps, and perhaps specify the --find-links and --no-index options with the pip install -r requirements.txt command. The --no-index option would assume that the developer has included the dependency wheel files in the YXI package. If possible, a second config option to add the path to the dependencies for the --find-links option would help companies that have a central location for storing their dependencies.

With more and more enterprises moving to cloud infrastructures and Azure being one of the most used one, there should be support for its authentication service Azure Active Directory (AAD).

Currently if you are using cloud services like Azure SQL Servers the only way to connect is with SQL login, which in a corporate environment is insecure and administrative overhead to manage.

The only work around I found so far is creating an ODBC 17 connection that supports AAD authentication and connect to it in Alteryx.

Please see the post below covering that topic:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Alteryx-Designer-How-to-Connect-to-Azu...

In some of our larger workflows it's sometime tedious to run a workflow in order to see some data, when adding something in the beginning of the workflow. Running und stopping it as soon as the tools gets a green border is sometimes an option.

It would be convenient to have an option in the context menu to run a workflow only until a specific tool.

In effect, only this specific tool has an output visible for inspection and only the streams necessary for this tool have been run - everything else is ignored and I'm fine to not see data for the other tools.

This would speed up the development of small parts in a larger workflow much more convenient.

Regards

Christopher

PS: Yes, I can put everything else in a container and deactivate it. But a straight forward way without turning containers on and off would be preferable in my opinion. (I think KNIME as something similar.)

Single point of maintenance for Salesforce Input tool connection to Salesforce

This prevents user maintenance every time their password (and token) changes which requires them to update every Tool with new credentials

Also logged as issue under Alteryx, Inc Case # 00252975: Connection to Salesforce Issue

While challenge 41 was fun to calculate weekdays between 2 dates, there should be a formula similar to networkdays in excel to do the same function

Copy & paste from my post here.

The Python SDK offers a possiblity to automatically install Python packages through pip when installing using the requirements.txt. Some changes to the virtual environment of the tool might not be covered by this: For example, downloading and configuring language models for spaCy cannot be solved through the requirements.txt alone (similar for training corpora for NLTK).

So, as an idea for future versions of the SDK: Allow us to specify a Python script that is run when a tool is installed. This way we might be able to set up the environment, load additional tools etc.

This functionality won't be mission-critical to anyone, I'm sure, but a lot of IDEs and upgraded text editors (lookin' at you Notepad++) have the ability to customize the colors of text, the background, and other various tabs/objects that may appear on the screen. I understand that this is more important for code-based systems where the coloring improves readability so much, but I thought it might be a neat feature. I think leaving the tool colors standardized is a good idea though, just the canvas and outerlying windows. It could include the colors for the formula syntax highlighting too?

The icing on the cake would be the ability to save and share your settings or create a repository for them in the public gallery or something.

At present - to identify the dependencies of your workflow - you have to go to to "Advanced Settings" to find this critical capability.

(see @MattB 's great post here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Workflow-Dependencies/ta-p/49696 )

Could we instead move this to the workflow properties on the left hand side - this would be a more logical place to keep this info.

CC:  @rijuthav; @jithinmony; @HengHe; @RajK; @ydmuley; @revathi; @Deeksha; @MPistone; @Ari_Fuller; @Arianna_Fuller; @JoshKushner; @samN; @avinashbonu; @Sunder_Sriram; @Rahul_Thakur; @Rahul_Sing

Microsoft Office provides a facility in all its apps to make the loading of frequently used files a breeze. In the FILE OPEN function the user can "PIN" a previously opened file so that it is always easy to find and load.  This would make it easier to manage and retrieve Designer files. 

This is what PINNING looks like in Excel

Many tab files lately (I am finding when they are created in mapinfo 16) Alteryx cannot read.  I have posted about this in other forums but wanted to bring it up on the product ideas section as well.

Hello,

We use the pre-sql statement of the input to set some parameters of connections. Sadly, we cannot do that in a in-db workflow. This would be a total game-changing feature for us.

Best Regards,

Simon

I have need to Unique my data on all fields. However, I do not know all the fields that will be in my data because of a Dynamic Select tool (or in some cases a Cross Tab tool). The Unique tool defaults to having any new fields be unchecked in its configuration. Without finding some work around, I will be unable to schedule this workflow or turn it into an app for use on the Gallery without risking duplication caused by the Unique tool that fails to capture new/different fields that may come through the data.

To solve this problem and be consistent with other tools in Alteryx, the following features need to be added to the Unique tool:

1. The user should be able to check a "Dynamic or Unknown Fields" option that will enable Alteryx to include any new fields in the data as part of the Unique (or any fields that have their names changed).
2. If a field that was checked in the Unique tool before no longer exists, it should appear yellow (like the missing fields in the Select tool) and produce a warning in the Results window. The option to "Forget all missing fields" will also need to be added.

When creating a formula with the formula tool, it would be useful to be able to quickly tab into the data type column, then press D for Double and select this quickly.

Right now, you cannot use the keyboard to quickly type-ahead in this field, so every double field requires you to select, drop down, move the mouse to the bottom of the scroll window, click scroll down, then mouse back up to D for double.

(or "S" for Spatial etc - this is standard for most drop-down boxes)

Pardon the length of this post, but I have been working with Alteryx since version 2.0 (11 years) and have been accumulating a wish list ever since.  Some of these suggestions have been made in the past but have yet to be embraced.  This is the first post for the first 'idea' but, as I said, this is a wish list that has grown since I was first introduced to Alteryx. More posts will follow.

I will break this into sections to hopefully make the suggestions easier to categorize and digest.

Application interface - Since I was introduce to Alteryx, the application interface (what is presented to users) has remained rather stagnant and, with the rumored push to adopt HTML as a replacement for pcxml, could benefit from the following additional settings. I suggest these based on the fact that dot Net classes for interface controls are readily available in Windows which allow for manipulation of each of the controls attributes.

1. The ability to set 'style' attributes for each of the interface tools in the application interface (font-family, font-style, font-size, font-weight, color, etc. This could be presented to the developer as an additional (perhaps optional button) in the Configuration panel for each interface tool as below:

These settings would be specific to the type of interface tool and to how the individual tool would layout and/or be styled relative to the application interface window. One layout option, applicable to most interface tools, would be where the label would be relative to the object itself (top, bottom, left, right). The CSS could be stored in and interpreted from the XML of the yxwz file referencing the ToolID of the Node in a section of the XML hierarchy called <CSS> or something standard.  An option to alter the default CSS could be displayed with a radio button control so that if not selected, the tool would fallback to the default system CSS of the tool.  This default could also be set in System settings so that a consistent interface could be defined across the enterprise.

2. Moving to the actual window that displays when the application is opened, a lot of the same concepts could be applied to the Interface Designer pane.

Attributes that could be set could include position on screen when opened, width and height of the window, and all the attributes of a dot Net form.  The same radio button strategy used for individual interface tools could be employed to use or not use system defaults.

3. In the UI, it would be nice if there was additional flexibility in how the interface tools could be laid out.  Along with the relative position of labels for each control, being able to layout controls horizontally as well as vertically would allow for a more organized interface.

 The Radio buttons would work as normal with the Text Box controls inside each Radio button and only displaying when the button is selected.

I realize a lot of the current development in Alteryx is focused on the new Alteryx Connect and being able to attach to more data files and services. But, if there is still also a concerted effort to move from what could be considered a legacy proprietary mark up language, pcxml, to a more robust and universally accepted mark up, html and css, then, in my humble opinion, expanding the options for developers to design more user friendly and customizable applications to a standard 'style' across the enterprise, both on the desktop and in the gallery, is a worthy endeavor.

Thanks for your attention.  More to follow.

Dan

I love that Alteryx came out with the visual layout tool. It's making some of the reporting I need to do much easier. Now for the challenges. I need this tool to allow me to either use a custom background or allow the overlapping of elements with the layout tool. Overlapping other elements would be the ideal way of doing this. But either will work.

porWYSIWYG - What you see is what you get...

WYSIWYG implies a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the end result while the document is being created.[3] In general, WYSIWYG implies the ability to directly manipulate the layout of a document without having to type or remember names of layout commands.[4]

Looking forward to have such a Reporting layout designer, embed all pictures, tables, graphs, legend, header, footer...

Just like in Qliksense and tableau...

In alterxy BI teams, we often need to hit the same data-store - however if shared connections are not adopted in the server environment, there's currently no easy way to share the connections among the team (none that I know of)

Would be great if there were a "share" button on the data connections tab in the designer, so that we could share connections with a team, or export known good connections to a file that can be kept under config-management / version control.

Thank you

Sean

Hi All,

My company has been using Alteryx designer for several years now but recently started a pilot for Alteryx server. One of the issues we have found is users keep trying to publish workflows that have aliased data connections. As our current Gallery Admin, i do not have permission nor do I know the wide range of connections that the users are trying to connect to. W would like to give users the ability to create/publish an aliased connection directly to Gallery. When this happens, it would automatically add that user to the data connection. They would also be given the ability to share the data source just like they can share a work flow.

One of our goals with this pilot is to promote self service, but having users wait on Admins to create the connections slows their process down.