Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

A client just asked me if there was an easy way to convert regular Containers to Control Containers - unfortunately we have to delete the old container and readd the tools into the new Control Container.

What if we could just right click on the regular Container and say "Convert to Control Container"? Or even vice versa?!

I would like a way to disable all containers within a workflow with a single click.  It could be simply disable / enable all or a series of check boxes, one for each container, where you can choose to disable / enable all or a chosen selection. 

In large workflows, with many containers, if you want to run a single container while testing it can take a while to scroll up and down the workflow disabling each container in turn.  

I am aware that an Auto-Documenter tool is available in the Gallery, but that has not been maintained since 2020. 

It would be great if Alteryx could have that as an added feature to the Designer as an option for end-users to utilize. 

The breakdown of it can be done via XML parsing as such: 

<Nodes>: Configuration of tools

<Connections>: The tools used

<Properties>: Workflow properties

Right now, the current workaround is for users to export their XML, and the internal Alteryx development team has to build another workflow that reads the XML accordingly + parses it to fit what is needed. 

It would be better for Alteryx to build something more robust, and perhaps even include some elements of AiDIN which they are promoting now.

Add the remove or add Prefix or Suffix Feature on the Summary Tool because this is where the prefix is added automatically by the Summary tool, so instead of adding a new select tool after the Summary tool to remove the prefix. why not to embed it with the summary tool it self. 

Not sure I'd call this a user setting, but I couldn't figure out the right heading this belongs to. 

When opening files, there are often times a couple of files at that aren't run on any kind of schedule or set time frame but you come back to when you need to run them.  

There should be a way to set "FAVORITES" for a handful of files that you find yourself referring to on a repeated basis, but too far back to be on the 'recents' list because you open too many other files. 

This may have been raised before, but we would like to see the equivalent of PRICE and YIELD formulas from Excel in Alteryx's Formula tool. I believe many users in the finance industry are using formulas like these frequently and it would be helpful to be able to replicate the formula in Alteryx.

Manually building the formula is possible, however it is unnecessarily complicated especially if you are working on different calendar basis e.g. 30 /360 European.

Thank you!

FILE==>Open Recent==>

(add the ability to Pin Favorite Workflows)

The Pinned workflows will persist at the top of your recent files each time you open your Alteryx Designer Application.

When inputting a CSV file via the Azure Data Lake File Storage tool the default behaviour is for the first row to be interpreted as data.

When reading the same file locally using the File Input tool the default behaviour is for the first row to be interpreted as headers.

Since the majority of files will include headers on the first row, it would be helpful to have the "First row contains field names" option selected by default in the Azure Data Lake File Storage tool, and this would also bring the defaults of this tool in line with the standard File Input tool.

Illustration below showing the issue:

Many users will probably follow best practice style guides with Alteryx to use comment boxes under tools to describe in detail what is happening with these tools - such as this one shared by @BenMoss.

However a limitation of this is the comment boxes do not move with the tools, so if you have a well documented workflow but then need to add a new tool, you need to adjust all the spacing and re-align the tools, which with a large workflow can be time consuming. 

Therefore the improvement would be to have an ability to lock comment boxes to individual tools (similar to a group function in Office).

Hi Alteryx community,

It would be really nice to have v_string/v_wstring and max character size as a standard for text columns.

it is countless how many times I found that the error was related to a string truncation due to string size limit from the text input.

Thumbs-up those who lost their minds after discovering that the error was that! 😄

I love the new right click and duplicate workflow feature, but I think the duplicated workflow that opens, should open next to the original workflow and not at the end of all of your already open workflow tabs...

cc: @jpoz @jeffv 

Adobe analytics api current version is 2.0 but the connector still uses 1.4. This works for log in access but does not for automated access since the end points are changed and 2.0 uses a new key structure

Sometime I confused DateTimeParse(dt,f) and DateTimeFormat(dt,f).

My idea is changing "DateTimeParse(dt,f)" to "DateTimeParse(string,f)" when we select DateTimeParse from function list.

Because DateTimeParse uses string type data as a first variables, not datetime type data.

No need to change DateTimeParse function itself.

The current Power BI Connector can only be used to publish to Power BI in the cloud but not to a local Power BI server. I would like to suggest the idea to improve this connector and configure it in a similar way to the Publish to Tableau Server Connector. The connector should allow to publish to a local url. See attachment.

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