Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

My organization use the SharePoint Files Input and SharePoint Files Output (v2.1.0) and connect with the Client ID, Client Secret, and Tenant ID. After a workflow is saved and scheduled on the server users receive the error "Failed to connect to SharePoint AADSTS700082: The refresh token has expired due to inactivity" every 90 days. My organization is not able to extend the 90 day limit or create non-expiring tokens.

If would be great if the SharePoint connectors could automatically refresh the token when it expires so users don't have to open the workflow and do it manually.

There is no tool that exists that outputs all records that are duplicates (those sharing the selected values with at least one other record) and also outputs the records that are not duplicates (those not sharing the selected values with at least one other record).

The Unique Tool is not sufficient.  It only provides the first record of a unique duplicate group along with any non-duplicates and then provides a secondary output that only contains the additional records of a duplicate group.  Sometimes you only care about the duplicates and want to quickly see what differs between the unique groups.

For example, if there are 4 records with the City of Austin and I am looking for duplicates on City I want to see all 4 records with Austin in the output so I can quickly compare additional fields to see what might differ, or if they are all indeed truly duplicates.

Hello all,

Like many softwares in the market,  Alteryx uses third-party components developed by other teams/providers/entities. This is a good thing since it means standard features for a very low price. However, these components are very regurarly upgraded (usually several times a year) while Alteryx doesn't upgrade it... this leads to lack of features, performance issues, bugs let uncorrected or worse, safety failures.

Among these third-party components :

- CURL (behind Download tool for API) : on Alteryx 7.15 (2006) while the current release is 8.0 (2023)
- Active Query Builder (behind Visual Query Builder) : several years behind

- R : on Alteryx 4.1.3 (march 2022)  while the next is 4.3 (april 2023)
- Python : on Alteryx 3.8.5 (2020) whil the current is 3.10 (april 2023)
-etc, etc....
-

of course, you can't upgrade each time but once a year seems a minimum...

Best regards,

Simon

Hello all,

As of today, you must set which database (e.g. : Snowflake, Vertica...) you connect to in your in db connection alias. This is fine but I think we should be able to also define the version, the release of the database. There are a lot of new features in database that Alteryx could use, improving User Experience, performance and security. (e.g. : in Hive 3.0, there is a catalog that could be used in Visual Query Builder instead of querying slowly each schema)

I think of a menu with the following choices :
-default (legacy) and precision of the Alteryx default version for the db
-autodetect (with a query launched every time you run the workflow when it's possible). if upper than last supported version, warning message and run with the last supported version settings.
-manual setting a release (to avoid to launch the version query every time). The choices would be every supported alteryx version.

Best regards,

Simon

Hello all,

As of today, we can easily copy or duplicate a table with in-database tool.This is really useful when you want to have data in development environment coming from production environment.

But can we for real ?

Short answer : no, we can't do it in these cases :
-partitions

-statistics
-index

-any constraints such as primary-foreign keys

But even if these ideas would be implemented, this means manually setting these parameters.

So my proposition is simply a "clone table"' tool that would clone the table from the show create table statement and just allow to specify the destination path (base.table)

Best regards,

Simon

Hello,

As of today, we can't choose exactly the file format for Hadoop when writing/creating a table. There are several file format, each wih its specificity.

Therefore I suggest the ability to choose this file format :

-by default on connection (in-db connection or in-memory alias)

-ability to choose the format for the writing tool itself.

Best regards,

Simon

Hello all,

Big picture : on Hadoop, a table can be

-internal (it's managed by Hive or Impala, and act like any other database)
-external (it's managed by hadoop, can be shared among the different hadoop db such as hive and impala and you can't delete it by default when dropping the table

for info, about suppression on external table :

https://docs.cloudera.com/HDPDocuments/HDP3/HDP-3.1.4/using-hiveql/content/hive_drop_external_table_...

Alteryx only creates internal tables while it would be nice to have the ability to create external tables that we can query with several tools (Hive, Impala, etc).

It must be implemented

-by default for connection
-by tool if we want to override the default

Best regards,

Simon

Hello all,

We all love pretty much the in-memory multi-row formula tool. Easy to use, etc. However, the indb counterpart does not exist.

I see that as a wizard that would generate windowing functions like LEAD or LAG
https://mode.com/sql-tutorial/sql-window-functions/

Best regards,

Simon

I dont know if it is asking too much, but here it is 😅

A lot of times when i develop Analytic Apps for business users, they ask me if they can run the app locally without Alteryx Designer installed. For business users it seems to make sense that the developer need to have Alteryx Designer licensed and installed, but also that after the app is developed, it would make sense and be great to be able to be able to run it without Alteryx Designer installed. And i agree with them!

I know that using the Server is the way to go in these situations, but not every company has this possibility. So, the idea is to have some non paid way to let business users from a company that already have Alteryx Designer licenses to be able to run just Analytic Apps locally, without Alteryx Designer installed on their local machines/and if the company does not have Alteryx Server yet.

Here are some previous discussions corroborating with this doubt/necessity:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Analytic-Apps-for-a-Nonuser/td-p/78152...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/App-Design-for-External-Users/td-p/340...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Best-way-to-share-Alteryx-workflow-wit...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/How-can-I-share-a-workflow-to-a-non-Al...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/General-Discussions/Where-to-save-an-analytics-app-for-non-alteryx-...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Does-everybody-that-use-my-Alteryx-App...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Running-a-workflow-locally-via-develop...

Thanks!

Lots of use cases involve concatenating some values based on group by clauses within the Summarize tool.

It will be great to have the option to Concatenate Unique as an aggregation method, so the results will have just one appearance for each value in the results.

Plus, having the option to get the chance to have them sorted or not will be awesome.

Hello all,

So, right now, we have two very separated products : Alteryx Designer and Alteryx Designer Cloud. But what if you want to go from Alteryx Designer on your desktop to the cloud ?

well, you will have to rewrite every single workflow because you can't publish or import your current workflow on Alteryx Designer Cloud. You cannot  export Designer Cloud workflow to Alteryx Designer on Desktop either.

This is a huge limitation on cloud implementation and sells and the ONLY product I know that's not compatible between on-premise and cloud.

Please Alteryx, this is a no-brainer situation if you want to convince your customers !

Best regards,

Simon

Hello all,

I'm currently learning Pythin language and there is this cool feature : you can multiply a string

Pretty cool, no? I would like the same syntax to work for Tableau.

Best regards,

Simon

I can't even count how often I looked at an Excel, CSV or even YXDB file, where I KNEW that it was generated by Alteryx, but I couldn't remember the workflow. Currently, I have to simply go through all workflows I ever build and see if I can find it.

Theoretically, I could use a text-search across all workflows and see if I can find the output names - problem here: Most of my output filenames are generated dynamically on the run.

It would be amazing if Alteryx could simply write the Workflow name (maybe even path) into the metadata of a file.

(Screenshot from Google, as my os is set to German) 

How about, we write "This file was created with by "Create Controlling Reports.yxmd on 2023-02-06 with Alteryx Designer 2021.4.298434" in the field 'Comments'?

This would make it extremely easy to find what workflow the file generated. I think it would be an option to talk about "filepath" instead of filename, but the filepath could include the local machine name, which might include GDPR information.

@Community: Is there any additional information that you'd like to see in the metadata?

Best

Alex

I would like to see Designer offer me the ability to chain workflows together where once Workflow A completes, Workflow B will automatically start.  There are times when linear processing is required in order to avoid dependency issues and/or for making it easier to organize complex processes. It would require outputting results to static files and it would take longer to process than the standard approach, but that is an expected trade-off.  Offering a GUI drag-drop "orchestrator" to tell Designer the order of operation would be even better than having to manually open each workflow and tell it which workflow to kick off next.

Similar to this idea, I think it would be really helpful to be able to search for fields in the dropdowns when using the Sort tool. Having to scroll through all of the possible field names can be a chore if you have 50+

Hello,

Just like Monetdb or Vertica, Clickhouse is a column-store database, claiming to be the fastest in the world. It's available on Cloud (like Snowflake), linux and macos (and here for free, it's open-source). it's also very well ranked in analytics database https://db-engines.com/en/system/ClickHouse and it would be a good differenciator with competitors.

https://clickhouse.com/

it has became more popular than Greenplum that is supported : (black snowflake, red greenplum, orange clickhouse)

Best regards,

Simon

In the Input tool, I rely heavily on the recent connection history list. As soon as a file falls off of this list, it takes me a while to recall where it's saved and navigate to the file I'm wanting to use. It would be great to have a feature that would allow users to set their favorite connections/files so that they remain at the top of the connection history list for easy access.

Today, I am able to take an excel file from a folder and drag it onto the canvas, which automatically creates an Input Data tool.

I would like to be able to drag an excel file right from outlook to do the same! 

Can a function be added to the Text-to-Column tool that allows selecting "split on entire entry" or "split on entry-as-a-whole" for the delimiters field?

Background:

Currently if we type  vs.  in the delimiters field, it'll look for each character separately including spaces.

The recommendation in the tool help is to use RegEx for splitting on whole words, but for some, RegEx is quite intimidating and adding this function would be a big help for new users.

Proposed Change:

2 Radio Buttons added to the Text-to-Column tool

1. Split by Each Entry
   1. Current functionality
   2. Should be default
   3. Splits on every letter, space, punctuation, etc. separately
2. Split by Entire Entry
   1. Allow splitting by using entire entry in the field
   2. Still includes spaces, letters, and punctuation, but now sees as "whole-word"

Example of function:

1. Radio button set to "split by entire entry"
2. Delimiter field has:   vs. 
3. Tool sees  ______ vs. ______  in a column in the data
4. Tool splits ______  and  ______ into new columns leaving out the entire vs. including the spaces entered around it

Thank you!