Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Using the Output tool to send data to a formatted spreadsheet apparently doesn't preserve formatting if the entire column is formatted.  I'd love this changed to keep the formatting when its applied to an entire column.  See this thread in Designer Discussions. 

Hi all,

 

The SalesForce Input tool is great.. but has some really bad limitations when it comes to report. 

I think there are 2 main limitations :

 

A - It can only consume 2000 rows due to the rest api limitation. There plenty of articles about it in the community.

B - Long string such as text comment are cutout after a certain number of characters. 

 

Thanks to this great article : https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Salesforce-Input-Tool-amp-Going-Beyond... , I had the idea of going through a csv file export to then import the data into Alteryx. 

I've done it using two consequent download tool. The first download is used to get the session id and the second to export a report into a csv in the temp folder. This temp file can then be read using a dynamic input workflow. 

 

Long story short, I think Alteryx should upgrade the Salesforce connector to make it more robust and usable. Using the export to csv feature, this should enable Alteryx to be fully compatible with Salesforce report.

 

Regards,

After multiple years of using Alteryx, The tabbed document feature was left out of 2022.1.  This feature allows for a much cleaner canvas for exploring workflow and output data.  I view this feature as a basic function of Alteryx, I was surprised to find out that the development team intentionally omitted this function.   I really don't want to revert back to older versions but it may be only the way to have a more comfortable feel of Alteryx.

When searching for a workflow in the application we severely struggle with being able to locate the workflows we need. The same thing happens when searching in the gallery.  The information entered that will pull up a workflow doesn't seem to search across the workflow name nor does it seem to use any regular search engine function e.g. "search term" will return all and only results that contain exactly those parameters.  

Example:

WF Name:  "Magic_Workflow_business_purpose"

We can search for

• Magic
• Workflow
• business
• purpose
• Magic_Workflow_business_purpose

For THIS particular workflow, let's say only the search term of "business" works. 

 

It seems to be completely inconsistent. We've had MANY circumstances where NO entered search parameters return the desired results and we find ourselves having to sort all workflows by name and slowly scroll through (waiting for more to load) until we locate the named workflow. Out of all the amazing things Alteryx can do, if we can't find the work we've developed in it, we can't use it.

 

Thank you!  

 

Regards, MAKpfe

Hello, 

 

This is one thing that my OCD cannot cope with. 

 

Some tools, like the Union tool, allow you to 'Ignore warnings', like when fields are missing. 

 

Some other tools however don't give the option. Date time tool for instance. Sometimes I feel like yelling at Alteryx that "I know that field already exists! I want to change it!". Or the join tool, when you join on a double. 

 

I know that these warnings don't really affect anything, and they may be useful to highlight something that may be best to be changed, but pleeeeaaassee give us a tick box or something like the union tool where we can ignore warnings. It makes my workflow messy. 

 

(I'm on designer v 2021.1 btw, so if this has already been done, then please ignore my rant. 😁 )

 

Thanks

 

Edit: What I'm talking about 

 

Hello,

In Datascience, Levenshtein and Jaro Winkler distances are used to quanitify a similarity between two strings.

Here the wikipedia pages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaro%E2%80%93Winkler_distance

Note 1 : the Levenshtein and Jaro Distances are already used in Fuzzy Matching tool, so that shouldn't be a huge work to include it in formula
Note 2 : there is a useful macro on the galley https://gallery.alteryx.com/#!app/LevenshteinDistance/5c54701f826fd30988f02779
Note 3 : some product already have it implemented such as Apache Hive or Qlik Sense

Best regards,

Simon

It would be absolutely marvellous if the ability to use a field as the replace value could be incorporated into the Regex tool. Currently the "Replacement Text" field is a hardcoded text value, and so to make that dynamic you have to wrap the tool in a batch and feed in the value as a Control Parameter. If we could just select a field to use as the replacement value, that would be spiffy.

 

 

M.

It is my understanding that hidden in each yxdb is metadata.  The following use case is common:

 

As an Alteryx Developer/Designer I want to know the source of a yxdb.  

 

Ideally, I would know as much about the workflow (name, path, workflow version, AYX version, userid) as possible.

 

It would be awesome to be construct a workflow that would allow me to search the metadata of yxdb's on my client computers quickly.

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

Please add either or both

1. "CustomFile/Database", similar to the TREE tool to the Text Box interface tool
2. An option to make TREE Tool "silent" or passive when using the "CustomFile/Database" option

The purpose is to provide a better way to pass data, and thus allow "Action" tool to be used, from interface responses in a previous App chained to the current App.

 

Use Case:

We had a workflow with 8 TREE tools and 3 of them had significant number of rows associated.  This caused frequent failures where the queries getting the multiple layers of data for the TREE would time out.

Through trial and experiment we determined this was the issue by removing TREE tools until we had consistent function.

 

Most if not all the TREEs and all of the 3 offending TREEs were used to modify FILTER tools, in this case each of those 3 TREEs 3 or 4 Actions driving the same number of FILTERs

 

So we had to find a way to break up the operation.  Ultimately I separated the 3 large volume TREE tools into a separate workflow to run first and then CHAIN to the original flow with modifications to read the responses passed from the new 1st workflow in the chain and replaced the FILTER with JOINs, effectively filtering by JOIN.

 

This worked but was extra work and it made me think of the many other situations where I would like to take input from an external source and affect a FORMULA or FILTER or a few other tools where an ACTION is best/only way to modify tool configuration at run time.

 

I think this lack of a way to use an ACTION tool with a "Non-Interface" data source has probably limited the opportunities of Applications.

 

Given the division of labor in an APP,

1. run all Interface tools first and modify config of other tools
2. then run the rest of the tools on the canvas

there is no way to make a run time ACTION tool as it must do its job before the core job runs. 

 

This adaptation of the TREE tool, which is my preference, or the adaptation of the Text Box tool, offer good solutions that should be fairly simple to code and roll out the the user base.

Tools should not error with Zero rows, often when working with macros it is possible to have a scenario where zero rows or columns is legitimate. Some tools are fine with this and some are not. In my case the Select Tool does not allow it so I have to create a Work around with a Text Input tool.

 

I rarely use the Group By tab on batch macros, but it's unfortunately always the first tab that pops up. When I have a questions tab on a batch macro, it would be great if it appeared first (ie I should see the questions tab when I click on my batch macro.) Thanks!

 

When I create a new table in a in-Db workflow, I want to specify some contraints, especially the Primary Key/Foreign Key

 

For PK/FK, the UX could be either the selection of some fields of the flow or a free field (to let the user choose a constant).

From wikipedia :

In the relational model of databases, a primary key is a specific choice of a minimal set of attributes (columns) that uniquely specify a tuple (row) in a relation (table).[a] Informally, a primary key is "which attributes identify a record", and in simple cases are simply a single attribute: a unique id. 

So, basically, PK/FK helps in two ways :
1/ Check for duplicate, check if the value inserted is legit

2/ Improve query plan, especially for join

There is an extensive need from customers to be able to create emails but not send them (right away at least).

I'm in the banking sector and I have been seeing many banks using Alteryx and Alteryx server in their routines. Also, when it comes to sending automatic e-mails in this sector, its very risky. We need a "four eyes check" when dealing with clients information. Currently there is no workaround that could be applied to e-mail tool when used in Alteryx server as well.

My idea is to simply create a button "Save in draft" in e-mail tool to create an .eml format as output. This .eml can be read by outlook and thus, it creates a draft.

This also should be taken into account when dealing with drafts in alteryx server, so that any user can run the workflow and get the desired draft.

Thanks

Hi Community Microsoft wil deprecate basic Authentication, so users will need OAuth2 to be included in the email tool. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients-and-mobile-in-exchange-online/deprecation-of-basic... Microsoft is removing the ability to use Basic authentication in Exchange Online for Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), POP, IMAP, Remote PowerShell, Exchange Web Services (EWS), Offline Address Book (OAB), Outlook for Windows, and Mac. This change will be efective on October 1, 2022. Best regards, JP

Hello all,

I really love the DCM feature present in the last two releases. However, I have noticed the Generic ODBC Connection is missing :

Classic Connection Manager :

 

Data Connection Manager :

 

Best regards,

Simon

 

In order to make the connections between Alteryx and Snowflake even more secure we would like to have the possibility to connect to snowflake with OAuth in an easier way. 

 

The connections to snowflake via OAuth are very similar to the connections Alteryx already does with O365 applications. It requires: 

• Tenant URL 
• Client ID 
• Client Secret 

 

1. Get Authorization token provided by the snowflake authorization endpoint.  
2. Give access consent (a browser popup will appear) 
3. With the Authorization Code, the client ID and the Client Secret make a call to retrieve the Refresh Token and TTL information for the tokens 
4. Get the Access Token every time it expires 

 

With this an automated workflow using OAuth between Alteryx and Snowflake will be possible.

 

You can find a more detailed explanation in the attached document.

Hello,

As I mentioned in this previous idea : https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Generic-In-database-connection-please-stop-i...

 

field mapping in generic in-db connection is based on Microsoft Sql Server. Given the specificity of MSQL Server field types, I would like to change that in order to at least be able to use another database. Without that, this feature has no sense at all.

Best regards,

Simon

Two very useful functions

According to https://www.w3schools.com/sql/func_mysql_least.asp

The LEAST() function returns the smallest value of the list of arguments.

example : SELECT LEAST("w3Schools.com", "microsoft.com", "apple.com");

returns "apple.com"

 

GREATEST works exactly the same but returns the greatest value of the list of argument

 

As of today, Alteryx proposes max and min to deal with that, but it only works with number and , I think, it's an ambiguous syntax : Max and Min works both as an aggregation function and as a row function. I love to separate these two notions.

 

Having a more standard means also more interoperability.

 

On a related topic, the coalesce function is proposed here : https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Coalesce-function/idi-p/841014

 

 

Best regards,

 

Simon

95% of the times I see myself using the Directory Tool, it is only to access the FullPath content, so I immediatly add a Select tool to deselect the other attributes the tool returns.

Is there any chance to add a checkbox to only retrieve FullPath?

 

I couldn't find a previous idea on this, but let me know if it already exists.