Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hello all,

According to wikipedia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_(SQL)

CROSS JOIN returns the Cartesian product of rows from tables in the join. In other words, it will produce rows which combine each row from the first table with each row from the second table.[1]

Example of an explicit cross join:

SELECT *
FROM employee CROSS JOIN department;

Example of an implicit cross join:

SELECT *
FROM employee, department;

The cross join can be replaced with an inner join with an always-true condition:

SELECT *
FROM employee INNER JOIN department ON 1=1;

For us, alteryx users, it would be very similar to Append Fields but for in-db.

Best regards,

Simon

Please add Parquet data format (https://parquet.apache.org/) as read-write option for Alteryx.

Apache Parquet is a columnar storage format available to any project in the Hadoop ecosystem, regardless of the choice of data processing framework, data model or programming language.

Thank you.

Regards,

Cristian.

Connecting to Smartsheets using Alteryx Desktop (and by extension, Alteryx Server) is extremely cumbersome. If a user wants to read data from Smartsheet, they are required to get an API token (preferred) or use a username/password

Then do one of the following to read data from Smartsheets:

1. a. Install a ODBC driver

    b. Configure a DSN connection for ODBC
    c. Use the input data using a generic ODBC connection
or
2. Use python

To write data to Smartsheets, a user can use Python or upload the data using an API call - both very hard for end users to use especially if they're not Python developers.

Regardless, all of these are problematic. On the server I manage, I have over 15 ODBC connections to Smartsheets and it's getting very hard to upgrade the server hardware because of them. Creating a native connector for input/output of data to Smartsheets will eliminate a headache of managing ODBC connections, and make it simple for Alteryx Desktop users to read and write data.

hello,

version 2021.4 does not allow workflows to run if any of their input files are open.... would be great to have an option for the input tool that switches on/off the ability to read from open files. Some of my input files have frequent data changes and i tend to keep them open while testing/simulating results

Thank you,

abdou 

As per a recent discussion (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Geopackages-Can-Alteryx-Open-GeoPackag...), please add the GeoPackage datatype to the Input tool.

For reference, the open-source project ogr2ogr has this functionality. (https://gdal.org/programs/ogr2ogr.html)

Thanks!

I love Workflow Meta info, especially the ability to put the Author, the search tags,the version, the description, etc...

But why can't we use it as Engine Constant? It doesn't seem very hard to implement and it would change life for development.

Hello all,

I really appreciate the ability to test tools in the Laboratory category :

However, these nice tools should go out of laboratory and become supported after a few monhs/quarters. Right now, without Alteryx support, we cannot use it for production workflow.

Example given :
Visual Layout Tool introduced in 2017
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/Tool-Mastery-Visual-Layout/ta-p/835...

Make columns Tool also introduced in 2017
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/Make-Columns-Tool/ta-p/67108

Transpose In-DB in 10.6 introduced 2016
https://help.alteryx.com/10.6/LockInTranspose.htm

etc, etc...

Best regards,

Simon

When working on a complex, branching workflow I sometimes go down paths that do not give the correct result, but I want to keep them as they are helpful for determining the correct path.  I do not want these branches to run as they slow down the workflow or may produce errors/warnings that muddy debugging the workflow.  These paths can be several tools long and are not easily put in a container and disabled.  Similar to the Cache and Run Workflow feature that prevents upstream tools from refreshing i am suggesting a Disable all Downstream Tools feature.  In the workflow below the tools in the container could be all disabled by a right click on the first sample tool in the container.

In the community and in mixed teams - it's very common for people to be caught on the error that "This document was created in a more recent version".   Although there are several workarounds (e.g. this one from @WayneWooldridge  here https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Adjusting-Alteryx-Files-for-Different-Versio...), this seems like it may be an easy problem to solve more permanently.

Could we add an option to Alteryx to save the file with the lowest compatible version number?

So - for example - if i'm only using components that shipped with version 10, then please mark the file as version 10.   If I've used a tool that shipped in 11.0.6 then that needs to be the version number.

This way - files will be back-compatible as far as is possible by default unless using newer components.

Many thanks

Sean

We're currently using Regex and text to columns to parse raw HTML as text into the appropriate format when web scraping, when a tool to at least parse tables would be hugely beneficial.

This functionality exists within Qlik so it would be nice to have this replicated in Alteryx.

Obviously, we need to retain the ability to scrape raw HTML, but automatically parsing data using the <td>, <th> and <tr> tags would be nice.

In the following page there is a table showing the states and territories of the US:

With Qlik, you can input the URL and it will return the available tables in tabular format:

As this functionality exists elsewhere it would be nice to incorporate this into Alteryx.

Hi there,

My idea comes when I've built an application, where user select filter from drop-down list. However it contains thousands of records, so it takes lot's of time to find desired record.

In Excel and MS Access when you use filter you can put many letter and filter shows rows that match the input. In Alteryx user can only put first letter, which is huge drawback to my users.

This is how it works in Excel:

Hope you like it!

We have Alteryx running in AWS which seems to be a common setup.Our AWS instances are set-up with IAM roles which has been one of the security measures applied in order to finally allow our enterprise company to allow some development in the cloud. IT will not allow the sharing of Access keys to connect to S3.

• Would like to use the AWS S3 Tools from the connectors palette as the AWS CLI has limited ability to handle/report exceptions or issues with any detail. At the moment, we are limited on what goes into production as we are using CLI for what we can.
• Ideally, an option would be to add to the S3 Tools allowing the user to select IAM Roles rather than Key Access. Refer the screen attached.

For the Output tool, File Format of Microsoft Excel (*.xlsx) - the non-Legacy one - it doesn't have the "Delete Data & Append" option that the Legacy ad 97-2003 Excel formats have. 

Having the Delete Data & Append for the most recent version of Excel would be very beneficial. Without it, there does not appear to be a way to udpate an existing Excel sheet using an Alteryx workflow while preserving the formatting within the Excel sheet. The option to Overwrite/Drop removes all formatting. 

I have this workflow refreshing an Excel sheet daily, and then am emailing it to a distribution at the end of the workflow. Unfortunately, right now I have to use the 97-2003 format to preserve the formatting of the Excel sheet when it is automatically refreshed and emailed each day. 

Can you please assess adding this option? Thanks!

To get simple information from a workflow, such as the name, run start date/time and run end date/time is far more complex than it should be. Ideally the log, in separate line items distinctly labelled, would have the workflow path & name, the start date/time, and end date/time and potentially the run time to save having to do a calculation. Also having an overall module status would be of use, i.e. if there was an Error in the run the overall status is Error, if there was a warning the overall status is Warning otherwise Success.

Parsing out the workflow name and start date/time is challenge enough, but then trying to parse out the run time, convert that to a time and add it to the start date/time to get the end date/time makes retrieving basic monitoring information far more complex than it should be.

Whenever I add an interface tool, it adds a constant just like the 4 engine constants and any user constants. It would be useful if tools like the formula and filter automatically added question constants to the list for you to use. This would be identical to how user constants behave currently. Here is the before and after for visual effect:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I know this has been posted before, but the posts are fairly old, and I have just confirmed with Support that it is still an issue.  Seems to be a pretty basic request, so I'm putting it out there again under this new heading.

The issue is that if you have data in a field, and you have that data separated by a new line (\n), it will show up fine in a browse tool, or pretty much any other output (database file, Office Document file, etc.). But if you try to use the Table Tool under Reporting, it ignores the line break and strings the data together.

Example:

The field data looks like this in a browse or most other outputs:

Hello, my name is 

Michael Barone

and I love

Alteryx

But when I try to pull this field into a Table Tool, it shows up like this:
Hello, my name is Michael Barone and I love Alteyrx

Putting this out here again in hopes that it gets lots and lots of stars so it gets put on the road map!!

Hello,

I had a business case requiring a cost effective and quick storage solution for real time online sourced survey data from customers.  A MongoDB instance would fit the need, so I quickly spun up a cluster on Mongo Atlas.  Atlas was launched by MongoDB in 2016 as a database-as-a-service deployed on AWS.  All instances for Atlas require TLS/SSL to connect.  Currently, the Alteryx MongoDB connector does not support TLS/SSL connections and doesn't work against Atlas.  So, I was left with a breakdown in my plan that would require manual intervention before ingesting data to Alteryx (not ideal).

Please consider expanding this functionality on all connectors.  I am building Alteryx out in my agency as a data platform that handles sensitive customer information (name, address, email, etc.).  Most tools I use to connect to secure servers today support this type of connection and should be a priority for Alteryx to resolve. 

Thanks,

Mike Schock

Please add a configuration to the RedShift bulk load to EITHER use access keys or an IAM EC2 role for access. 

We should not have to specify access keys when we are in an IAM enabled environment.

Thanks