Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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.

When you click on 'Open results in a new window' or in when viewing results in the 'Results - Browse' sometimes it would be nice to have a freeze pane feature so you can pin column(s) to the left and scroll to the right.

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

Currently the BROWSE tool shows numeric data in raw format.  It would be easier to evaluate a column of data if the data was right justified and formatted with the decimal point aligned.  

Thiwould change this

234.56788

12.0

.098

to 

    234.567

      12.000

          .098

Please enhance the input tool to have a feature you could select to test if the file is there and another to allow the workflow to pause for a definable period if the input file is locked by another user, then retry opening.  The pause time-frame would be definable for N seconds and the number of iterations it would cycle through should be definable so you can limit how many attempts to open a file it would try.

File presence should be something we could use to control workflow processing.  

A use case would be a process that runs periodically and looks to see if a file is there and if so opens and processes it.  But if the file is not there then goes to sleep for a definable period before trying again or simply ends processing of the workflow without attempting to work any downstream tools that might otherwise result in "errors" trying to process a null stream.

An extension of this idea and the use case would be to have a separate tool that could evaluate a condition like a null stream or field content or file not found condition and terminate the process without causing an error indicator, or perhaps be configurable so you could cause an error to occur or choose not to cause an error to occur.

Using this latter idea we have an enhanced input tool that can pass a value downstream or generate a null data stream to the next tool, then this next tool can evaluate a condition, like a filter tool, which may be a null stream or file not found indicator or other condition and terminate processing per the configuration, either without a failure indicated or with a failure indicated, according to the wishes of the user.  I have had times when a file was not there and I just want the workflow to stop without throwing errors, other times I may want it to error out to cause me to investigate, other scenarios or while processing my data goes through a filter or two and the result is no data passes the last filter and downstream tools still run and generally cause a failure as they have no data to act on and I don't want that, it may be perfectly valid that on a Sunday or holiday no data passes the filters.

Having meandered through this I sum up with the ideal being to enhance the input tool to be able to test file presence and pass that info on to another tool that can evaluate that and control the workflow run accordingly, but as a separate tool it could be applied to a wider variety of scenarios and test a broader scope of conditions to decide if to proceed or term the workflow.

This functionality would allow the user to select (through a highlight box, or ctrl+click), only the tools in a workflow they would want to run, and the tools that are not selected would be skipped. The idea is similar to the new "add selected tools to a new tool container", but it would run them instead. 

I know the conventional wisdom it to either put everything you don't want run into a tool container and disable it, or to just copy/paste the tools you want run into a blank workflow. However, for very large workflows, it is very time consuming to disable a dozen or more containers, only to re-enable them shortly afterwards, especially if those containers have to be created to isolate the tools that need to be run. Overall, this would be a quality of life improvement that could save the user some time, especially with large or cumbersome workflows.

Currently when creating a table in Oracle in Alteryx there is a lot of "magic" that happens under the hood in converting Alteryx data types to Oracle data types.

For example fixed decimal creates NUMBER, String created CHAR and V_String created VARCHAR.

It would be great to have an option to review the Oracle data types in the Output Data Tool when writing to Oracle. This would improve efficiency when using Alteryx to create Oracle tables. 

See picture for example of what would display in output configuration. 

. 

I love the new Custom Format option with the DateTime tool in Alteryx 11.0, this makes working with dates SO MUCH easier... BUT it would be great if you could update an existing field rather than having to create a new column (e.g. DateTime_Out) and then use a select to put this back to the original Date field.

Hey there,

The performance profiling option on the "runtime" tab is very helpful to identify bottlenecks on a long-running workflow.   However this is missing (along with the entire "Runtime" tab) if I change this to a macro.

Given that the only way to build relatively complex dependant chain jobs is to wrap them in dummy batch macros (using a macro like a sub-procedure with flow-of-control on the master-canvas) - most of our work is done in Macros - so it would be helpful to be able to performance profile them during testing.

I would like to suggest 2 small changes to make working with Interface tools easier:

1) Let a user change the name of Question Constants from the workflow tab. For example, I would love the ability to change the names of my list boxes below. Currently, I can click in the name box and write new names in, but it doesn't stick.

2) Let the user add the value on the Interface tools under the Annotation tab. Currently, I drop an interface tool on, change the name on the annotation tab, and then have to go the the workflow tab to setup a value. It would be easier if the value box was also on the annotation tab:

The ability to limit the number of records (either on a specific input tool, or via the Workflow Properties) is super useful when developing a workflow...

...but how many times do you forget that a record limit was set and then spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to figure out why something isn't working properly? (I can't be the only person this has happened to...).

Wouldn't it be fantastic if a warning/message was shown in the workflow results (e.g. "Input Tool (n) has a record limit set"
or "Record Limits are set on the Workflow Properties")?

It would be great if we could have a Windows Active Directory data connector tool added to the standard Alteryx toolset.

MS Excel Power Query and PowerBI both can connect to Active Directory for use as a data source, but are both very cumbersome to use.  Having a connector in Alteryx that can read AD data into a workflow would be super helpful for a long list of use cases.  A couple that are top of mind for me are:

-Leveraging group membership info for dynamic distribution of reports or datasets

-Being able to build reporting and dashboards about the organization (useful for Tech audit, HR, etc.) 

I've seen links to an old project on GitHub of someone that started development on this, but the method (just copy these random .dlls into your program directory) is seriously frowned upon by any enterpise IT.  Would be great if Alteryx could pick up that work, polish it a bit and add it to the actual Alteryx Designer toolset.

We have a large SAS Programming team that keeps most of thier data sets in a Unix environment. A more robust ODBC connection to this data would greatly enhance our use of Alteryx. The current SAS odbc Driver tends to lock Alteryx up. Creating edits to the connection also tends to lock ateryx up to an unrecoveable point.

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.

In the previous tools the information lab had build for publishing to Tableau server, they had the incremental TDE refresh option available. I would like to see that included in the Publish to Tableau Server Macro. We often just want to add previous day data to a YTD data extract without running the full data set from our Datawarehouse. The full set takes long and a daily increment / add only would take a couple minutes.

Idea: Allow the user to set the data type including character field width in the Text Input tool.

The Text Input tool currently auto-senses the correct type and width of the field in a Text Input tool. However, this sometimes restricts the usage of the data downline.

Examples:

1 - I often run into the situation where I've copied some data from a browse tool and then pasted that as an input to a new workflow. Then I'll turn that workflow into a macro. But then I run into an issue where the data that comes into the macro is larger than the original width in the Text Input tool. This causes problems.

2 - The tool senses that a field containing zip codes should be numeric and then converts the data. This corrupts the data and makes me insert a Select/Formula tool combo to pad the zeros to the left.

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:

The behavior of an "Overwrite Sheet (Drop)" configuration is such that it breaks formulas (#REF) that point to the overwritten sheet and named ranges that reference the overwritten sheet.  This is a bummer because the only way I've found to overcome the issue is to write a script that re-applies the named range.  This works, but it greatly raises the barrier to using this tool and in some corporate environments it won't even be possible.

What would probably be a good alternative behavior is to delete the contents of the sheet, rather than the rows/columns/cells of the sheet.  I think both probably have valid use cases but my proposed functionality is going to cause fewer issues and be the more popular behavior for most users.  I believe there is a google sheets API call for just this kind of behavior...

Please include IBM DB2 as an in-Database option. Currently, my primary use of Alteryx is for copying DB2 tables into Teradata for use on that server. Copying large tables and particularly joining several tables and copying the results to Teradata is too slow in Alteryx.