Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

When connecting to Oracle thru In-db

I've came across an awkward issue, somehow Alteryx can't read TNS that I've defined.

Eventually I've had a solution and this was not as straight forward as it should be...

1) There is an easy way to edit, update add TNS records, finding the file and understand and update it is not as straightforward as a non IT person to tackle

Here's some tablau links on how to do it... http://kb.tableau.com/articles/howto/setting-an-oracle-connection-to-use-tnsnames-ora-or-ldap-ora

2) Especially the In-db tool doesn't even look at that file...

It says enter "TNS Server Name" but it actually asks for an IP address and some credentials like

1.0.0.0.1/oracl,

you gotta write this in Help file,

You gotta have a better UI/UX design that helps the end user...

Best

What about allowing us to maintain the same active license / activation info on 2 devices simultaneously, but automatically deactivating the license on the other device when the program is used? Almost all software these days allows users to do full installation and activation on secondary devices, but restricts the use of the software to a number of active devices at any point in time. The current process of juggling a clunky transfer process (and temporary "demo" installs when that fails) just to be able to work on an office desktop during the day and a laptop at night / home is a brutal restriction on users.

This has been brought up many times and is always ignored. The current license approach is no longer a simple inconvenience now that we are living in the age of Covid. The ability to easily move between computers is a necessity in order for us to manage the constant unpredictable work arrangements of our modern world. Please address this issue.

Formula tool expression editor is very useful. However, I have remeber the syntax when I write expressions in other expresion editor like custom filter, multirow formula etc..

Can we have an option to have two more option: 

1. filename and sheet name

2. Sheet name

sometime we need to identify the sheetname, we need to go for fullpath and do the formula to extract the sheetname.

even worse if we want to get the filename in the same time. we need use more complex formula or regex to extract the filename.

Shopify is a popular software for e-commerce. With Shopify Connector in Alteryx, it will be very helpful for Alteryx users to integrate with Shopify. 

I have a process where I output data to a database each week.  Because the database fields have a pre-defined/expected data type, I must maintain that same data type in my workflow.  However, I would still like Alteryx to determine the max size of the fields for string fields.  The Auto Field tool does both, and sometimes it might change the data type of a field based on the records being passed at the time.

The reason is because the output to the target database is fastest when you make the string field sizes as small as possible.  So, hard-coding the field sizes has inherent inefficiencies.

It would be very helpful if we could pick from a list of installed calgary datasets in the dropdown menu:

we currently have the ability to choose geocoder/drivetime/Allocate datasets which are typically stored in the .ini files, but don't currently have the ability to choose calgary datasets. 

Hello all,

Here is a very, very simple idea :

just having the right to put a minimum length to Text Pre-processing
Why ? A lot of words (especially in French) with 1 or 2 characters does not change the meaning, the sentiment: la, le, à, un, une, etc... In English : in, the, etc..

Best regards,

Simon

While it is good to have the test tool stop outputs based on tests, it isn't too insightful to users on the full details of these error messages. It would be more useful to have an output location for a test if these errors appear so that end users can troubleshoot instead of the workflow developer having to work through all of the error messaging.

There are workarounds for this that can be used, but they are often extensive and require the addition of significant logic. Adding optional outputs to the test tool would be a simple fix that could save a lot of hours of debugging when end users find an error.

Hi,

I am not sure why it is so complicated to troubleshoot formula tools in Alteryx. When I am getting an error with information parse error at char (char number) why we don't get this information highlighted in the configuration tool at the left. 

It should be crystal clear for the user where he needs to troubleshoot his workflow. We can say that the formula tool is showing us where the formula is working, so it isn't so bad.

When working with a multi formulas tool, it isn't easy to figure out where the mistake occurred.

Can we highlight somehow this specific character and make users life easier?

It would be very helpful if there was a tool that could stop the workflow without throwing an error. Currently, you can use the message tool to throw an error on a certain condition, and then enable the "Cancel Running Workflow on Error" option in the Runtime settings, but when the workflow is stopped in this way, many other tools don't function such as the Output Data and Email tools. Simply adding a tool that stops the workflow without erroring that also allows the other tools to finish their job would be great. 

Dear Alteryx Gods, I beseech thee!

The most common use of the Browse tool in the Alteryx Designer is to pop the results out into a full window. Can we PLEASE have a single button to do this rather than this functionality being hidden under the action menu?

M.

Passing data to the next app running in a chain from the gallery varies from challenging to impossible. An impossible situation I've found is when the same user needs to run multiple instances of the app simultaneously. Very difficult is just allowing two different users to run simultaneously without risk of passed data mixing between the two.

This idea would add the capability to pass values from one app in the chain into user variables in the next app in the chain.

Hello Alteryx Support,

I’m a Business Analytics Manager at Evernorth. My team and I use Alteryx Designer 2020.2 x64 for daily data preparation + analytic purposes; primarily, the desktop version but also have access to the company Alteryx Server ‘Gallery’ as well. Recently, we ran into a challenge and after asking around we still couldn’t find a solution.

Our Need:

We are seeking a solution to ‘add an example link’ in our custom built macro.

Our Challenge:

We don’t have the proper permissions to save and/or write to the “C:” designated folder location required to host the file as specified within the Alteryx Community help documentation (e.g. outlined below). --> We understand this is an internal IT obstacle that will take time to work out from a corporate data governance perspective, which is why we are seeking Alteryx Support.

At the end of the day, we are reaching out to see if your team can help us understand if there are alternative solutions that we can explore. Making the assumption, that is…that we can’t take the suggested approach in the documentation. See below for details about what we are trying to achieve.

Current macro state (…as viewed by Alteryx Designer users in the user-interfaces top tool panel for viewable macros):

Desired future macro state:

***Help Documentation***

What we currently know: (According to…How to add an example link in the custom tool - Alteryx Community)

Prerequisites

1. Alteryx Designer

Procedure

1. Place the sample workflow in the %ALTERYX_INSTALL%\Alteryx\Samples\%LANG%. A separate folder can be created to store the workflow. An example of a directory: C:\Program Files\Alteryx\Samples\en\MyTest
2. Add in the "Example" tag with "Description" and "File" child tag in the tool configuration file of the custom/user tool.

Example:
 
    <metainfo>

 ...
     
            Open Example
            Path to the workflow
       

... 

Limitations

1. The sample workflow can only exist in %ALTERYX_INSTALL%\Alteryx\Samples\%LANG%. The link will fail  if the file is located in a different path.
2. The sample workflow needs to be distributed separately from the custom tool installation since it has to be stored in %ALTERYX_INSTALL%\Alteryx\Samples\%LANG%.

Thanks for your support and consideration to create a feature enhancement that allows Alteryx Designer users to 'add an example link to their custom tool' without having to go to the C:\ file location in order for it to work!

Respectfully,

Corey

Hello!

I recently had a use-case that needed me to start using the text mining tools for a reporting based workflow, and i had pretty good success. However, my workflow does not always have data being brought through it, and when 0 results are supplied to a Text Pre-processing tool, it produces a bug and log file. I imagine this is a small fix, just a weird one to run into.

Steps to replicate:
1- Add a text input tool with some dummy text values as part of a field

2- Add a text pre-processing tool to the workflow, and configure it to use this field and English.

3- add a filter tool, prior to the text pre-processing tool, to filter out any valid results

4- Run the workflow

As the data cleansing tool does not behave similar, I fully believe this to be an unintended outcome.

Hi All,

Did you all experience when building a iterate macro this situation?

When you have no idea why the output is different from what you want,

hence, you remove the rows/ data to force the data run only 2 iterate, review the result.

then, you add back the rows/ data to force the data run only 3 iterate, review the result 

then 4, 5 and etc... until we found the issue.

so it was important that we can view how the result of each iterate to enable us to identify the issue quicker and more efficient.

Example output

The output may like below: (with a option to let user to choose of cause)

if input data is 3 and the macro is to multiply 2 and power of 2 every iterate. (1st iterate=3*2^2, 2nd iterate=12*2^2)

just add one column in front to show the iterate and rest is the result.

This might be an edge case, but it would be nice to be able to parse a file using a Regex in the Text to Columns Tool, or specifying a delimiter as a Regex:

Consider the following pandas code where one can easily pull in a file with a bad delimiter

In Alteryx, you would be forced to read in the file with no delimiter, and set the field length to be extremely long, and parse out the contents manually.

filename = "http://daniels-pull.universityofdenv.netdna-cdn.com/assets/GeneralOccurrencesAll.csv"

df = pd.read_csv(filename, sep=r',(?!\s)')

Hi Alteryx Team,

Would love to see alteryx incorporate Risk Modeling techniques under its umbrella. Mainly cover topics like Basel Norms, LGD, Default at Risk etc.

To enable a check mark kind of option to lock or edit the configuration window of each tool.

It could be very useful to keep safe the settings in the configuration window.