Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi Alteryx Devs - 

It would be *really tight* to have a drop down interface tool that would support auto completion based on a odbc connection to a table/column or ajax call.  I recently had a situation wherein we need to give the users the ability to select an address, then run a workflow.  But the truth is, our address data is terrible, and what I really needed was to be able to let the users start typing the address, then give them a list of choices to pick from, they pick the correct (but usually wrongly formatted) address, and then I send that value into the workflow. 

I could not find a decent way to give a gallery user a reliable way to pick an address from our list, so eventually wound up having to write an ajax piece to handle the auto completion, capture the user input, then post to a service that would in turn, interact with gallery through the API, get the response, and send it back calling page, and back to the user.  A significant amount of work to put into something that is an exceedingly common web operation of auto completion.  

This would make a lot of gallery operations flow so much more naturally.  

Thanks for listening! 

brian

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

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.

The Sharepoint file tools are certainly a step in the right direction, but it would be great to enhance the files types that it is possible to write to sharepoint from Alteryx.

The format missing that I think is probably most in demand is pdf. If we're using the Alteryx reporting suite to create PDF reports, it would be awesome to have an easy way to output these to Sharepoint.

https://help.alteryx.com/20213/designer/sharepoint-files-output-tool

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/Sharepoint-Files-Tool/ta-p/877903

As @JordanB mentioned in his post (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Stop-workflow-on-a-condition/tac-p/74403#M19...) - there's a common need to stop a worfklow when an condition is met.

However, at present there's no way to do this without generating an error.

Please can we either alter the message/test component to allow for error-free termination on a formula condition; or alternatively implement the fuller idea that Mark ( @MarqueeCrew) mentioned in his programmatic Detour idea?

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Programmatic-Detour/idi-p/12763

There are a number of requests for bulk loaders to DBs and Im adding MySQL to the list.

Really every DB connection (on prem and cloud) need some bulk loader capabilities to be added (if they don't have it already)

I really like that I can scroll -- using my mouse -- between the tool groups in Alteryx. Can this UX be added to scroll through my workflows? I usually have a bunch open, and this functionality would be awesome to have there, too! 🙂

PS: Yes, I know I can do Ctrl+Tab...but mouse scrolling is more efficient.

Often as I am scraping web sites, some clever developer has put an invisible character (ASCII or Unicode) in the data which causes terrible trouble.

I've identified 89 instances of zero-width or non-zero-width glyphs that are not visible and/or Alteryx does not classify as whitespace. There are probably more, but Unicode is big y'all.

Unfortunately, the Trim() string function only removes 4 of these characters (Tab, Newline, Carriage Feed, and Space).
REGEX_REPLACE with the \s option (which is what the Cleanse macro uses) is a little better but still only removes 20. And it removes all instances, not just leading and trailing.

I've attached a workflow which proves this issue.

@apolly: this is what I mentioned at GKO.

And I did see this post (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Elegantly-remove-all-ASCII-characters-...), but it's too brute force. Especially as Alteryx is localized and more users need those Unicode characters.

Now that we have a Snowflake Bulk Loader option, it would be great to utilize the built-in Snowflake internal staging.  This eliminates the need for an end-user to have the technical know-how or access to IT resources to utilize a separate S3 bucket and generally reduces friction in the process. 

There was pretty widespread support in the original Bulk Load thread: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Snowflake-Bulk-Loader/idi-p/105291/page/2#co...

Would be extremely useful if the Summarize Tool had an option in the numeric menu to Standardize the data.  More often than not, data sets will not have the same count of variables which makes the comparison analysis meaningless.  Currently, there is no easy way to Standardize the data without using the K-Centroids Cluster Analysis tool or standardize_unit interval supporting macro. 

I would like to see the same functionalitly that the Output Tool has in the Render tool.  In the Output Tool, you can specify the Excel Worksheet along with the Sheet Name that you want to output too.  Meaning Same Worksheet, different tab:

     C:Output FilesExample_Worksheet.xlsx|Report_1
     C:Output FilesExample_Worksheet.xlsx|Report_2

This functionality is not currently available in the Render Tool and would be very useful and cut out some manual operations on the back end that requires us to copy/paste from one file to another.

I tried using the Section Break technique that was offered as a suggestion, but it did not perform what I needed.

Hi Alteryx Team,

My work is to create Output from Alteryx and upload the Output file into Tibco Spotfire. So i want a system in which Alteryx output directly goes in to the Tibco Spotfire and update Tibco Spotfire in every 6 hours.
So do you have any plan to connect the Alteryx with Tibco Spotfire? This is will help me to automate the project.
If not pls think on these concept for future use.

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

I superimposed multiple screens and multiple workflows and rendered them into a single image below. Have you noticed something?

 There is a space never being used at all times, painted in yellow for emphasizing...

Actually this is an enough space for ads 🙂 And we can make the designer for free...

Though I suggest a better placement and use of the available screen space;

Currently it's possible to use the Output tool to output to either a sheet, a place in a sheet or a named range in Excel, but it is not possible to output to a preformatted excel table - it would be really good if the output tool had an option to output to [Table1] in an Excel workbook for example. This enhancement would be incredibly helpful for reporting purposes.

I wasn't able to find an existing idea for this, so here goes...

We often put URLs in Comment boxes in order to direct workflow users to different resources, but users are then required to go into the Comment and copy the string (and then paste in their browser). It would be quite handy if the Comment tool simply turned text strings with a url format into clickable links (as seen in Word, Slack, etc).

It would be even more handy if it also had basic text formatting tools (bold, italic, underline, coloring, highlighting of specified characters/words) -- or if it could just render html (like this text tool I'm typing into right now) 😎

XGboost regression is now the benchmark for every Kaggle competition and seems to consistently outperform random forest, spline regression, and all of the more basic models. For those of us using predictive modeling on a regular basis in our actual work, this tool would allow for a quick improvement in our model accuracy. And I think, from a marketing standpoint, having a core group of users competing in Kaggle using Alteryx would be a great way to show off Alteryx's power.

It is readily available as an R package: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/xgboost/index.html

The Output tool currently creates a zero-row file if you filter all the rows out (an empty file)

However - there's a very common need to say "don't generate a file at all if there are zero rows" - for example if you are generating a "Daily Details" file and there are no daily details today, you want to suppress this file.   This frequently trips up newer users since the only way to suppress a zero-row output file today is to it with macros.

Could you add a flag to the output tool to "Suppress empty files" so that if there are no rows to be written, Alteryx does NOT create an empty file?   This way the user can be in control of what to do with empty record sets?

Hello all,

DuckDB is a new project of embeddable database by the team behind MonetDB. From what I understand, it's like a SQLite database but for analytics (columnar-vectorized query execution engine on a single file). And of course it's open-source and free.

More info on their website : https://duckdb.org/

Best regards,

Simon