Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi Alteryx community,

It would be really nice to have v_string/v_wstring and max character size as a standard for text columns.

it is countless how many times I found that the error was related to a string truncation due to string size limit from the text input.

Thumbs-up those who lost their minds after discovering that the error was that! 😄

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!

The following idea might not be as valuable as some of @SeanAdams posts, but it would save this user precious fractions of time.   When I leave the canvas with my mouse (point A) to go up to the pallet I select and drag the tool down to the canvas.  Sometimes I do right-click and go through the menus to add the next tool, but generally I go through that labor only when I'm inserting in-stream the tool.  So here is my idea:

Double-Click your NEXT tool and it "Alteryx-ly" appears on your canvas in proximity to the hi-lighted (last) tool.  Better yet, connect it!  Now I can move from the pallet to the configuration panel directly without having to move my mouse down to the canvas and then over to the configuration panel.

Hopefully, my friend @Hollingsworth will find this time-saving idea worthy of a star.  Speed demons like @NicoleJohnson and @BenMoss might not need this turbo boost, but at my age it is worth the ask.

Cheers,

Mark

When using the output data tool, it would save me and my cluttered organizational skills a lot of effort if the writing workflow was saved as part of the yxdb metadata. 

I've often had to search to find a workflow which created the yxdb. I tend to use naming conventions to help me,  but it would be easier if the file and or path was easily found. 

cheers,

 mark

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.

Maybe it was a lack of planning, but I've had a need to rename a variable within a workflow and would like to (outside of the XML view) be able to rename the variable so that downstream tools don't have to be reconfigured (e.g. formula, join, union).  

Presently when mapping an Excel file to an input tool the tool only recognizes sheets it does not recognize named tables (ranges) as possible inputs. When using PowerBI to read Excel inputs I can select either sheets or named ranges as input. Alteryx input tool should do the same.

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,

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

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.

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;

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