Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I've had to look through a few logs recently and I had expected the information to match with what is displayed in the results window

 

Reference the tool name, type of tool (in/out, prep, etc).   Only the toolid shows up in the log where the results window shows the name

 

When running an app (not in the Gallery), the status bar appears to complete for each tool, then start over for the next tool.  It'd be great if while it was doing that, the tool name that it was running displayed.  Now, I know for most processes this will be instantaneous and your eye won't even catch it.  But if we have, for example, several join/sort tools with lots of data going through them, it would be nice to know which one it's on.

It was discovered that 'Select' transformation is not throwing warning messages for cases where data truncation is happening but relevant warning is being reflected from the 'Formula' transformation. I think it would be good if we can have a consistent logging of warnings/errors for all transformations (at least consistent across the ones based on same use cases - for e.g. when using Alteryx as an ETL tool, 'Select' and 'Formula' tool usage should be common place).

 

Without this in place, it becomes difficult to completely rely on Alteryx in terms of whether in a workflow which is moving/populating data from source to target truncation related errors/warnings would be highlighted in a consistent manner or not. This might lead to additional overhead of having some logic built in to capture such data issues which is again differing transformation by transformation - for e.g when data passes through 'Formula' tool there is no need for custom error/warning logging for truncation but when the same data passes through 'Select' transformation in the workflow it needs to be custom captured.

I'd like to see a tool that can take an input, then send it in different directions (similar to formula tool), but with many options... based on filters and/or formulas and/or fields.

 

Sometimes I need to perform actions on parts of my data or perform different actions depending on whether the data matches certain criteria and then re-union it later.

 

Right now, the filter tool only allows true or false. If we could customize further we could optimize our workflows rather than stringing filter tools together as if they are nested if/then.

So either the filter tool could have more options than true/false, and infinite ouputs, or the join multiple tool could be flipped, as shown below.

 

I envision something that says:

Split workflow:

• By Field: Field Name (perhaps with summarize functions such as min/max, etc.)
• By Formula (same configuration as current)
• By Filter
  • Field
  • Operator
  • Variable

 

Chaos reigns within. Repent, reflect and reboot. Order shall return.

 

For those of us really old school, this would be a novel Easter egg to add

 

when using the R-Tool for simple tasks (like renaming files, for example) in an interative macro - there's a delay on every iteration as the R Tool starts up R.

 

The following are repeated on every iteration (with delays):

 

Can we look at an option to forward scan an alteryx job to look for R Tools, then load R into process once to eliminate these delays on every iteration?

 

This wasn't pretty (actually, it was challenging and pretty when I was done with it)!

 

My client receives files that include a static and dated name portion (e.g. Data for 2018 July.xlsx) within the file there are multiple sheets.  One sheet contains a keyword (e.g. Reported Data) but the sheet name also includes a variable component (e.g. July Reported Data).  I needed to first read a directory to find the most recent file, then when I wanted to supply the dynamic input with the sheet name I wasn't able to use a pattern. 

 

The solution was to use a dynamic input tool just to read sheet names and append the filtered name to the original Full Path.

[FullPath] + "|||<List of Sheet Names>"

This could then feed a dynamic input.

 

Given the desire to automate the read of newly received "excel" data and the fluidity of the naming of both files and sheets, more flexibility in the dynamic input is requested.

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

I need to consume a web service that uses a “0-legged” OAuth transaction. I contacted Alteryx tech support and found that this was not possible with the current feature set of the Download tool. Please add it.

I was recently surprised to find that Alteryx doesn't already havea connector to upload to SFTP sites.  I've managed to work around it with RunCommand and some external programs, but it's very cumbersome.  A simple SFTP upload connector would be a great addition to Alteryx.

I need support for outbound data streams to be gzip compressed.  Ideally, this would be done by a new tool that can be inserted into a workflow (maybe similar to the Base 64 Encoding tool).  Just including it in the Output Tool will not address my needs as I will be sending gzip payloads to a cloud API.  There are two main reasons why this is necessary (and without it, quite possibly a roadblock for our enterprise's use of Alteryx):

 

1. Some APIs enforce gzip encoding, therefore Alteryx cannot currently be used to interact with such APIs
2. When transmitting large volumes of data across the Internet, gzip compression will significantly decrease transmission times

I haven’t found a common spatial file format to use between Alteryx, MapInfo Pro and ArcMap.  The one file/db type that all 3 software packages have the ability to use is SQLite.  Problem is that each of these GIS packages stores data differently in SQLite. 
I propose the following…  Alteryx should have 2 new SQLite options to save output (and read from) in SQLite-ESRI and SQLite-MapInfo.  This does not get us to the holy grail of one common file format but does get us down to 2.  (If you guys could figure out 1 common format that would be better)

Having these new SQLite formats would fix a common issue shared by the Alteryx supported ESRI and MapInfo formats, namely 2G file limits, multiple files per dataset and short field names.  Currently, to save an output for ESRI and Mapinfo, I take a single yxdb and save multiple shape or tab files.  The conversion back is an aggregation of individual files into an yxdb.  SQLite, as a database, has the ability to store many tables which further reduces files (much like a file geodatabase).

Finally, I have been begging for Alteryx to have the ability to read and write to an ESRI file geodatabase, which seems to never come to fruition.  This SQLite solution would eliminate my need to write out to file geodatabases.
 

We have a number of clients now using Exasol databases and they would like to connect Alteryx to this data source.  There is currently some difficulty connecting using Alteryx and so it would be good if this could be fully tested please.

This appears to be a bug with either the Layout Tool or the Render Tool. When I setup two Tables using the Horizontal Layout Tool and export to Excel using the Render tool, the font size of the bottom-right cell of the first table is too large. No amount of changing the font properties within the Alteryx Reporting tools appears to fix this.

 

It would be very powerful to be able to multi-thread batch macros. Since the data for each batch is known and unrelated between batches, it seems like the processing of each batch could be distibuted to multiple processors without issue. This could dramatically increase performance in certain situations.

It would be great if we could output the coefficients of regression equation to a table so that one can use them in rest of the module. Currently, Alteryx can output the table/coefficients in charts/reports form which is not re-usable as such in the module. 
The values of coefficients/Residuals/Errors would be very useful in building macros for techniques like Missing Value Analysis which can't be done in Alteryx as of now.

Possibility to deselect fields directly in the input (shape, csv, tab, etc).

 

It would be useful to have the count of rows show up under Browse icons once a module was run.  While debugging, I often have a number of Browse icons scattered about.  It would be nice if I didn't have to click on each to see how many records made it that far.

Thanks!

Probably a small request, but please consider updating the Output and Browse tool icons so they are easier to tell apart from one another.

When working with large modules, I often need to update Output paths or make sure I'm not overwriting data, and the two tool icons are so similar they are hard to pick out.

Thanks!

Both of these can be partially accomplished with the output of the directory tool:

- List Directories - Summarize unique list of directories from the directory tool output

- Exclude Paths - use filter tool to exlude files or directories based on patterns

 

 However, here are some scenarios that aren't addressed cleanly:

- Directories are not listed unless there is a file contained within.  The tool is called Directory, but it only lists files.  The directory has to be non-empty to be listed.  An option is needed to either list files and/or directories (including empty optionally)

- I can't figure out whether the file specification is a wildcard expansion only or supports regular expression for inclusion/exclusion. I see in the File Browse tool that you can list multiple formats e.g. Text Files (*.txt)|*.txt|All Files (*.*)|*.*.  Here is a use case where this is required.  Our network shares have Windows file restore snapshots stored in a ~snapshot directory.  We don't want the directory tool to traverse this directory (because it literally takes hours to scan), but there isn't an elegant way to exclude it.  If you filter it from the directory tool output, it's already scanned it. What we've done is generate the top-level directory list outside of the tool and fed it into a macro that has a directory tool (with sub-directory scanning enabled) inside. 

- Another way to address this specific scenario woudl be to have an option to exclude traversal of "hidden" folders.  But a more generic approach is ideal.