Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I'm adding a 'Dynamic Input' tool to a macro that will dynmaically build the connection string based on User inputs. We intend to distribute this macro as a 'Connector' to our main database system.

 

However, this tool attempts to connect to the database after 'fake' credentials are supplied in the tool, returning error messages that can't be turned off.

 

In situations like this, I think you'd want the tool to refrain from attempting connections. Can we add a option to turn off the checking of credentials? I assume that others who are building the connection strings at runtime would also appreciate this as well.

 

As a corollary, for runtime connection strings, having to define a 'fake' connection in the Dynamic Input tool seems redundant, given we have already set the 'Change Entire File Path' option. There are some settings in the data connection window that are nice to be able to set at design time (e.g. caching, uncommitted read, etc.), but the main point of that window to provide the connection string is redundant given that we intend to replace it with the correct string at runtime. Could we make the data connection string optional?

 

To combine the above points, perhaps if the connection string is left blank, the tool does not attempt to connect to the connection string at runtime.

We would like to see more configuration options for renders to PowerPoint PPT. Specifically, we would like to be able to add headers, footers, and repeat column headers in the same way we can with PDF renders.

 

Refer to this unresolved question:

Powerpoint as an output of macro

 

@jaq734; @Prasanna921

Probably more of a bug. Not sure if this annoyes anyone else, but when a running workflow in a different tab completes, the current windows focus is gone, even you have the pop-up notification disabled. Check the video and see what happens at 0:11 when tab 105 finishes running while I'm typing a super complicated code 😉

 

Would be great if when copying and pasting tools onto the canvas they would appear next to the cursor, instead of near where they are being copied from. On large workflows it's annoying to copy the tool/s, paste, then drag to their new location.

I'm converting some old macros that were built in 8.6 for use in 10.6 and found something that could potentially be changed about the Alteryx .xlsx drivers. Specifically this refers to the field types passed from a Dynamic Input tool when the data fields are blank when using an .xlsx file as the data source template. 

 

When the new .xlsx file has fields populated, it works fine. If data is not populated in the new file, the field types are converted to Double[8]. This doesn’t cause a problem for the Dynamic Input, but it can cause problems for downstream tools. In the second case below, the field names are retained but the downstream Join tool errors when trying to join this now double field to a string (rather than returning no results from the join output as desired). This also occurs when a single field is empty, only that field will be converted to a Double[8] field. When the legacy .xlsx drivers are used, the field types are retained from the data source template.

 

File Source Template vs. file that is returned upon running

       

 

There are other solutions for this scenario such as using a Select tool with a loaded .yxft file of the correct field types, or selecting the Legacy .xlsx drivers from the File Format dropdown when configuring the Dynamic Input. However I thought this is something that could be improved about the Alteryx .xlsx drivers. 

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.