Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

In the community and in mixed teams - it's very common for people to be caught on the error that "This document was created in a more recent version".   Although there are several workarounds (e.g. this one from @WayneWooldridge  here https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Adjusting-Alteryx-Files-for-Different-Versio...), this seems like it may be an easy problem to solve more permanently.

 

Could we add an option to Alteryx to save the file with the lowest compatible version number?

So - for example - if i'm only using components that shipped with version 10, then please mark the file as version 10.   If I've used a tool that shipped in 11.0.6 then that needs to be the version number.

 

This way - files will be back-compatible as far as is possible by default unless using newer components.

 

Many thanks

Sean

We have Alteryx running in AWS which seems to be a common setup.Our AWS instances are set-up with IAM roles which has been one of the security measures applied in order to finally allow our enterprise company to allow some development in the cloud. IT will not allow the sharing of Access keys to connect to S3.

• Would like to use the AWS S3 Tools from the connectors palette as the AWS CLI has limited ability to handle/report exceptions or issues with any detail. At the moment, we are limited on what goes into production as we are using CLI for what we can.
• Ideally, an option would be to add to the S3 Tools allowing the user to select IAM Roles rather than Key Access. Refer the screen attached.

I personally think it would work better to tab from 'Select Column' to 'Enter Expression Here' and not the 'Functions' List as probably people who are tabbing would immediately like to start typing the formula rather than going through functions, fields, etc.

 

 

 

If you forget to put a name on a new column in the formula tool - the error message is 

The field "" is not contained in the record. (Expression #1)

 

Please could you replace this with a user-friendly message which is self descriptive like:

"Please provide a name for the new column created in expression 1"?

 

 

 

When I create a new table in a in-Db workflow, I want to specify some contraints, especially the Primary Key/Foreign Key

 

For PK/FK, the UX could be either the selection of some fields of the flow or a free field (to let the user choose a constant).

From wikipedia :

In the relational model of databases, a primary key is a specific choice of a minimal set of attributes (columns) that uniquely specify a tuple (row) in a relation (table).[a] Informally, a primary key is "which attributes identify a record", and in simple cases are simply a single attribute: a unique id. 

So, basically, PK/FK helps in two ways :
1/ Check for duplicate, check if the value inserted is legit

2/ Improve query plan, especially for join

@AdamR_AYX,

 

Limit conversion warning allows for a minimum of 1 message.  Can we set the minimum to 0 to completely ignore the message?

 

Perhaps we can allow warning messages a similar function as ERROR messages and allow the designer to Ignore, Warn or Cancel?

 

ConvError: Imputation (441): Tool #104: No demand: 0.200000000000031 had more precision than a double. Some precision was lost.

ConvError: Summarize (456): Data: 0.360000000004675 had more precision than a double. Some precision was lost.

 

End: Designer x64: Finished running FP Model - Marquee Crew v3.yxmd in 32.3 seconds with 16 field conversion errors and 4 warnings

 

Thanks,

 

Mark

I would like to specify two points on a map and have Alteryx create a spatial object that represents the best route from one point to another given some parameters such as quickest route, or shortest route.

When a custom (bespoke for @Chrislove) macro is created, I would like the option to create an annotation that goes along with the tool.  This is entirely cosmetic, but might help users to recognize the macro.

 

Thanks,

Mark

Currently if one wants to compare different alteryx files or different versions of the same file - one needs to compare the XML files. If you are not very familiar with navigating XML, this poses a risk as one may not be able to identify all changes.

 

It would be a great addition to Alteryx to integrate Alteryx with Git, Subversion, CVS, Mercurial, and GitHub as this tool is becoming the go-to tool for data processing for data analysts and even programmers.

 

This additional functionality to compare previous versions (diff) and also to merge alteryx workflows if two people are working on the same workflow, and also to easily see what changes have been committed/ made by other developers and when would make Alteryx a much more powerful tool and would open doors to other types of users, as essentially you can run anything through Alteryx.

 

Report text tools currently only give the option to allign left, right or center. Would be great if we could have the option to have a true 'Justify' option also as it makes chunks of text look so much cleaner

Idea:

An Alteryx version for Mac OS X sounded like a nice idea... Although there are options for using bootcamp with windows 7-8

or some virtualisation software as mentioned in a community post here.

 

Rationale 1 (Competitors do it):

First of all there is no need to neglect a customer segment using Mac's.

 

• Rapidminer Studio comes with a dedicated OS X version,
• Knime has Mac OS X support 
• Weka has Mac OS X support as well
• SPSS Modeler is Windows only but SPSS Stats is Mac OS X compatible.

 

Seems SAS was compatable in the last decade, but they dropped it. Now SAS is not OS X compatible but

still with the "SAS OnDemand" version Mac users can easly get a hands on experience.

 

Rationale 2:

The Mac Pro Beast has 7.2 TFlops of computing power with the help of dual ATI graphics cards.

It would be awesome to install Alteryx on one... 

 

Hello,

 

I work for a company with circa 250K employees. We are in the process of shifting all documents over to OneDrive and I've noticed that when I have an Alteryx workflow that uses inputs stored on OneDrive the connection can be very intermittent. I use the UNC file naming protocol for my input/directory tools, but more often than not I need to run a VBA script that accesses OneDrive before Alteryx tools will connect.

 

There's a couple of posts on this community about this, but nothing in the ideas board. I believe the SharePoint connector is being updated for v11, but nothing for OneDrive.

 

I'd like there to be better integration to OneDrive for business and SharePoint Online please.

 

Thanks,

John.

 

Assuming some source control or versioning is in place, a formal compare tool would be a nice addition. This would be useful for determining what is different between two versions of a workflow, and that knowledge is very useful when modifying a production process: when formally moving a new (modified) process into production, part of the checks and balances would be to run a formal comparison against the workflow being replaces, and ensure that all differences are accounted for.

 

This sort of audit is notoriously difficult when the differences are buried deep in the configuration settings of various tools within Alteryx.  I do see that the .yxmd files are XML based, so perhaps we could create our own compare tool based thereon, but it would be better (more trustworthy) to have one formally provided by Alteryx.  Thanks!

 

Thanks you to @JoeM for recent training on macros, and @NicoleJohnson for pointing out some of the challenges.

 

when writing an iterative macro - it is a little bit difficult to debug because when you run this in designer mode, it only does one iteration and stops.

Could we add the capability to the designer itself to be able to run the second and third iteration using the test data built into the macro input tool?   Even something as simple as an option to run X iterations; or when it's run the first iteration allow me to look at what happened and trigger iteration 2 (or to trigger a run-through to completion) would be immensely helpful.

 

While you can do this with a test-flow wrapped around a macro, macro development is a bit of a black box because Alteryx doesn't natively have the ability to step into a macro during run-time and pause it to see what's happening on iteration 1 or 2 or n and why it's not terminating etc.   So putting the ability to run in a debug mode would be HUGELY helpful.

Hello,

According to wikipedia :

 

A partition is a division of a logical database or its constituent elements into distinct independent parts. Database partitioning is normally done for manageability, performance or availability reasons, or for load balancing. It is popular in distributed database management systems, where each partition may be spread over multiple nodes, with users at the node performing local transactions on the partition. This increases performance for sites that have regular transactions involving certain views of data, whilst maintaining availability and security. 

 

 

Well, basically, you split your table in several parts, according to a field. it's very useful in term of performance when your workflows are in delta or when all your queries are based on a date. (e.g. : my table helps me to follow my sales month by month, I partition my table by month).

So the idea is to support that in Alteryx, it will add a good value, especially in In-DB workflows.

Best regards,

Simon

Directory Tool retrieves today a lot of information about a file. I must say I appreciate getting easily the size and the last write time.

But why not the owner? I have developped a macro with a powershell to do that but what a nightmare for a so little piece of information.

Hello,

 

Here a use case :

I work on the projects A and B with Alteryx inj IN DB mode.

 

My coworker works only on project B and have no rights to the data of project A.

 

When using temporary table in Alteryx, we both create the temporary tables in the default database. The issue is my coworker can see my temporary data of project A, which is not safe.

Solution : allow me to specify the database/schema when I create my temporary table.

A cahce tool would allow a user to temporarily store a snapshot of inline data from previous run of the module.

Imagine a browse tool that was inline as opposed to a terminus tool (input and output). Now allow that browse tool to persist its data after a run of the module. When an option on that tool was activated, it would block all of the dependent tools upstream from it and instead send its cached data downstream.

The reason I think this would be a useful tool is that I often come to the end of creating a module when I'm working on the Reporting tools. I run multiple times to see the changes I've made. When the module has a lot of incoming data and complex data transformations, it can take a long time just to get to the point where the data gets to the reporting tools. This cache tool would eliminate that wait.

Hello all,

as of today, a join in-db can only be done with an equal operator.

Example : table1.customer_id = table2.customer_id

It's sufficient most of the time. However, sometimes, you need to perform another kind of join operation, (especially with calendar, period_table, etc).

Here an example of clause you can find in existing sql

inner join calendar on calendar.id_year_month between fact.start_period and fact.end_period

 

helping to solve that case :

 

(the turnaround I use to day being : I make a full cartesian product with a join on 1=1 and then I filter the lines for the between)

or <,>, .... et caetera.

It can very useful to solve the most difficult issues. Note that a product like Tableau already offers this feature.

Best regards,

 

Simon