Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Currently the InDB tools require to select a DSN that is defined on your computer.

This makes any workflow which uses a DSN incredibly painful to deploy to the server, since the DSN needs to be created on every worker node and for a large server environment this can  mean creating DSN entries on 6+ worker nodes in prod plus prod server plus dev/UAT environment plus dev/UAT worker nodes.

Could we please change the InDB tools to default to DSN-less connections, where the connection persists the connection details in-line so that it can deploy to the server without a DSN setup (since all connection details are contained within the connection string)?

Thank you

Sean

CC: @rijuthav @jithinmony @HengHe @RajK @ydmuley @revathi @Deeksha @MPistone @Ari_Fuller @Arianna_Fuller @JoshKushner @samnelson @avinashbonu @Sunder_Sriram @Rahul_Thakur @Rahul_Singh

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

Hi there,

Just got a new 4k UHD monitor, and found that Alteryx Designer doesn't scale well in default settings in Windows.    Fonts are blurry but icons are the right size.

If instead you change compatabilty mode to allow the application to force scaling, then the fonts and icons end up all different sizes.

Could you change the fonts and icons to scale gracefully in Windows 10 to full 4k UHD HDR - especially on the large size monitors (30 inch plus)?

Shot 1: default mode - blurry text - badly scaled by Windows 10.    It's not easy to see here because the image is small - but all the text is blurry like a badly blown up BMP file.

Shot 2: Override Windows 10 DPI scaling and set to "Application" mode

You can see in the picture below that text is now super-sharp but the the play button; save button are all tiny; the fonts are different sizes (look in the properties tab on the left) etc.

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

The TO field (and I assume other fields) in the Email tool seem to have a 254 character limit - this should be increased heavily as there are many distribution lists that will go above this character limit!

• Solved: Email tool recipients list truncating emails - Alteryx Community
• Solved: Email Widget: Cut off all the emails in the "To" r... - Alteryx Community
• Re: Email Address Truncated in the "To" Field - Alteryx Community

A distribution list works but is not ideal. Thumbs up if you like this idea!

My organization use the SharePoint Files Input and SharePoint Files Output (v2.1.0) and connect with the Client ID, Client Secret, and Tenant ID. After a workflow is saved and scheduled on the server users receive the error "Failed to connect to SharePoint AADSTS700082: The refresh token has expired due to inactivity" every 90 days. My organization is not able to extend the 90 day limit or create non-expiring tokens.

If would be great if the SharePoint connectors could automatically refresh the token when it expires so users don't have to open the workflow and do it manually.

For the Output tool, File Format of Microsoft Excel (*.xlsx) - the non-Legacy one - it doesn't have the "Delete Data & Append" option that the Legacy ad 97-2003 Excel formats have. 

Having the Delete Data & Append for the most recent version of Excel would be very beneficial. Without it, there does not appear to be a way to udpate an existing Excel sheet using an Alteryx workflow while preserving the formatting within the Excel sheet. The option to Overwrite/Drop removes all formatting. 

I have this workflow refreshing an Excel sheet daily, and then am emailing it to a distribution at the end of the workflow. Unfortunately, right now I have to use the 97-2003 format to preserve the formatting of the Excel sheet when it is automatically refreshed and emailed each day. 

Can you please assess adding this option? Thanks!

Very often, I used a container to make notes about certain parts of the workflow. Some of the comments that I created are pretty long. Could the user have the possibility to have at least rows for the title of the container?

I have created a screen to show what I have in mind. Potentially users could have the ability to turn this option on or inside the container?

Please add xlsx files within the onedrive input/output tool

I would love to see a "Product" option added to the summarize tool. I can currently count, sum, mean etc., but I can't multiply my data while grouping. There are numerous "work arounds", but a native product function built into the summarize tool would be great.

Thanks for listening!

To get simple information from a workflow, such as the name, run start date/time and run end date/time is far more complex than it should be. Ideally the log, in separate line items distinctly labelled, would have the workflow path & name, the start date/time, and end date/time and potentially the run time to save having to do a calculation. Also having an overall module status would be of use, i.e. if there was an Error in the run the overall status is Error, if there was a warning the overall status is Warning otherwise Success.

Parsing out the workflow name and start date/time is challenge enough, but then trying to parse out the run time, convert that to a time and add it to the start date/time to get the end date/time makes retrieving basic monitoring information far more complex than it should be.

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

Sometimes formulas get pretty long. There are cases of deeply nested conditionals, concatenation of long strings, cases where multiple casts and parses are used, etc. where formulas get pretty large and unwieldy. The current system of wrapping lines and managing the size of the properties pane can be a hassle, especially if you are trying to use any sort of whitespace formatting to make the formulas more readable.

My solution is this is pretty simple, add a pop-out window for formulas. It could be a context menu option from right-clicking the formula box itself, a button on the bar at the top of each formula, or any number of other things.

A really good example of this is MS Access. You can right-click any text box that takes an expression and open it in the expression editor pop-up window. The current system is more like excel where you're stuck with whatever box size you're given.

Hi,

     Currently loading large files to Postgres SQL(over 100 MB) takes an extremely long time. For example writing a 1GB file to Postgres SQL takes 27 minutes! This is serious impacting our ability to use Alteryx as an ETL tool for loading our target Postgres Data Warehouse. We would really like to see the bulk load capacity to Postgres supported by Alteryx to help alleviate the performance issues.

Thanks,

Vijaya

Currently there is a function in Alteryx called FindString() that finds the first occurrence of your target in a string. However, sometimes we want to find the nth occurrence of our target in a string. 

FindString("Hello World", "o")  returns 4 as the 0-indexed count of characters until the first "o" in the string. But what if we want to find the location of the second "o" in the text? This gets messy with nested find statements and unworkable beyond looking for the second or third instance of something. 

I would like a function added such that 

FindNth("Hello World", "o", 2) Would return 7 as the 0-indexed count of characters until the second instance of "o" in my string. 

Ability to color the connector lines to symbolize a path or data. This would help when you have multiple sources into a Join to determine that a path is still the same set of data when you have multiple paths created.

Hi GUI Gang

At the moment, I have a lovely formatted XLS with corporate branding, logos, filled cells, borders etc.  The data from the Alteryx output needs to start in cell B6.  I have tried the output tools to this named range, but Alteryx destroys all the Excel formatted cells in the data block.

As a workaround on the forums, many Alteryx users pump out to a hidden "Output" tab, and then code =OutputA1 in the formatted sheet.  This looks messy to the users who then go hunting for the hidden tab.  Personally I end up pumping the workflow out to a temporary CSV file.  Then opening that in Excel, selecting all, and then pasting values in the pretty Excel file.

This is fine for one file, but I need to split the output report block by a country field and do this 100s of time for each month end.

Please can we have a output tool that does the same as my workaround.  Outputs directly from a workflow to a range in Excel that doesnt destroy the workbook's formatting.

Jay