Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hello!
I like to annotate my workflows when finished, and it can be a bit of a pain to add more and more comment tools by searching for them, or going through the current right-click menu:

What would be nice is the option to right click anywhere on the canvas, and have the option of 'add comment', similar to how we have the option for 'add container' when selecting tools on the canvas.

Cheers!

When using the transpose and cross tab tools, I find that I frequently need to reorder the columns selected in the "Key Columns" and "Group data by these values" sections of the tools respectively by using a select tool. It would be helpful to provide users with the ability reorder fields displayed in these tools similar to the functionality provided in the select, join, append, summarize tools etc. Currently the tools default to outputting these columns in the order they come in through the incoming data stream. 

Creating .yxi files currently is a manual and a bit of a fiddly process. It would be great to just have an option in the menu to click which would auto package the macro into a tool installer file.

When switching modes sometimes it reboots and looses all the code:

Need an option in the output tool(Delete and append option is selected) so that if some error occur while writing into the table. workflow would automatically gets back to original record count. Right now if the workflow fails we are seeing zero records in the output table.

When working with .flat files, the actual Data file selection (Option #5) is a text input field.

Can we have a File Selection control here?

I think it's going to be easier than writing the whole path for a file.

Thanks!

Hello Alteryx folks!

I think it would be awesome to be able to dynamically rename headers right in the Table tool so that the headers can stay in their intended position. For instance, if you use a Dynamic Rename tool, the Table tool will put the new "unknown" column at the end of the output. We have the ability to rename and add formulas to the fields, but we cannot do the same with the headers.

Thanks!

Please asses the value of having hdf5 as data input. A possible workflow could be:

HDF5 => | Processing tasks |  => export to Tableau (.tde) or Qlik (.qnx) => vizualisation workflows

Thank you.

Regards,

Cristian.

When opening an Alteryx workflow that has been saved in a newer version, a warning message is shown, but you are still able to open the workflow, provided that it doesn't contain tools that don't exist in your current Alteryx version.

This does not work for packaged workflows that contain macros, for instance. You have to manually edit the xml of the extracted package file.

It would be great if we could have the same ability with packaged workflows that exists for normal workflows, i.e. the ability to extract and execute them with a warning.

I am aware there are posts on this in the community and that there is a macro available to do this on the public gallery, however I think this is such important functionality that it should be incorporated into the main product.  I want to be able to join 2 data sources by a date range.  In SQL the code would look like this:

select ric.*,map.*
from
Staging.TicksHourlySummary ric
LEFT OUTER JOIN Reference.ReutersInstrumentCodeMap map
on (
ric.#RIC = map.ReutersInstrumentCode
and ric.[Datetime] >= map.EffectiveFromDate
and ric.[Datetime] < map.EffectiveToDate

)

'%userprofile%\documents' in file explorer will return 'C:\Users\username\Documents' It would be very useful if Alteryx would allow the %Path% syntax. When using One Drive or SharePoint often the user name has to come first which if you are sharing workflows will be different every time. This would solve this problem very cleanly.

hello!
Currently when using any spatial data or tool, by default, i have to select a reference base map each time:

This can be confusing for new users - as they may not realise within the browse tool (and other spatial tools) that you have to select this, especially with it being such a small setting at the top of the browse tool.

Now this can be solved by going into the User Settings, and changing this in the default settings:

However as mentioned, for new users this really isn't clear, and can be a roadblock in development. It would be fantastic if Alteryx defaulted the reference base map to Alteryx Light (or, any of them, other than [None]) to make these tools useable out of the box.

Thanks,
TheOC

@NicoleJ recently asked a question about what default save options that we might want to apply to when we save to SERVER.  I'll answer for both SERVER and to DESIGNER here as ideas.

SERVER:  When I save a workflow to the server, I'd like to have Alteryx automagically do the following:

1.  Respect my CANCEL RUNNING WORKFLOW on ERROR default setting.
2. Respect my SHOW MACRO MESSAGES default setting.
3. Respect my Enable Performace Profiling default setting (OFF should be recommended).
4. Respect my AMP Engine Compatibility Mode setting (if AMP is turned on).
5. Modify any non-relative path dependencies to UNC.
6. Respect my DISABLE All TOOLS that WRITE Output default setting.
7. USE GLOBAL Default for Temporary Files

If any settings or rules (e.g. dependencies) don't match default, please WARN me or give option to reset automagically.

For DESIGNER saves, please do the same as SERVER plus:

1.  Respect my DISABLE ALL BROWSE TOOLS setting.

If anyone wants to chime in with more settings, please do so.

Cheers,

Mark

The order of the join fields effects the ordering output

For more complex joins it would be nice to have up and down arrows much like the summarise tool:

It would be helpful if we could open 2 or more workflows at the same time from a gallery connection. Sometimes they are related or part of an overall update process, so opening all of them at the same time would save many clicks and a lot of time. 

It would be nice to have a seed input for the Random % Sample tool. The edited picture above is what it might look like. One input is the seed value, and another input is the data. 

My testing has shown that when a datetime field is input from a Snowflake table, the Input tool will convert the data to reflect the datetime as local time to the machine the workflow is run on. 

For example, this is a data set from a direct query to Snowflake...

This is what is coming out of the Input tool with the machine set to Pacific time...

However when setting the machine to Central time, the results from the Input tool are...

This obviously can wreck havoc with inconsistencies of subsequent reporting off of this data. 

Since Snowflake carries the UTC offset as part of the data, it would be nice to have the ability to disable this "assumption" by Alteryx that the results should convert the datetime to the machine datetime. This way the data could pass through with the datetime values that are held in the database.

Please add an option to set datatype on import tools.

This would be the same feature as a select tool, but build into the input tool.

E.G if you read several excel files with dynamic input, you can get an error because of different schemas (lets say a cell is read as text in one sheet, and the same cell is read as a number in another sheet).

So there's a shortcut for running a workflow but for the life of me I can't seem to find a shortcut for running a workflow as an analytic app.  Surely there should be one? 

Ctrl + Shift + R seems like an obvious choice.

Shifty