Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Allow users to add in a string attribute to the Dependency Macro Path.  Currently, to change the version of the macro you have to change the Macro Path by hand.  Adding this will allow the path to be changed by environment usage or anything else the user would like.

Making changes to the environment requires a new deployment.  This would remove the need to move the workflow based on the dependencies.

It would be really valuable to add more configuration to the Sort tool. I very rarely need to sort my string data alphabetically, I usually want to sort by the data in a specific column. Like the group by function in the summarise tool, but I don't want to summarise it. Please add a custom sort section, where you can select the column and organise by chosen order. 

Example:
I'm making a very basic workflow to sort the Alteryx weekly challenges in order of certification level first, then difficulty level second. I want Foundation > Core > Advanced, then within these I want Basic > Intermediate > Difficult > Expert. I'm planning on adding a column with an if statement (if Basic then 1, if intermediate then 2...) then sorting, but this seems a convoluted way of doing a relatively simple thing. Ideally, I'd like to be able to Sort by Data: select the column, and select the data options (or type them in manually) within the Sort tool.

I have recently started using blobs, and I've noticed that when I select 'Disable all tools that write output' that the blob output is not disabled. 

Could it be included in the tools that are disabled please?

@caltang thanks for supporting this.

Thanks

PuffinPanic

DecomposeUnicodeForMatch removes diacritics and changes the case to lower case which is in deed useful for comparing strings.

I have two proposals:

Add support for German and other languages

In German language, umlauts are replaced by the character + an "e" rather than just removing the dots, i.e., "ä" → "ae", "ö" → "oe", etc. And, the sharp s (sz ligature) is replaced by "ss": "ß" → "ss". Both replacements are not being done by DecomposeUnicodeForMatch.

Proposal: Add an optional argument:

DecomposeUnicodeForMatch([String], [Language] = "default")

if [Language] = "default" or omitted, standard behaviour is selected.

if [Language] = "de" or "German", replacements "ä" → "ae", "ö" → "oe", "ß" → "ss" etc. are applied

Other new replacements would be good, e.g. for "Œ", "œ", "Ø", "ø", "Æ", "æ", e.g., for Danish or French. Native speakers should advice the correct replacements.

Switch off case change

A second optional argument could be added to switch off the case change and to preserve uppercase characters:

DecomposeUnicodeForMatch([String], [Language] = "default", [Preserve Case] = 0)

The Text Input tool and Macro Input tool with text input determine the output data type based on the input data by best guess. This works in many cases, but also frequently results in incorrect data. This might be fixed with a subsequent Select tool in many cases but not always, e.g., if "1.00" is first converted to Double, the desired string "1.00" results in "1" instead (no chance to go back to the original input).

Current situation:

What if Column 1 should be Bool? Or Column 2 should be String, preserving the exact input? What if Column 4 needs to be longer?

Proposal: Add possibility to select Type and Size in the Text Input dialog:

Please add a column for the "Tool Name" to the Control Container metadata output.  

This would help greatly in finding the log lines that matter!

 - Add "ToolName" Column to above list of messages

As shown in the results here

And the Annotation window here

I wanted to report an issue with the TRIM function in Alteryx and suggest an enhancement. When you use TRIM(string, '.0'), it does remove the .0 at the end, but it also removes the zero from the integer. For example:

• 23.0 → 23 (correct)
• 20.0 → 2 (incorrect)

Allow for replacement of configuration values in the SharePoint Output Tool version 2.7.5. In previous versions of the tool, we could update configuration values (such as output path) in the tool by passing desired replacement values through a control parameter tool (plus action tool) within a macro. Currently, we are not able to do so with the latest version of the tool + DCM connections. This works for the 2.7.5 SharePoint Input tool, so I'd think it would be somewhat simple to add this functionality to the output tool as well. It's important to note that we are aware of the ability to dynamically change file name through the tool itself. This does not solve our issue as we want to update folders within the full path, not just the file name.

When a workflow is saved to the gallery and validation fails, the workflow is saved locally instead of the gallery without notification. If the user doesn't notice it and closes the workflow thinking it was saved back to the gallery, all changes are lost. 

Even if the user notices that the workflow was saved locally not the gallery, it is annoying to get it fixed. One have to save the workflow again to the gallery, creating a duplicate, then replace the original workflow with the new one so the schedules are not affected.

A couple times I lost hours of work because of this. 
I opened the workflow from the gallery, worked on it, saving it regularly without noticing I was not saving the workflow to the gallery. Then I closed the worklfow and days or weeks later, when users started complaining about the expected changes I realized the work was lost.

I suggest showing a dialogue if saving workflow to the gallery was not successful. 
I recommend three options to chose from:

- Try again

- Save without validation

- Save locally

Hello Together,

I have the following situation:

I have a workflow which is used in many different collections because of different users, regions etc,

Depending on the collection name from which the WF was started I would like to have different start parameters, different defaults for interface settings, use formulars, filters etc., having a system constant like [Engine.WorkflowFileName] but as [Engine.WorkflowCollectionName] would be great!

At the moment, I need to save the WF n-times just because of different settings instead of having just one working dynamically depending on the Collection name. Would save a lot of admin time just changing one WF instead of n!.

In case of any questions, pls. go ahead and get in touch with me!

My company is moving off of network drives into the cloud. There is currently no tool that can write an Excel file into SharePoint with a header snippet, with formatting or with multiple Excel sheets like the Render tool. I don't know how I can remediate my existing workflows without such a tool.  

Curently the yxdb python library is not a pre installed library as per alteryx to allow python to read yxdb files. This should be done to make it easier to read yxdb tools within the python tool in Alteryx, or have a function built in the alteryx library to allow teh same functionality 

While Alteryx Designer's Input Tool will correctly presume that DateTime values from a SQL Server query are indeed DateTime types, it does not correctly presume that DATE type values should remain as Date types.  Instead, they are currently interpreted as Strings.  While downstream tools, such as Select, Formula, and DateTime can transform the types, this can impact run times.  I suggest that the Input Tool do correct interpretation of Date types in the origin data set.

Joins are a vital part to any analysis.  Relating data together is the backbone of bringing data together.  Currently the Join Tool allows the relating of one or many data fields that are assigned to be equal to each other (aka Equi-Join).

As creativity evolves and users aspire to construct more complex relationships, Non-Equi relationships become more prevalent.  What are Non-Equi relationships?  Simply put, they are Non-Equal.  Examples:

• Field_A  <  Field_B
• Field_C  >  Field_D
• Field_E  <=  Field_F
• Field_G  >=  Field_H
• Field_I  !=  Field_J

Non-Equi relationships are especially useful when working with dates that fall within a range of dates contained within two other fields.

• Example:  Target_Date BETWEEN Low_Date AND High_Date

Currently, to accomplish this, there are a couple options:

1. Generate Rows:

• You can use the Generate Rows Tool and fill in the range of values
• Then use the traditional Equi-Join matching the generated date to the Target_Date
• And persist only the INNER join stream
  
  Lots of tools to accomplish a "simple" task

<or>

2.  Cartesian Join:

• You can use the Append Tool to replicate every Target_Date onto every row containing the Low_Date and High_Date fields
• Filter where the appended Target_Date is between the Low_Date and High_Date
  
  Memory intensive, creating many unnecessary data rows, and may ultimately not work with large datasets

A simple solution, or alternative, would be to enhance the existing Join Tool to allow for choice in the "Join by Specific Fields" configuration section.  For example:

Adding in a drop-down menu per field pairing, the additional Non-Equi options could be added.  Equal would be the default, but users could otherwise pick the relationship type to accomplish the same "between" condition.

Here's a zoomed image of the look and feel:

The benefit is a much simpler configuration within the workflow, avoiding extra tools and creating a bunch of extra data rows that aren't relevant to the result.

If you're reading this and would like to see this enhancement to the JOIN Tool, consider a quick click on the like button.  It helps ideas like this get more exposure and lets Alteryx know this is important to you!

Cheers and thanks for taking the time to consider this idea!  -Jay (jrlindem)

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Acknowledgements:

It's important for me to point out that this isn't the first time this idea has been posted.  There are others that share the sentiment for both Non-Equi Joins as well as other enhancements to the join tool.  Here are two other, older, ideas that share some of the same needs:

• Conditional Joins in Alteryx - Alteryx Community
• Various enhancements to Join Tool - Alteryx Community

My company still uses .xls files regularly due to the older systems we use. I will need to run a macro or directly save the .xls files as .xlsx before running workflows. This is annoying and not necessary likely for Alteryx to continue to progress.

We can Cache and Run Workflow for individual input tools now. Why not let there be a default option to just do it automatically? Or a Run & Cache feature next to Run?

Submitting this idea from a different category as I couldn't find an appropriate category.

I think that it is important to have an offline documentation in either PDF or HTML format (or both) with each major release (or minor release where new features are introduced, such as Alteryx Designer 2025.1.2) for at least the on-prem products (such as Designer and Server) for the use cases or scenarios where either internet connectivity might be limited or non-existent or the user might want to access a part of the documentation quickly (especially in PDF format though searching from the index, where one wouldn't have to navigate between web pages).

It would be great to have the new expression editor in the Interface tools such as Action and Error Message to have the modern expression editor, not only for highlighting and autocomplete but also the "preview result for the first row" (which is the only row when you are writing an expression for an Interface tool.

I think that the addition of this feature is especially necessary because of the "Update Raw XML with Formula" feature, which requires you to clearly be able to see the output of your formula, which in turn usually requires you to first test the XML in a separate workflow with a Text Input tool.

While JSON Parse tool is useful for processing data, it is possible that a name corresponding to a JSON value may contain a period (.) symbol and this can be problematic when you are dealing with a nested JSON value, as Alteryx automatically uses the period character as a delimiter for the JSON_Name column.

I would like to propose an enhancement where the user can select the delimiter the JSON_Name column would be created with, allowing the user to select a character not used in the names for the JSON values, therefore eliminating the need to take extra steps (like finding each name with a period and/or writing specialized RegEx patterns) for dealing with the names that contain a period.