Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

When you get an error message in an R tool it's almost impossible for a newbie to figure out what has just happened...

For eg. the normal R package randomForest sets 32 as a max number of classes for a given class variable

Thus when you happen to run randomForest on anything with > 32 classes you get an error, imposssible to figure out without searching on the net or better surfing on the community.

How about a basic rules checker providing message on the configs sayin;

"X" and "Y" variables are categoric and have more than 32 classes,

you have to fix thembefore running an RF tool in order to succeed"

It would be great if we users could have the ability, ideally in a simple interface (maybe workflow option) to create .yxi macro installers. This would allow us to create and really simple, quick and straightforward way on installing macros in Alteryx rather than having to copy into certain directories or add through the user settings.

I know we can edit the XML on @AdamR_AYX CREW Macro installers etc. but this would make it really simple for single macros.

I'm assume this might already be on the road map, but will be useful to discuss.

YXI Files Intro Blog: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Engine-Works-Blog/YXI-Files-in-Alteryx-10-5/ba-p/20773

Discussed briefly on Twitter by @Joe_Lipski, @chris_love @jdunkerley79 @danielbrun2 but probably better to bring the discussion here: https://twitter.com/Joe_Lipski/status/811907135516852224

Can you look at improving the table tool? something to look at:

1.  background/alternate color off or none so we don't have any fill color in Excel
2. Table header alignment option vertical AND horizontal - different from row alignment.
3. make it dynamic for rules - so if _currentfieldname contains 'percent' then back ground color =yellow, if contains 'Rank' then green etc. Split between header & data. I know it could be accomplished with a macro and xml but that's a tedious process and having it in the tool just makes sense.

Thanks!

simon

I utilize the Workflow Events quite a bit, but the standard options fall short in a few critical cases.

For example: I use the events to send me an email after the workflow runs with errors.

Usually that is all I need.  But, I have run into a few situations where the workflow didn't run at all - thus, no email was sent.

One such instance was on our server.  While still initializing (before it even hit tool #1) the job hung.  It sat like that for over a day before I noticed that there were no jobs running through a particular worker at all and saw this one sitting there. 

A second such instance was recently when I changed Persistence Options and accidentally deleted the source for a scheduled job.  The workflow marked itself complete in the scheduler and gave an error message of "Corrupt: Internal Error in PersistenceContainer......"

I realize that these are unexpected events and application errors (which I've worked with support on); but it would add great value to have that fallback mechanism to let us know the error happened.

Understandably, it would probably take a lot of work to engineer a schedule monitor that would catch this - but I think it would be worthwhile.

One option to do this: have an Event to email or run a command if a workflow hasn't started within a certain grace period after its scheduled time.

Ideas:

1. In the workspace (i.e. the white space) the perimeter is not fixed so when working with tool containers near a border and you place a tool inside the container the container expands outside the workspace, which makes the container useless since you can't select it
2. The ability to disable multiple tool containers at once

 R

We have a large SAS Programming team that keeps most of thier data sets in a Unix environment. A more robust ODBC connection to this data would greatly enhance our use of Alteryx. The current SAS odbc Driver tends to lock Alteryx up. Creating edits to the connection also tends to lock ateryx up to an unrecoveable point.

I have reviewed a number of batch macros that work well for mirroring the "NetworkingDays" excel calculation but it would be great to add an interval type for "weekdays" to the DateTimeDiff formula ie

 DateTimeDiff ( [Date01],[Date02], "WorkDays")  where any Saturday or Sunday between the dates would be discounted.

Hi!

For a improved presentation of the GUI elements (Inteface Tools), may be to use for an Analytic App.

It would be great if it were possible to position the Interface Tools also side by side, instead of one above the other.

Best regards

Mathias

Hi

While the download tool, does a great job, there are instances where it fails to connect to a server. In these cases, there is no download header info that we can use to determine if the connection has failed or not. 

Currently the tool ouputs a failure message to the results window when such a failure occurs. 

Having the 'failed to connect to server' message coming into the workflow in real time would allow for iterative macro to re-try. 

Thanks

Gavin

It would be nice to have a function similar to IsEmpty() that would also return true if the string only contained spaces. Of course the simple work around is to Trim() inside IsEmpty(). Just trying to save a few keystrokes and remove a failure mode if you forgot to Trim()...

ken

(Not sure i have posted this in the correct spot)

Hi,

I get a lot of adhoc requests where the insturctions are in the actual email. As I'm going through the ask, creating the new workflow, the requester will mention "column C" or "column XY", but I'm viewing the data in Alteryx where that doesn't show. So I have to open the Excel file, find the column, get the name, go back to Alteryx to locate the column I need, run the module but get an error/no results because I forgot to close the Excel file (because the module is using the same file I just opened to validate which column I'm using).

It would be really cool to have an Option in the Input tool to add the Excel column lettering and numbering to show (Ex, Column A, B, C, D going left to right, Row 1, 2, 3, going top to bottom). This would just be visually showing it, not adding it to the data (because then you would lose the actual column names). If this can be done, it would be equally as useful in the Browse tool view. Have a great day!

As of Version 10.6, Alteryx supports connecting to ESRI File GeoDatabases from the input tool but it doesnt support writing to a geodatabase.  This is something we would really like to see implemented in a future version of Alteryx.  Those of us working with ESRI products and/or any of the ESRI online mapping systems can do our processing in Alteryx and store large files as YXDBs, but ultimately need our outputs for display in ArcOnline to be in shapefile or geodatabase feature class format. Shapefile have a size limit of 2 GBs and limitation on field name sizes. Many of the files we are working with are much larger than this and require geodatabases for storage which are not limited by size (GDB size is unlimited, 1 TB max per feature class) and have larger field name widths (160 chars).  Right now, we have to write to one (or many) shapefile(s) from Alteryx, then import them into a GDB using ArcMap or ArcPy.  This can be an arduous process when working with large amounts of data or multiple files.

The latest ESRI API allows both read and write access to GDBs -- is there a way we can add this to the list of valid output formats in Alteryx?

This idea is an extension of an older idea:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/ESRI-File-Geodatabase/idi-p/1424

Right now, logging of workflows is either on or off and when on is directed to a single location.

Current logging setting

I think it would be useful to have control over logging in the Runtime settings for a workflow.

Either as an enable/disable checkbox that uses the logging directory (above)

Disable Logging with check box

Or as a more fully featured option where logging output folders could be specified:

Disable Logging Full Featured

We're currently using Regex and text to columns to parse raw HTML as text into the appropriate format when web scraping, when a tool to at least parse tables would be hugely beneficial.

This functionality exists within Qlik so it would be nice to have this replicated in Alteryx.

Obviously, we need to retain the ability to scrape raw HTML, but automatically parsing data using the <td>, <th> and <tr> tags would be nice.

In the following page there is a table showing the states and territories of the US:

With Qlik, you can input the URL and it will return the available tables in tabular format:

As this functionality exists elsewhere it would be nice to incorporate this into Alteryx.

Pet Hate... When i re-enable a container, it opens up the container... 

Would be great if the default is do not open on re-enable... 

cheers

As Tableau has continued to open more APIs with their product releases, it would be great if these could be exposed via Alteryx tools.

One specifically I think would make a great tool would be the Tableau Document API (link) which allows for things like:

- Getting connection information from data sources and workbooks (Server Name, Username, Database Name, Authentication Type, Connection Type)

- Updating connection information in workbooks and data sources (Server Name, Username, Database Name)

- Getting Field information from data sources and workbooks (Get all fields in a data source, Get all fields in use by certain sheets in a workbook)

For those of us that use Alteryx to automate much of our Tableau work, having an easy tool to read and write this info (instead of writing python script) would be beneficial.  

It would be great if there was a way for the Text to Columns tool did not drop the last empty when using Split to Rows.

For example, if I had the data:

Notice that each value has two commas (representing three values per cell), and If I configure to split into rows on the comma character, what would you expect the result to be:

Result A:

OR

Result B:

OR

Result C:

I would expect Result C if I selected "Skip Empty Fileds", and that is what happens if I select that option.

But If I do not want to skip empty fields, I would expect Result B, but what I get is Result A where the last value/field is dropped/skipped.

What would it take to Result B as the output from the Text to Columns tool?

The regular filter tool is great because I get the true and false returns. When doing ad-hoc analytics it would be super helpful if the date filter did the same thing.

In the example below, I had to create an "IF" statement that returned a T/F value and then fitler out based on the output of that formula.

We are running into errors on our scheduler if we have multipe workflows with the Publish to Tableau server macro running at the same time. The macro writes to a local yxdb file with a fixed naming convention and is locked if another workflow is using it at the same time.  We like to see if the cached filename TableauServer.Selection.ServerSite.yxdb can be made somehow unique.  

Error experience: 

Talking with support this is a known issue and needs Macro enhancement.