Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi All,

It would be a given wherein IT would have invested effort and time building workflows and other components using some of the tools which became deprecated with the latest versions.

It is good to have the deprecated versions still available to make the code backward compatible, but at the same time there should be some option where in a deprecated tool can be promoted to the new tool available without impacting the code.

Following are the benefits of this approach -

1) IT team can leverage the benefits of the new tool over existing and deprecated tools. For e.g. in my case I am using Salesforce connectors extensibly, I believe in contrast to the existing ones the new ones are using Bulk API and hence are relatively much faster.

2) It will save IT from reconfiguring/recoding the existing code and would save them considerable time.

3) As the tool keeps forward moving in its journey, it might help and make more sense to actually remove some of the deprecated tool versions (i.e. I believe it would not be the plan to have say 5 working set of Salesforce Input connectors - including deprecated ones). With this approach in place I think IT would be comfortable with removal of deprecated connectors, as they would have the promote option without impacting exsiting code - so it would ideally take minimal change time.

In addition, if it is felt that with new tools some configurations has changed (should ideally be minor), those can be published and as part of
promotions IT can be given the option to configure it.

Thanks,

Rohit Bajaj

So, best practice is to add annotations - so how many times have you seen an annotation that says 

"This filters for column y" and then it's been changed to something else in the meantime.  

Alteryx provides some default annotations, but wouldn't it be amazing if those metadata fields were available in an easy way to include in your own annotations

I imagine this working like so:

On an input tool:

"The file {filename} comes in from Joe in accounts every Tuesday and is currently {rows} big."

Filter tool

"This filters out the salaries above 100k with the formula {expression}"

Join

"I join using the {fields} fields rather than the typical key because the key isn't well populated"

Union

"I combine {IncomingNames} sets"

Formula

"The expression {expression1} calculates the exposure then {expression2} converts to bps."

Input, SQL Server

"The data source {databasename} is owned by Joe Soap in Investment"

Suddenly it makes sense to use annotations, and they don't lie (as easily) and mislead you into believing something other than the inherent logic, but with flexibility to select which bits of the metadata of the tool make sense to you.

Alteryx must have this functionality under the hood with the auto annotation, and this just provides better flex for that.

If you copy a text box named ClientCode to another workflow, the name of the box will be reset to text box(#) in that new workflow. That can be a snag if the workflow the text box is contained in is deployed to gallery as an app that is ran via the gallery API... the API parameters will be looking for a text box named ClientCode but is now named text box(#). This happens almost in the background without the developer knowing they have renamed the text box and the ES eventually failing. This can be annoying; it would be great if the name were inhereted. 

If you copy a text box named ClientCode to another workflow, the name of the box will be reset to text box(#) in that new workflow. That can be a snag if the workflow the text box is contained in is deployed to gallery as an app that is ran via the gallery API... the API parameters will be looking for a text box named ClientCode but is now named text box(#). This happens almost in the background without the developer knowing they have renamed the text box and the ES eventually failing. This can be annoying; it would be great if the name were inhereted. 

Hi, All!

Alteryx' interface is currently in English, but Alteryx' help is available not only in English, but also in French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese.

I would like to suggest there could be a way to select which language help should appear.

As a Brazilian reseller of Alteryx, it would be a great deal to us if I can configure help to be automatically loaded in Brazilian Portuguese.

Currently there is no way of doing this. Alteryx help simply cames in English, there is no choice in here.

Likewise, it would be beneficial to users in France and Germany as well.

During development it seems the syntax checker or whatever process runs behind the scenes after a tool is modified reviews the full workflow. 

Ex - Just from observation if I modify the file name in an output tool I don't see why it would rerun the full syntax check process.

This reduce the time waiting to continue development.

In SQL, obtaining partial sums in a grouped aggregation is as simple as adding "WITH ROLLUP" to the GROUP BY clause.

Could we get a "WITH ROLLUP" checkbox in the Summary Tool's confg panel in order to produce partial sums?

(This was initiated as a question here.)

Here is an example of without rollup vs. with rollup, in SSMS:

(Replacing "NULL" with the phrase "(any)" or some such, and we have a very useful set of partial sums.

Would love for the text areas in the configuration window to allow for a Find/Replace text search. Especially useful if you have long/nested/complex calcs that reference the same field multiple times and then you change that field's name or want to replicate the same formula for another field.

It would be great if we could make use of HTML5, in the same way the new formula tool will, by enabling autocomplete in all relevant tools - Filter, Multi-Row/Multi-Field Formula etc...

Alteryx should really get into the business of having a metadata management tool integrated into the UI.

We recently started training new users with Alteryx, making it more widespread than the few (less than 10) that already had it.  The good and bad of Alteryx is that it really allows us the power to do work we've never done before.  That also means that we've not had to worry too much about resource contention before either.  But with great power comes great responsibility and now we do need to think find a way to manage this power.

There are some good new ideas out there that use the concept of cloud-sourced data governance (specifically, I just checked out Alation).  But why should we have to go to two separate platforms then to examine our data? 

I already know that if I have to spend more time switching back and forth between two platforms to get the same job done with greater care will result in many people taking shortcuts.  Why couldn't this or something like it be integrated into Alteryx?

Would like to direclty query Hyperion Cube / Essbase data source directly - please propose functionality in next release or add a user macro to the gallery.  Thanks -cb

When using horizontal layout the status messages can overlap those of other tools meaning % progress can't be read:

Status labels would be better placed above the tools, not to the right.

I'm curently creating  an app using interface tools to control multiple worklflows.  It would be nice if I didnt have to physically drag the interface tool to the recceiving node.  For example, right now I can click on the Left node of a join tool and it gives me the option to make connections to that tool or out of that tool wireless.  It would be nice if I could right click and have an option to select from a list of interface tool incoming connections.

Ok the time has come to expand functionality in the record ID tool. I would like the ability to restart the counter based on a field (e.g zip code). You can do it quickly in Tableau (see image) so why not have this functionality readily available in Alteryx? Sure, you can already do it in Alteryx - the long way - with the generate rows tool, look at previous/active row with certain condition and do +1 or something like that.

Having a simple restart counter in Record ID tool just makes sense. It's intuitve to have it there, and it's easier to use than generate rows tool. IMHO also easy to develop by Alteryx and +1 for Alteryx in gartner magic quadrant! 

Need to allow Aliases to work with the Google Sheets Input / Output tools, so that I can input API keys in one place to service multiple tools.  I know I can do this via Macros, but I also know it's best practice to avoid nesting macros.

Hi all,

I often feel like workflows can easily become overly cluttered with Browses, especially around Join and other multi-output tools. I need to see the output of most of the data streams, so I can't necessarily just delete the Browses and be done with them (as I'll like need to see them over and over again).

To solve this problem, Alteryx could potentially add a "nested browse" view or tool. I've attached a picture to show what I mean. This would unclutter the area right after multi-output tools significantly.

What are your thoughts? Have I missed any neat trick or functionality that can already do something like this?

Nested Browse View Idea

Frequently with more complicated tool configurations I end up having to setup certain elements over and over again.  Would be great to have a one click "use this as the default" configuration that would follow my profile and apply to all future drags of that tool onto the workflow.  Configuration elements that depend on the input fields would not be impacted.

Also an apply all feature to apply the similar configuration elements to all tools of the same tool type.

Example Configuration Elements

Comment Tool - Shape, Font, text Color, Background Color, Alignment...

Tool Container - Text Color, fill color , border color, transparency, margin

Table Tool - Default Table Settings

Union Tool - "Auto config by name", Actions when fields differ

Data Clensing - all configuration elements

Sample - all configuration elements

Would be extremely useful if the Summarize Tool had an option in the numeric menu to Standardize the data.  More often than not, data sets will not have the same count of variables which makes the comparison analysis meaningless.  Currently, there is no easy way to Standardize the data without using the K-Centroids Cluster Analysis tool or standardize_unit interval supporting macro. 

All the tools in the interface should be populated and assigned/selected with dynamic values.

Now we have the option of populating a set of values for Tree/List/Dropdown.

But we do not have the selecting some of them by default / while its loading.

And Other controls like TextBox/NumericUpDown/CheckBox/RadioButton also should be controlled by values from database.

For example If I have a set of three radio buttons, I should be selecting a radio button based on my database values while the workflow loading.