Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I recently did some extensive work on using the download tool to invoke Restful Web Services. A lot of the initial effort was around ensuring that the data being passed in the header and body for the request was as the service required. Following review of experiences on the community I used a tool called Fiddler to directly view what was being sent to identify the problems in my transformations of the data going into the Download tool. The idea is that the raw HTTP request and reply messages are available directly in Alteryx in the Results window when running a workflow, preventing the need to use another tool.

Add a search or find function that looks for content within a tool rather than just the tool number. e.g. ctrl Find, to look for any tool that uses a keyword or field in the formula/join/etc. This would save me a boatload of time editing, updating, and troubleshooting my workflows.

Currently using these macros from Adam Riley: http://www.chaosreignswithin.com/

The stuff he has over there is great and makes alteryx much more powerful.  Two tools in particular that I am using from there are Conditional Runners and the Parallel Block Until Done.  These are tools that for us are vital and it would be nice if Alteryx would pick them up and maintain them for stability.  

During execution the user cannot scroll around. Large workflows need to be shrunk to very small icons to be able to follow the progress. Either have an option to automaticaly center on the active icon or allow scrolling during execution.

It would be really useful to have a Join function that updated an existing file (not a database, but a flat or yxdb file).

The rough SAS equivalent are the UPDATE and MODIFY Statements

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/basess/58133/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a001329151.htm

The goal would be to have a join function that would allow you to update a master dataset's missing variables from a transaction database and, optionally, to overwrite values on the master data set with current ones, without duplicating records, based on a common key.

The use case is you have an original file, new information comes in and you want to fill in the data that was originally missing without overwriting the original data (if there is data on the transaction file for that variable). In this case only missing data is changed.

Or as a separate use case, you had original data which has now been updated and you do want to overwrite the original data. In this case any variable with new values is updated, and variables without new values is left unchanged.

Why this is needed: if you don't have a Oracle type database, it is difficult to do this task inside of Alteryx and information changes over time (customers buy new products, customers update profiles, you have a file that is missing some data, and want to merge with a file that has better data for missing values, but worse data for exisitng values (it is from a different time period (e.g. older)).  In theory you could do this with "IF isnull() Then replace" statements, but you'd have to build them for each variable and have a long data flow to capture the correct updates. Now is is much faster to do it in SAS and import the updated file back into Alteryx.

Visio is our organization's most common method of communicating business processes and workflows. Being able to export an Alteryx workflow to Visio would help us communicate the tool's functionality to process owners.

It would be nice to instead of scheduling a workflow at a certain time, just schedule workflows to run after the current workflow is done.  

So what it would be is instead of running workflow B at 6:00 AM every morning, you could run workflow B when workflow A finishes running so that you would know that if there was anything happening in workflow A that workflow B relied on, everything would finish in the correct order.  

I think that it would be nice to be able to append a Time Stamp to the name of a file in the OUTPUT Tool, as a Mainframe Programmer I could append a time stamp to file names this is helpful when doing batch jobs that are scduled on a server. 

I would love to be able to double-click on an input or output file and have the file open. Second to that would be a clickable hyperlink to the filepath that could be used to open the file, or a "go to" button or something. Anything would be better than my current process of copying and pasting the filepath into an explorer window.

In the summary tool, we often use the summary tool to concatenate strings - we love this functionality.

However, we would also like to be able to concatenate just the unique values of strings. This could be done if we ran the preceding text field through the unique tool first, and then concatenate. But when we are doing this for multiple text variables and when we need to summarize other types of data at the same time, this becomes a very un-natural combination of joins & macros. 

Thanks for considering,

Jeremy

Create a tool that allows user to create calculated fields for Tableau to output along with a .tde so they are available when openning the tde.  

There are several situations where precalculated materialized data will visualize inaccurately in Tableau and calcualted fields need to be used.

• 1:* measures - Fixed Lod expersions for selected measures
• Count Distinct
• Percentages and Ratios

Hi, 

I think it would be nice to have the possibility to select which fields will output fo the distance tool.

When calculating distances for between large dataset, I do not always want my to 2 set of points has par of the output and would like to drop them directly in the tool.

Thank you

Simon

Korem

XGboost regression is now the benchmark for every Kaggle competition and seems to consistently outperform random forest, spline regression, and all of the more basic models. For those of us using predictive modeling on a regular basis in our actual work, this tool would allow for a quick improvement in our model accuracy. And I think, from a marketing standpoint, having a core group of users competing in Kaggle using Alteryx would be a great way to show off Alteryx's power.

It is readily available as an R package: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/xgboost/index.html

I think we would all benefit from having IntelliSense within Alteryx. Just think about how much quicker writing formulas wold be or any time you need to reference your data within the various tools.

I've had the need to Find & Replace inside of a formula that I've written.  Would it be possible to have that type of functionality inside of the expression builder?

Does anyone else think that it would be useful?

When editing larger workflows, the "Find Tool" window is often a great help in terms of locating tools. However, having to close this window in order to make edits to the workflow is a bit inconvenient, especially when changing the sort method or using the search function. It would be great if users were allowed to edit the workflows and tools while still keeping this window open and maintaining the current settings.

It would be useful when building apps to be able to put interface tools in containers and disable them.  This would allow an app developer to show users multiple ways of having the app styled without having to have multiple app versions saved.  

I think there should be the ability to turn on and off the “Browse Everywhere” function.  I have found that my temp drive is filling up faster than it did before this most recent addition and, while I think Browse Everywhere is fantastic for QA, I don’t necessarily need it working in every workflow I run.

It would be extremely useful if most Alteryx tools had the option to output error records seaparetly. This functionality is already present in most other ETL packages, even freeware ones like Pentaho - Kettle. From its wiki: http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/EAI/.09+Transformation+Steps

http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/EAI/.09+Transformation+Steps

Step error handling allows you to configure a step so that instead of halting a transformation when an error occurs, the rows that caused an error are passed to a different step.