Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi all,

The SalesForce Input tool is great.. but has some really bad limitations when it comes to report. 

I think there are 2 main limitations :

A - It can only consume 2000 rows due to the rest api limitation. There plenty of articles about it in the community.

B - Long string such as text comment are cutout after a certain number of characters. 

Thanks to this great article : https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Salesforce-Input-Tool-amp-Going-Beyond... , I had the idea of going through a csv file export to then import the data into Alteryx. 

I've done it using two consequent download tool. The first download is used to get the session id and the second to export a report into a csv in the temp folder. This temp file can then be read using a dynamic input workflow. 

Long story short, I think Alteryx should upgrade the Salesforce connector to make it more robust and usable. Using the export to csv feature, this should enable Alteryx to be fully compatible with Salesforce report.

Regards,

Please consider adding a new setting to the Render Tool, so the users can select or deselect if an existing File should be overwritten (Otherwise throw an error, like the Output Data Tool does, when configured to create a new Sheet and that Sheet already exists)

Dear Developers,

it would be great, if SSO would be possible for Salesforce connector. 

Our company is not so much in favor distributing log-in details for a service account. 

If there is already a solution in place, than perfect, but if not, I guess this functionality would be a lever to use Alteryx in our company.

Best Regards,

Johanna 

It is my understanding that hidden in each yxdb is metadata.  The following use case is common:

As an Alteryx Developer/Designer I want to know the source of a yxdb.  

Ideally, I would know as much about the workflow (name, path, workflow version, AYX version, userid) as possible.

It would be awesome to be construct a workflow that would allow me to search the metadata of yxdb's on my client computers quickly.

Cheers,

Mark

There is an extensive need from customers to be able to create emails but not send them (right away at least). This would be an enhancement to the email tool to allow for checking a box to say "Save in Draft" and if that box was checked the send email functionality would not be called but the email would be created. 

When I'm organizing my workflow, sometimes I want to move a whole tool container on the canvas. Currently, the only way to do this is to first find the header then select and drag this. When the ends of the container is off screen, it can be hard to know how much I wanted to move my container to get it where I wanted relative to the other tools around it. I feel like it would be nice to be able to select anywhere on the tool container and drag it around (possibly holding right click and dragging so that current tool selection capabilities aren't hindered).

In the (simplified) images below, you'll see that I want my tool container to vertically align just above the browse tool:

I can't currently see the top of the tool container to move it, though, so I must first navigate to that part of the workflow to select the header.

Currently - if someone has accidentally kept an excel file open on their desktop, Alteryx will fail to load this flow.

However, it would make more sense to open this file without read-lock as a dirty-read (equivalent of "Read Uncommtted").

This may require some interaction with Microsoft but would be worth pursuing because it prevents / eliminates an entire category of needless canvas errors.

Hello, 

This is one thing that my OCD cannot cope with. 

Some tools, like the Union tool, allow you to 'Ignore warnings', like when fields are missing. 

Some other tools however don't give the option. Date time tool for instance. Sometimes I feel like yelling at Alteryx that "I know that field already exists! I want to change it!". Or the join tool, when you join on a double. 

I know that these warnings don't really affect anything, and they may be useful to highlight something that may be best to be changed, but pleeeeaaassee give us a tick box or something like the union tool where we can ignore warnings. It makes my workflow messy. 

(I'm on designer v 2021.1 btw, so if this has already been done, then please ignore my rant. 😁 )

Thanks

Edit: What I'm talking about 

At the moment, at least for Postgres and ODBC connections, the DCM only supports a names DSN that must be installed on each machine running Designer or Server. However, the ODBC admin function is admin only within my company, which makes DCM more trouble than it is worth to use.

Connection strings work well in the workflows, have been implemented on the gallery before, and do not require access to the ODBC admin to implement. Could DCM please be improved to support native connection strings?

In order to make the connections between Alteryx and Snowflake even more secure we would like to have the possibility to connect to snowflake with OAuth in an easier way. 

The connections to snowflake via OAuth are very similar to the connections Alteryx already does with O365 applications. It requires: 

• Tenant URL 
• Client ID 
• Client Secret 

1. Get Authorization token provided by the snowflake authorization endpoint.  
2. Give access consent (a browser popup will appear) 
3. With the Authorization Code, the client ID and the Client Secret make a call to retrieve the Refresh Token and TTL information for the tokens 
4. Get the Access Token every time it expires 

With this an automated workflow using OAuth between Alteryx and Snowflake will be possible.

You can find a more detailed explanation in the attached document.

Working in the accounting department, this has come up too many times now to ignore! 

Would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see a new formula available in the DateTime formula suite that mimics the function of the EOMONTH() formula when working with dates in Excel. 

The beauty of the EOMONTH() formula in Excel is that I can just give it a date, and then tell it how many months in the future or past I would like it to add/subtract... Alternatively, in Alteryx, this can require 2 or 3 nested DateTime functions to arrive at the same answer. 

Example: To find the end of the month 2 months in the future from today's date, I would use the following formula...

Excel = EOMONTH(Today(),2)

Alteryx = DateTimeAdd(DateTimeAdd(DateTimeTrim(DateTimeToday(),"month"),3,"months"),-1,"days")

Seems much more complicated than it needs to be in Alteryx, and easy to get lost in the nested formulas & non-intuitive adding/subtracting of months/days! I can see a new formula (something like DateTimeEOMonth?) being structured as follows in Alteryx: DateTimeEOMonth([Field],increment)

Please consider! Our accounting department thanks you heartily in advance... 🙂

Cheers,

NJ

The crosstab tool replaces any non-alphanumeric characters with underscores in column names. It would be helpful to keep the original values as column names (or to have the option to toggle whether or not special characters are replaced with underscores).

This is often an issue for reporting and for dynamically-populated app inputs (e.g. drop-down), where we need to retain the special characters.

For example, say I have the following dataset: 

Currently, the crosstab tool produces this:

I would like this:

There are currently (somewhat cumbersome) workarounds such as adding an extra row with the original names, and then using Dynamic Rename to rename the columns, but it would be great to be able to use the data straight out of the crosstab!

Changing the Macro Input tool in an existing macro is dangerous and can result in unmapped fields or lost connections in workflows using the macro. For example, we have a widely used macro for which we'd like to change the name of an input field, change it's default type from Date to DateTime, make it optional while keeping other fields mandatory. Currently, we cannot find a solution which would not require us to fix each workflow using the macro after changing it. We should be able to change the field names, field types (e.g. String to V_WString, Date to DateTime), select optional fields and do other modifications to Macro Input without having to update each workflow using the macro. The new Macro Input UI could be enhanced with a window similar to that of Select tool's. Technically, the Macro Input fields could have a unique ID by which they would be recognised in workflows, so the field names would just be aliases that could be changed without losing the mapping. In summary, we are restricted to our initial setup of Macro Input and it is very complicated to change it afterwards, especially if the macro is used widely.

Right now we can create Tableau extract files (.tde), but cannot read them into Alteryx -- this limits the partnership of these two companies.
Please add the functionality to import .tde files,
Best,
Jeremy

Sometimes, Control Containers produce error messages even if they are deactivated by feeding an empty table into their input connection.

(Note that this is a made up example of something which can happen if input tables might be from different sources and have different columns so that they need separated treatment.)

According to the product team, this is expected behaviour since a selection does not allow zero columns selected. This might be true (which I doubt a bit), but it is at least counter-intuitive. If this behaviour cannot be avoided in total, I have a proposal which would improve the user experience without changing the entire workflow validation logic.

(The support engineer understands the point and has raised a defect.)

Instead of writing messages inside Control Containers directly to the log output (on screen, in logfile) and to mark the workflow as erroneous, I propose to introduce a message (message, warning, error) stack for tools inside Control Containers:

1. When the configuration validation is executed:
1. Messages (messages, warnings, errors) produced outside of Control Containers are output to the screen log and to the log files (as today).
2. Messages (messages, warning, errors) produced inside of Control Containers are not yet output but stored in a message stack.
2. At the moment when it is decided whether a Control container is activated or deactivated:
1. If Control Container activated: Write the previously stored message stack for this Control Container to the screen and to the log output, and increase error and warning counts accordingly.
2. If Control Container deactivated: Delete the message stack for this Control Container (w/o reporting anything to the log and w/o increasing error and warning count).

This would result in a different sequence of messages than today (because everything inside activated Control Containers would be reported later than today). Since there’s no logical order of messages anyways, this would not matter. And it would avoid the apparently illogical case that deactivated Control Containers produce errors.

Hello all, just another little QoL suggestion!

There have been a few occasions recently where I've been adding some Report Text to a Rendered output and have needed to reference the current date. However, when building a quick formula to do this, I've first needed to add a dummy field within a Text Input tool so that the Formula tool doesn't error due to no incoming connection.

I know I can create a branch off from the main dataset and just use that, but for something simple like this, I find it cleaner to isolate and generate it in this way and so it'd be great if - for situations like this - the Formula tool's input anchor was optional (obviously only when using it to create new fields).

There are likely many other examples where you may want to build a simple workflow (or branch of one), starting with a quick field generated within the Formula tool itself. However, just thought I'd raise this with a scenario I've encountered a couple of times recently.

Cheers!

95% of the times I see myself using the Directory Tool, it is only to access the FullPath content, so I immediatly add a Select tool to deselect the other attributes the tool returns.

Is there any chance to add a checkbox to only retrieve FullPath?

I couldn't find a previous idea on this, but let me know if it already exists.

It looks like as of 2022.3, workflow tabs get shortened to a specific width. This is fine however now the asterisk that lets me know if my workflow has changed doesn't display in the tab anymore. I would have to look at the top of the screen to see this. I know this isn't a huge deal, but it would be nice to still be able to see the asterisk in the tab so that I can still know which workflows have been saved even if I am currently looking at a different open workflow. One solution may be to move the asterisk to the front of the workflow name.

Also, would users want a setting to allow them to keep full workflow names versus shortening them?

Thanks!

It would be nice if we can arrange some tools on the canvas neatly by one click and having them distributed evenly (horizontally/vertically).

See this picture which worth thousand words.