Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

This has probably been mentioned before, but in case it hasn't....

The dynamic input tool is useful for bringing in multiple files / tabs, but quickly stops being fit for purpose if schemas / fields differ even slightly. The common solution is to then use a dynamic input tool inside a batch macro and set this macro to 'Auto Configure by Name', so that it waits for all files to be run and then can output knowing what it has received. 

It's a pain to create these batch macros for relatively straightforward and regular processes - would it be possible to have this 'Auto Configure by Name' as an option directly in the dynamic input tool, relieving the need for a batch macro? 

Thanks,

Andy 

Hi all,

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Tool-Mastery-RegEx/tac-p/74936

@AlexKo did an excellent article on RegEx, and Mark @MarqueeCrew Frisch has helped me out of many pickles with Regex - and one of the things that I've discussed with a few folk on the community is that Regex is super-powerful ( @Ken_Black made this same comment) and can do way more than we initially understand.

The problem is not one of the power of the tool, but rather the onramp to using it (it's painful to do/experiment/run/try etc, it doesn't give you any visual guides or hints when you've got it right or wrong, etc)

My method is to hop straight on to http://regex101, paste in sample text, and figure out the right RegEx in their AWESOME UI which really make this into a 5 minute job, and makes me feel like I've scored at least one victory today (it is so easy, you actually feel more powerful and competent).

Could we bring some of this great User Interaction design into the RegEx tool?   I honestly believe that if the RegEx tool was as easy and approachable as RegEx101.com (or why not go one better than them), we'd see an explosion in usage and creativity.

Thank you all

Sean

Please could you enhance the Alteryx download tool to support SFTP connections with Private Key authentication as well.  This is not currently supported and all of our SFTP use cases use PK.

The following idea might not be as valuable as some of @SeanAdams posts, but it would save this user precious fractions of time.   When I leave the canvas with my mouse (point A) to go up to the pallet I select and drag the tool down to the canvas.  Sometimes I do right-click and go through the menus to add the next tool, but generally I go through that labor only when I'm inserting in-stream the tool.  So here is my idea:

Double-Click your NEXT tool and it "Alteryx-ly" appears on your canvas in proximity to the hi-lighted (last) tool.  Better yet, connect it!  Now I can move from the pallet to the configuration panel directly without having to move my mouse down to the canvas and then over to the configuration panel.

Hopefully, my friend @Hollingsworth will find this time-saving idea worthy of a star.  Speed demons like @NicoleJohnson and @BenMoss might not need this turbo boost, but at my age it is worth the ask.

Cheers,

Mark

Hello,

It would be very helpful to have a search box for field names in the summary tool, I think it would help decrease errors by selecting fields by mistake with similar names and will help gain a couple of seconds while looking around for a specific field, particularly with datasets with a lots of them.

Like this:

When I create a new table in a in-Db workflow, I want to specify some contraints, especially the Primary Key/Foreign Key

For PK/FK, the UX could be either the selection of some fields of the flow or a free field (to let the user choose a constant).

From wikipedia :

In the relational model of databases, a primary key is a specific choice of a minimal set of attributes (columns) that uniquely specify a tuple (row) in a relation (table).[a] Informally, a primary key is "which attributes identify a record", and in simple cases are simply a single attribute: a unique id. 

So, basically, PK/FK helps in two ways :
1/ Check for duplicate, check if the value inserted is legit

2/ Improve query plan, especially for join

I love Workflow Meta info, especially the ability to put the Author, the search tags,the version, the description, etc...

But why can't we use it as Engine Constant? It doesn't seem very hard to implement and it would change life for development.

DearAlteryx team and community,

all the best for 2021!

Thank you very much for enhancing the output option from Alteryx Designer to Excel keeping the format.

For a lot of my use cases this is very helpful!

Still, there are some use cases left. In case I want to overwrite a calculated/linked number (e.g. calculated prediction) with the Actual number, it would be very helpful to feed into those cells as well. At the moment Alteryx is doing the job but I receive a lot of Excel Errors (xml errors) and a corupt Excel file when overwriting calculated fields/linked fields.

Is there a chance to extend the current setup for all of those cases?

Thanks and best regards

Chhristoph

When using the output data tool, it would save me and my cluttered organizational skills a lot of effort if the writing workflow was saved as part of the yxdb metadata. 

I've often had to search to find a workflow which created the yxdb. I tend to use naming conventions to help me,  but it would be easier if the file and or path was easily found. 

cheers,

 mark

Tools within a workflow needs to be able to run in parallel whereever applicable.

For example: Extracting 10 million rows from one source, 12 million rows from a different source to perform blending.

currently the order of execution is the order in which tools are dragged into the canvas. Hence Source1 first, Source2 second and then the JOIN.

Here Source1 & Source2 are completely independent, hence can be run in parallel. Thus saving the workflow execution time.

Execution time is quite crucial when you have tight data loading window.

Hopefully alteryx considers this in the next release!

I will start off with a story. I have built a process to manage batch API requests. It's an iterative process that checks to see where the export is at by calling an API and then returning some status. It will run and wait and run and wait until the export is ready to be downloaded. However sometimes, the jobs don't finish and a status returns something like "failed" or "cancelled". When this is the case, I have my process (which is a little bit batch macro) kicks off an error message, using the nifty error message tool. After some time I noticed that it was a PAIN to go back and figure out which of my requests failed and I decided that I need to add some messaging around where this was failing, so I could do some easy auditing. So I go back into my tool and much to my chagrin, I cannot pass variables into the message section. I would expect it to have worked something like this:

"Record "+[#2]+" is not 'A'"

Can we please get a change to this. It would save a lot of time and energy if we could create a dynamic error message option.

TL;DR Please allow us to use formulas in the "If expression is true, display error message:" settings area.

Hi GUI Gang

At the moment, I have a lovely formatted XLS with corporate branding, logos, filled cells, borders etc.  The data from the Alteryx output needs to start in cell B6.  I have tried the output tools to this named range, but Alteryx destroys all the Excel formatted cells in the data block.

As a workaround on the forums, many Alteryx users pump out to a hidden "Output" tab, and then code =OutputA1 in the formatted sheet.  This looks messy to the users who then go hunting for the hidden tab.  Personally I end up pumping the workflow out to a temporary CSV file.  Then opening that in Excel, selecting all, and then pasting values in the pretty Excel file.

This is fine for one file, but I need to split the output report block by a country field and do this 100s of time for each month end.

Please can we have a output tool that does the same as my workaround.  Outputs directly from a workflow to a range in Excel that doesnt destroy the workbook's formatting.

Jay

Hello!
Currently i develop on a 2560 x 1440 monitor, and it is great for development of Alteryx workflows. 

However, from an accessibility perspective (and for demonstration purposes), the whole of the Alteryx Interface text and icons are far too small for anyone to read. For instance, this is what Designer looks like at the most common monitor size, 1920 x 1080:

And at my native resolution (2560 x 1440)

And 4k resolution, for comparison:

As you will notice - virtually everything is smaller, and unreadable at higher resolutions. It doesn't appear that this is a setting within Alteryx, and so I have to resort to windows settings to change the size:

Or as @CharlieS mentions here change the size of text across all applications.

It would be useful within Alteryx to have a 'scaling' slider/dropdown, so I do not have to change the resolution or size of applications within windows, to be able to easy read or demonstrate data from Alteryx Designer. 

Thanks,
TheOC

For in-DB use, please provide a Data Cleansing Tool.

We frequently have issues where users report slowness from an Alteryx installation on a particular machine; or where a specific tool or package fails to install correctly.

For our admin teams - this becomes a debugging exercise to go through different permutations to understand the cause - and if this is escallated to Alteryx Support, this becomes even tougher.

Could we think about including a basic "Self Diagnostic" in to Alteryx which runs through the basic functionalities of Alteryx with some basic timings; checks that Python is working correctly; checks the memory allocation and temporary disk space - and then either persists this to disk and/or sends to a central environment for analysis?

Given a large deployed environment like ours (over 10 000 seats deployed) - self-checkout-telemetry like this would provide the central team with massive increase in their ability to manage the deployed base; and at the same time signficantly reduce the time to resolve support issues.

This has probably been mentioned before, but in case it hasn't....

Right now, if the dynamic input tool skips a file (which it often does!) it just appears as a warning and continues processing. Whilst this is still useful to continue processing, could it be built as an option in the tool to select a 'error if files are skipped'? 

Right now it is either easy to miss this is happening, or in production / on server you may want this process to be stopped.

Thanks,

Andy 

At our organization we are required to change our passwords every few months forcing a change to my Tableau Server password.  How does this relate to Alteryx?  Well, every 90 days I have to change my password in the "Publish to Tableau Server Tool" for all of my workflows.  This is quite a cumbersome process that could be eliminated with AD.

If you dislike manually changing your for each workflow that uses this tool then "star" this post!

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!

I noticed through the ODBC driver log that Alteryx doesn't care about the kind of base I precise. It tests every single kind of base to find the good one and THEN applies the queries to get the metadata info.

Here an example. I have chosen an Hive in db connection. If  I read the simba logs, i can find those lines :

Mar 01 11:37:21.318 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select USER(), APPLICATION_ID() from system.iota

Mar 01 11:37:22.863 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select USER as USER_NAME from SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1

Mar 01 11:37:23.454 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select * from rdb$relations

Mar 01 11:37:23.546 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select first 1 dbinfo('version', 'full') from systables

Mar 01 11:37:23.707 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select #01/01/01# as AccessDate

Mar 01 11:37:23.868 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: exec sp_server_info 1

Mar 01 11:37:24.093 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select top (0) * from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INDEXES

Mar 01 11:37:24.219 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: SELECT  SERVERPROPERTY('edition')

Mar 01 11:37:24.423 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select DATABASE() as `database`, VERSION() as `version`

Mar 01 11:37:24.635 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select * from sys.V_$VERSION at where RowNum<2

Mar 01 11:37:25.230 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select cast(version() as char(10)), (select 1 from pg_catalog.pg_class) as t

Mar 01 11:37:25.415 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select NAME from sqlite_master

Mar 01 11:37:25.756 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select xp_msver('CompanyName')

Mar 01 11:37:26.156 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select @@version

Mar 01 11:37:26.376 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: select * from dbc.dbcinfo

Mar 01 11:37:26.522 INFO  5264 HardyDataEngine::Prepare: Incoming SQL: SELECT @@VERSION;

I can understand that when Alteryx doesn't know the kind of base he tries everything.. (eg : in memory visual query builder) but here, I have selected the Hive database and I have to loose more than 5 seconds for nothing.