Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

• moving or renaming a file after importing it
• deleting a file after importing it
• moving or copying a file after successfully exporting it
• writing a temporary file (i.e. batch file for RunCommand tool), then deleting it when finished

In a controlled environment, there is a need to control promotion of assets to prod with basic controls to ensure that someone has tested, signed off, that it meets certain quality standards (like "no warnings", "no Run Commands", "all reports must have company logo on top left" etc).

However, at the moment there doesn't appear to be a promotion process in Alteryx to control this flow, so assets are copied across by an admin.   This is very manual and error prone (many times we've had the wrong assets copied), and it also means that this process is controlled in a workflow outside of Alteryx (e.g. A JIRA queue or similar).

Could we request that Alteryx look into a production promotion process, which allows the admin team to perform any required checks (including automated checks), and then pushes this into prod stamped with the designer's Kerberos rather than the sys admin?

Joint idea with @avinashbonu @DamianA  @BenBu

Can we have a User Setting that allows the users to select if Alteryx should prevent the computer to go into Sleep or Hibernate mode when running a workflow?

I really like that I can scroll -- using my mouse -- between the tool groups in Alteryx. Can this UX be added to scroll through my workflows? I usually have a bunch open, and this functionality would be awesome to have there, too! 🙂

PS: Yes, I know I can do Ctrl+Tab...but mouse scrolling is more efficient.

Hi all,
Something really interesting I found - and never knew about, is there are actually in-DB predictive tools. You can find these by having a connect-indb tool on the canvas and dragging on one of the many predictive tools.

For instance:
boosted model dragged on empty campus:

Boosted model tool deleted, connect in-db tool added to the canvas:

Boosted Model dragged onto the canvas the exact same:

This is awesome! I have no idea how these tools work, I have only just found out they are a thing. Are we able to unhide these? I actually thought I had fallen into an Alteryx Designer bug, however it appears to be much more of a feature.

Sadly these tools are currently not searchable for, and do not show up under the in-DB section. However, I believe these need to be more accessible and well documented for users to find.

Cheers,
TheOC

We aren't getting a huge amount of help from support on this, so I'm posting this idea to raise awareness for the product teams responsible for the Salesforce connectors and the embedded Python environment.

This post from user Dubya describes the issue in detail:

I have a workflow with several salesforce tools in it, which works fine on my machine. But we need another alteryx user in our office to be able to access, run and maintain the workflow too, via their machine and copy of alteryx designer.

However we're finding that the salesforce inputs and outputs can only be authenticated on one machine at a time.

When the other new user opens the original workflow from the shared network location, the salesforce tools display an error "Salesforce Input (1): {'error': 'invalid_grant', 'error_description': 'authentication failure'}" and the tools fail to load any data. But we can see the full query in the tool and we can even set the custom query option and validate the query successfully, which suggests the source is being correctly connected to and queried, but we just cant run the tool.

The only way to run the tool successfully is to change the credentials and re-authenticate the tool. However this then de-authenticates the original machine, and when we open up the workflow on there and try to run ying the workflow brings back the same error.

We've both tried this authentication back and forth on our own machines and each time one of us re-authenticates, it de-authenticates the other, leading to it triggering the error.

Can someone help explain what's going on and how to fix it, as this doesn't bode well for our collaboration.

We're both running:
The latest build of version of designer 2021.2 (original machine also running desktop automation)
Salesforce Input Tool v4.1.0
Salesforce Output Tool v1.3.0

My response here identifies that this is a problem for our organization as well:

We're experiencing the same issue. It appears to be related to how the tool handles password and security token decryption. I've found that when you modify the related registry entry from "true" to "false", you can see in the tool's xml that the encrypted password and security token are still in there. I'm not sure what else is going on behind the scenes beyond that, but that ought to be addressable by the product teams handling the Salesforce connectors and the Python installation embedded in Designer.

The only differences in our environment compared to u/Dubya's are that we're running on 2020.4 and attempting to use Salesforce Input Tool v4.2.4.

This is a must have for anyone who needs the ability to share workflows among multiple users. This is part of a series of problems that these updated connectors have been plagued with since introducing them years ago, and no one at Alteryx seems to care enough to truly fix the problems. Salesforce is a core system for our organization, so having tools that utilize the latest version of Salesforce's APIs is very important to us. The additional features that the Input tool provides are welcome, but these bugs have to be sorted out in order for us to extract any kind of value out of them. If the "deprecated" Salesforce tools were ever to be removed from Designer while there are issues with the "new" connectors, we would have no choice other than to never upgrade Designer/Server again and be forced to look for another product to serve as our ETL platform.

Please, please, please address this.

When we edit formula tool, only first expression is expanded. I prefer all expressions are expanded as a default. When I want to shrink them, I want to 'expand all' icon like attached snap shot. This icon is toggled same as each expression's expand icon('expand all' <-> 'shrink all')

Currently the InDB tools require to select a DSN that is defined on your computer.

This makes any workflow which uses a DSN incredibly painful to deploy to the server, since the DSN needs to be created on every worker node and for a large server environment this can  mean creating DSN entries on 6+ worker nodes in prod plus prod server plus dev/UAT environment plus dev/UAT worker nodes.

Could we please change the InDB tools to default to DSN-less connections, where the connection persists the connection details in-line so that it can deploy to the server without a DSN setup (since all connection details are contained within the connection string)?

Thank you

Sean

CC: @rijuthav @jithinmony @HengHe @RajK @ydmuley @revathi @Deeksha @MPistone @Ari_Fuller @Arianna_Fuller @JoshKushner @samnelson @avinashbonu @Sunder_Sriram @Rahul_Thakur @Rahul_Singh

It would be very useful to be able to search the field by typing the name instead of scrolling up and down looking for it among a few hundred fields.

When working in the Designer, I sometimes have to undo changes. And this experience is quite often very confusing and annoying.

For every change in the workflow, you have to press undo once. However, quite often, one user interaction results in other actions such as automatic move of the donwstream tool, change of size of a tool container etc. In such cases, you have inserted a single tool but need to press undo a couple of times to get back to the original situation. It is, however, often not clear how often. In most cases, I fail using undo at the end and revert my changes by hand.

Please change undo towards undoing one user-action in one undo step.

In case there might be users who like the current behaviour, you might make this a user setting how to deal with the undo history.

One of the most frequent issues I have with my workflow is when the Join Tool reorders columns for no reason. There is an option in the configuration to have the columns revert to the incoming order. It would be nice if the workflow automatically had this set as a default, or provide a toggle option in the settings for this to happen. In many of my flows I've had to create macros to keep the integrity of the column order or remember to go into the settings of this tool and re order the columns before a workflow run. 

Currently if one wants to compare different alteryx files or different versions of the same file - one needs to compare the XML files. If you are not very familiar with navigating XML, this poses a risk as one may not be able to identify all changes.

It would be a great addition to Alteryx to integrate Alteryx with Git, Subversion, CVS, Mercurial, and GitHub as this tool is becoming the go-to tool for data processing for data analysts and even programmers.

This additional functionality to compare previous versions (diff) and also to merge alteryx workflows if two people are working on the same workflow, and also to easily see what changes have been committed/ made by other developers and when would make Alteryx a much more powerful tool and would open doors to other types of users, as essentially you can run anything through Alteryx.

Hello Alteryx Community,

If like me, you've been developing in Alteryx for a few years, or if you find yourself as a new developer creating solutions for your organization - chances are you'll need to create some form of support procedure or automation configuration file at some point. In my experience, the foundation of these files is typically explaining to users what each tool in the workflow is doing, and what transformations to the data are being made. These are typically laborious to create and often created in a non-standardized way.

The proposal: Create Alteryx Designer native functionality to parse a workflow's XML and translate the tool configurations into a step by step word document of a given workflow.

Although the expectation is that after something like this is complete a user may need to add contextual details around the logic created, this proposal should eliminate a lot of the upfront work in creating these documents.

Understand some workflow may be very complex but for a simple workflow like the below, a proposed output could be like the below, and if annotations are provided at the tool level, the output could pick those up as well:

Workflow Name: Sample

1) Text Input tool (1) - contains 1 row with data across columns test and test1. This tool connects to Select Tool (2).

2) Select Tool (2) - deselects "Unknown" field and changes the data type of field test1 to a Double. This tool connects to Output (3).

3) Output (3) - creates .xlsx output called test.xlsx 

Need ability to call Stored Procedures in Snowflake Database. 

Hello!
Just another QOL change from me today. 
When building a workflow - just for fun sometimes I like to make mistakes. It's never by accident I promise 😎

Now theoretically, if I did make a mistake, and put a tool in the wrong place (or want to refactor, or want to move a select earlier in the workflow etc), I would typically right click, cut and connect around, and then right click the connection I want to paste onto. This works fine, however, some users are unaware of it, and it can still be a bit of a pain.

What would be really nice, is if we could hit ctrl and click/drag a tool, to move it elevated of connections. I have attempted to create a couple of gifs to illustrate.

The current method of moving a tool within a workstream:

What I'd love, if you could hold ctrl + drag:

Cheers!
Owen

When using the formula tool -- one of the nice features is that when you start typing in a function or variable -- the tool will show formulas/variables that begin with that letter and keep changing as you type in more letters. I believe this is called predictive typing.

However, this does not happen in tools like multi-row or multi-field where a user would have to search for functions and variables if they weren't sure what they are.

Can predictive typing be added to the multi-row and multi-field tools? If I want to take it further, any tool that allows a user to use the formula functionality should be able to see predictive typing. 

Thanks,

Seth Moskowitz

It would be great to have the below functionality in Alteryx.

A workflow is built in Alteryx and button click in Alteryx can be used to generate SQL code that can be ran on a specific database platform, such as SQL Server to run external editors such as SQL Server Management Studio. Thanks. 

Currently when you add an event to notify you of workflow failure / success - you have to enter the SMTP settings every time.    It would be more efficient to set this up as a user setting which can be used for the default across all canvasses that this user creates.

I want to jump to expression #3 of formula (3), when I see following error message. Now I can jump to formula (3), but only expression #1 is opened, not #3. If I have 30 expressions, it is hard to find #20 in 30s.