Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi is it possible to look at alteryx workflows being run when a file has been dropped into a file or somehting along those lines? I.e an external activty has taken place

It would be nice to have a tool that automatically normalized data, or calculated percentages.  This could be overall or in groups. 

For example, maybe I have a dataset with 2 columns: US State and Number of amusement parks.  So I know the count of amusement parks by state.  But maybe I want a distribution so I can see which percentage are in what state.  What I want is (# of parks in a state) / (total across all states).  Currently you need at least 3 tools to do this calculation (summarize, then join or append fields, then formula).  This is a very common operation, and often I want counts and percentages next to each other in a table.

Such a tool could be called "normalize" or "rescale" or "scale".  It could be more general - maybe not just normalizing so values add to 1 (or 100%), but to other magnitudes, recentering the data, or doing a "standard normal" (z score) transormation as suggested here:
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/How-to-do-Feature-Normalization-in-Alt...

Can we have an option to disable all tool containers at once? Similar to disable all browse tools or tools that write output.

The Multi-Field formula tool has three really powerful features that it supports:

[_CurrentField_]

[_CurrentFieldName_]

[_CurrentFieldType_]

These are really powerful within Multi-Field formulas because they allow for a dynamic process to apply across multiple fields.

However, they would also be very helpful in regular formulas and Multi-Row formulas, for code transportability.

A basic example:  I have a Longitude field that is a string.  I need to set it to a value of 0 if there is a null value.

My formula today:

IF ISNULL([Longitude]) THEN 0 ELSE [Longitude] ENDIF

Now lets say I want to use the same formula somewhere else, but for Latitude instead.

 That formula looks like:

IF ISNULL([Latitude]) THEN 0 ELSE [Latitude] ENDIF

If I could use [_CurrentField_] instead, that would allow me to instead write both formulas as:

IF ISNULL([_CurrentField_]) THEN 0 ELSE [_CurrentField_] ENDIF

This code can easily be copied for any field that requires replacing Nulls with 0s, and doesn't require refactoring to use a Multi-Field formula instead.

This also means that if I later change my field name, the code will remain consistent.  This not only speeds up development time and flexibility, but more readily allows for validation that the existing code has not changed.

Cleanse Macro

Given a choice between the delivered macro and the CReW macro, I’ll choose the CReW macro for both speed and functionality.  Wikipedia says, “Data cleansing or data cleaning is the process of detecting and correcting (or removing) corrupt or inaccurate records from a record set, table, or database and refers to identifying incomplete, incorrect, inaccurate or irrelevant parts of the data and then replacing, modifying, or deleting the dirty or coarse data.”  If Alteryx were to convert the macro to a true tool, here is my feature request list:

Performance:

• AMP compatible – Fast!
• Faster than the CReW macro for deleting empty fields/rows
• Resolve time it takes to load the tool (current macro versions are slow), html is faster.

Feature Enhancement:

• Allow selection of fields based on data type
• Include incoming/outgoing SELECT functionality
• Allow for PREFIX functionality (like multi-field formula), but NOT default
• Read incoming metadata to provide color coding of fields to indicate where potential problems exist (e.g. NULL, Whitespace) – part of browse everywhere currently
• Allow for Nulls to convert to 0/blank or 0/blank to convert to Null
• When removing punctuation, provide for exceptions (e.g. Numeric set of negative, comma and period).
• Include HTML tag removal
• Support internationalization (character sets)

Going the extra mile:

• Display or opt for output, cleanup metrics.  How dirty was my data?  Potentially, allow for ERROR to stop workflow if garbage is detected.
• Optional:  Detect outliers in numeric data.  I’ve got an outlier detection macro that we can review, but while you are passing all of the data for numeric values, explaining or tagging outliers would be useful.  Could be a box-whisker on numeric values maybe?
  • Make outlier actionable
    • Identify in data (new field indicator)
    • Remove
    • Modify/Impute
  • Test/Preview against metadata:  (pre-run), see what the incoming/outgoing results would be on *all of the metadata before I run the workflow.
  • camelCase:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case
  • Identify/Replace unknown values (e.g. N/A, Not Applicable, #) with Null() or other?
  • Identify/Remove duplicate values within a cell
  • See also:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_cleansing
  • Option to point to a “personal” dictionary for spelling or validation
  • Provide “smart” annotation on tool

If the workflow configuration had a run for 'x' number of iterations option it would make debugging macros a lot easier. My current method consists of copying results, changing inputs and repeat until I find my problem which feels very manual. 

It would be extremely helpful if Alteryx could add quick filters to the data browsing windows that would allow you to filter the contents of the window based on each column.  Essentially just replicate what you can do with quick filters in Excel.

Without this, I'm often forced to copy my data out into Excel in order to do any detailed trouble-shooting, and often there's too much data to copy, which prevents me from quickly getting to what I need.

Of course you can create a whole separate filter object, but that's combersome and requires re-running the workflow.

Our company often builds applications where we need the ability for it to dynamically update dropdowns based on a user's previous selections. 

For example: 

• A user needs to select their Server, database, and table for analysis (3 dropdowns).
• When the user selects their server, a query is run to get a list of all databases on that server. Then the database dropdown will automatically populate with this list of databases. 
• The user then makes a database selection, and a query is then run to get all tables within that database. The table dropdown will automatically populate with this list of tables. 
• The user makes their table selection, and then runs their analysis using the server, database, and table variables with values that they have selected from each dropdown.

We can do this in other programs, but unfortunately the lack of dynamic selections/dependent dropdowns is a big limitation for us when building Alteryx applications. Our current workarounds are chaining applications together, or using PyQt within the workflow. Chaining is clunky and often causes unforeseen issues when uploading to Server with errors that are non-descriptive, and using PyQt comes with Python versioning issues. 

If this interactivity can somehow be added to Alteryx applications it would be a huge upgrade to our current Alteryx processes. Any suggestions for further workarounds would also be helpful!

Thank you, 

Amanda 

Hi all,

Currently, only the Sharepoint list tool (deprecated) is working with DCM, it would be amazing to add the Sharepoint files input/output to also work with DCM.

Thank you,

Fernando Vizcaino

Single point of maintenance for Salesforce Input tool connection to Salesforce

This prevents user maintenance every time their password (and token) changes which requires them to update every Tool with new credentials

Also logged as issue under Alteryx, Inc Case # 00252975: Connection to Salesforce Issue

Hi All,

Data security is very important nowadays. There is no encryption for the output file from Alteryx Designer. 

Imagine, anyone who has Alteryx designer can open any yxdb even with the sensitive data. 

Suggest to add an encryption option in the Output Data tool.

Best Regards,

Samuel

Hey all,

I would love to be able to have an interface tool that allows a user to search through drop down values (when there are more than 100 or so) similar to autocomplete. It would be helpful as a multiselect or single select drop down. I have inserted a very poorly mocked up picture below. It would essentially be a modified version of the drop down as all the values would be in the tool, but the user could type to find what they are looking for.

As a developer I want to Cache & Run all/selected inputs in a Workflow with one command. Maybe even with a keyboard shortcut?

I usually use the comment tool by:

- dragging it on to the canvas and then

- Repositioning and expanding it to cover the tools I'd like to comment on.

What if I could select the tools I wanted to comment on and then use a key combination or double click so that the comment tool surrounds these tools for me. 

Note: Additional enhancement would be to anchor the comment to the tools selected but I see that this was dropped for consideration: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Ideas/Anchoring-comment-boxes-to-tools/idi...

Thanks you to @JoeM for recent training on macros, and @NicoleJohnson for pointing out some of the challenges.

when writing an iterative macro - it is a little bit difficult to debug because when you run this in designer mode, it only does one iteration and stops.

Could we add the capability to the designer itself to be able to run the second and third iteration using the test data built into the macro input tool?   Even something as simple as an option to run X iterations; or when it's run the first iteration allow me to look at what happened and trigger iteration 2 (or to trigger a run-through to completion) would be immensely helpful.

While you can do this with a test-flow wrapped around a macro, macro development is a bit of a black box because Alteryx doesn't natively have the ability to step into a macro during run-time and pause it to see what's happening on iteration 1 or 2 or n and why it's not terminating etc.   So putting the ability to run in a debug mode would be HUGELY helpful.

Hello,

Tableau has a veru useful "split" function that allows you to split a string with a delimiter and specify the number of the result you want

https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/functions_functions_string.htm

Qlik has the same function, subfield : https://help.qlik.com/en-US/sense/February2019/Subsystems/Hub/Content/Sense_Hub/Scripting/StringFunc...

I think this is quite useful and a very standard feature.


Best regards,

Simon

Some of the workflows I use have multiple inputs that can take a long time to initially load. The new cache function itself has been amazing, but there is one big drawback for me: I can't cache multiple tools at the same time.  Alteryx will allow me to eventually cache all of the tools I want cached, but it will take multiple times running the file.  This still saves me time in the end, but it feels a bit cumbersome to set up.

Please build individual *Unknown fields, one from the Left and one from the Right, into the Join tool. One *Unknown field cannot cover both side of the Join leading into the J output.

Right now it is not possible to open .xlsx files in Alteryx that has restricted access to specific users from the excel file, even when you are logged in to Alteryx and Excel with the same user. If it is possible to make Alteryx recognize which users/email addresses should be able to input a file to Alteryx I think it would be a great enhancement. To get around the problem we are currently changing the file restrictions through right clicking on it -> Properties -> Security, but this is time consuming and not a smooth fix. 

All the best,

Elin