Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

The option to "Disable all tools that Write Output" is great during testing but I often need to toggle back and forth and its location on the Runtime tab of the Workflow Config is inconvenient.

I think it would be great to have a button for that on the toolbar with the added feature that it would visually display whether the feature is on or off (so you don't need to see an Output Data tool to determine the current status)

Similar to how there is a functionality to use pip through the ayxinstallPackages, there needs to be a way to upgrade python itself. There are important packages such as keras that have errors in Python 3.6 that are not present when used with 3.7 so it should really be up to the user as to which python package to use. Another solution could also be to allow the user to point to their own local installation of Python so that the user can maintain consistency between their own local site-packages and the one that Alteryx has.

In the output window, numbers should always be displayed right aligned by default. Also the font should be fixed width type so an 8 and 1 both take equal width and we dont see numbers as below.

11111111

88888888

1. It instantly tells the user that its data type is numeric without having to check metadata.

2. Readability of the values is greatly increased.

Please add option to right-click a module tab to rename the yxmd file.  This would be easy to do, for you, and quite handy.

We've been researching snowflake and are eager to try this new cloud database tool but are holding off till Alteryx supports in-database tools for that environment.  I know it's a fairly new service and there probably aren't tons of users, but it seems like a perfect fit since it's fully SQL complaint and is a truely native clouad, SAAS tool.  It's built from scratch for AWS, and claims to be faster and cheaper.

Snowflake for data storage, Alteryx for loading and processing, Tableau for visualization - the perfect trio, no?

Has anyone had experience/feedback with snowflake?  I know it supports ODBC so we could do basic connections with Alteryx, but the real key would obviously be enabling in-database functionality so we could take advantage of the computation power of the snowflake.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention the topic and find out if it's in the plans or not.

Thanks,

Daniel

It would be nice to have the option of reassigning the Tool ID's based on each tool's process order within the workflow.

Currently on the input tool I can only specify if the first row contains data.  It would be great if I could simply specify which row the data starts on, ie. row 4 or row 500, and then specify which row, if at all, contains the headers.

Hello,

  could you improve the sample tool to able it using a variable ?

  For exemple : the user could use a variable instead for "N".

  Thank you

  Kévin V.

Hi Team,

If you can please work on the idea of auto arranging the tools on Alteryx Designer. This would save a lot of tedious efforts, when we create a very big flow then it becomes very tough for us to arrange the tools properly and it becomes confusing sometimes.

Thanks

In order to improve processing of HTML data (to use HTML data as a data-source) it would be valuable to convert HTML data to XML. 

There's a few transformations that would be needed:

- special characters like &

- dealing with HTML's imprecision - for example - "img src" tags do not require an explicit close marker.

Example: <img src="/html/assets/alteryx_company_logo.svg?F0F845F3873A74E16B876DC33606AFEA" class="ryx-company-logo"> rather than

<img src="/html/assets/alteryx_company_logo.svg?F0F845F3873A74E16B876DC33606AFEA" class="ryx-company-logo" />

- dealing with multiple class tags on a single div

- footer tags which are balanced off against a </div> tag.

This would enable more efficient processing of HTML data using modern XML capabilities

Hope this is fairly self-explanatory.

I'd like to be able to create presets for Summarize tool.  Instead of having Group By, Sum, Count, Count Non Null, etc on top of the libraries of functions, put them into their own category.  Users could then create a Favorites and the functions that they use the most would be stored in that section (editable by user).

Hello all,

A whole field of performance improvement have not been explored by Alteryx : the hardware acceleration by using something else than a CPU for calculation.

Here some good readings about that :
https://blog.esciencecenter.nl/why-use-an-fpga-instead-of-a-cpu-or-gpu-b234cd4f309c

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit

The kind of acceleration we can dream !

When you right click on a Macro tool (e.g. Google Analytics) within a workflow, you can choose the version of the tool to use. However, it does not indicate which version of the tool is already in use. 

Why is this an issue for me?

I have a workflow with 15 instances of the Google Analytics tool.  (I needed to use the API for each month fo GA data and then use a join. I built it this way due to the restriction on the number of records.)

So when I update the Google Analytics tool I have to do it 15 times. I'd like to be sure the update is needed before I start. 

Alteryx Support confirm that there is no way to tell which version of the macro is in use. 

It would be good to replicate some of the key workflow configuration settings as shortcut icons in the main shortcut toolbar.

For instance, I often use 'Disable all tools that write output' and need to toggle it on/off quickly when I'm testing a workflow. It takes too many clicks to deselect a tool, open workflow configuration, open the Runtime tab and select the checkbox. Many end-users I work with also don't even know the option is there because it is so well-hidden.

It would be much simpler and easier If I could toggle it straight from the shortcut bar. Having a keyboard shortcut to do it, like I do with ctrl-R (to run) would be even better.

Having shortcuts would also be good for:

• Disable all browse tools
• Show/Hide connection progress
• Open the Events window

A workflow of one of our Alteryx business users ended with a timeout, and only part of the data was written in the output. This leads to wrong data for the reports. 

The goal should be: 

It is not allowed that output data is only partially written the output. Either the output is written completely or no output will be created. Would it be possible to achieve this?

This behavior ( Either the output is written completely or no output will be created) is already available in Qlikview and expects the same to be available in Alteryx as well. 

Database systems, and seemingly Quickview, have the ability to create "transactions" that will either write all data or no data.  They can do this because the database has full control over the database.  

Alteryx Designer is writing to different file types and doesn't have this ability because it's not in total charge of the files or databases.  For example, if it's updating 1 million records in a database, it's not saving the previous values of the field being updated, so it would have to way to undo those updates if the workflow experienced an error later in its processing.

Alteryx product team should consider this and implement it in the future to solve many problems. 

I would like a new format option within the Designer function DateTimeFormat such that where a date is held in the database

e.g. 2023-01-01

DateTimeFormat([date],%o)

will return 1st not 1 or 01. 

Workarounds exist, but are fiddly given the different options....1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th.....

I recently had an error in a module because an expected variable was not present coming into a formula tool.  My variable, "MONDAY" was not present and the formula MONDAY/3 failed.  The workaround was to union all days into the incoming data and things worked fine.  I would have liked to have an Excel formula like this instead:

IF ISERROR([Monday]/3) THEN 0 ELSE [Monday]/3 ENDIF

Thanks

I am suggesting an addition to the Auto Field Tool.  Create an option that allows only auto sizing of the fields and does not change the field type.  A check box that says Auto Size Only.  The tool would recognize any fields that can be resized based on their incoming data field type and will not change the data type.  The resizing function is very helpful to maximize workflow performance, but I currently do not use it much because it guesses wrong on the data types.  This causes problems also when data inputs change.  Whereas setting to auto size only, it can streamline the data but let the user be confident the data types would not change. 

Thank You