Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Find answers, ask questions, and share expertise about Alteryx Designer Desktop and Intelligence Suite.

Join tool swaps column names around

Roche
8 - Asteroid

Hi everyone, 

 

I have a table that matches products sold together (product 1 together with the various product 2 results).  In the excel file, product 1 information is that which was originally the row names in a matrix and product 2 was the original column names in a matrix.  I transposed the columns so that the row products will show the matches in a table format.  (However, after I prepared data to join it with this specific data, the joins literally only swops column names around and what was the "Row_" fields is named the "Col_" fields and what is supposed to be the '"Col_" fields is named the "Row_" fields as you can see in the attached Excel example.  (The top sample is after the first join and this data is correct, but the second join changes the names as displayed in the bottom sample.)  Does anyone know why the join tool does this?

 

Thank you for helping, 

 

Rouche

9 REPLIES 9
JarekSkudrzyk
11 - Bolide

Hi,

could you please also attach the workflow (with sample input data, if possible)?

 

regards

Roche
8 - Asteroid

Hi Jarek, 

 

I will have to create similar data and use the workflow.  Will post it.  The original data is confidential.  I did check for the integrity of the data and all looks fine to me.  I find the 'behavior' of the join tool to be very unusual.  I did wonder if the Alteryx tools can have 'bugs' in them.

JarekSkudrzyk
11 - Bolide

@Roche

The behaviour is strange indeed. Hopefully with a data and workflow it will be easier to spot the cause.

cmcclellan
13 - Pulsar

Any software can have bugs, but a bug in the Join tool would be VERY surprising.

 

Can you post a screenshot of the Join tool configuration window ?  There must be something in there. I can see what you mean in the attachment, but really need to see the configuration to explain it further.

JarekSkudrzyk
11 - Bolide

@Roche I was wondering what could be the cause of the "switching" data between columns and I thought maybe you have set up the tool to configure columns by position (instead of "by column name"). In that case if the order of columns in both data sets is different the outcome could be as you described.
Please let me know if this is the case. 

JarekSkudrzyk
11 - Bolide

I meant if you used "union" tool somewhere in this workflow

Roche
8 - Asteroid

Hi @JarekSkudrzyk and @cmcclellan.  I have managed to come right.  After going back to the flow I added sort tools and then it seemed to be fine.  However I am sure that the column and row fields were swapped, since it was clear from the screenshots that I took, which I will not be able to share with you.  The data is sorted out, but I still have the question as to why the data (/ tool) behaved like that.  Thank you for helping. 

JarekSkudrzyk
11 - Bolide

I am afraid that without the original workflow and some data (e.g. made up data, not a real one) we will not be able to help find the bug or mistake in the workflow. 

JarekSkudrzyk
11 - Bolide

Great that your problem is solved, though:) 

Labels