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!
The Product Idea boards have gotten an update to better integrate them within our Product team's idea cycle! However this update does have a few unique behaviors, if you have any questions about them check out our FAQ.

Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Share your Designer Desktop product ideas - we're listening!
Submitting an Idea?

Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!

Submission Guidelines

Concatenate Distinct values in 'Summarize' tool

We have 'CountDistinct' and 'Concatenate' options within Summarize tool. 

But 'Concatenate' displays all the instances of value for a Grouped field, this might include lot of duplicates.

It would be great to have an option like 'ConcatDistinct'.

 

For example - 

Concat.PNG

 

Group by 'Branch' and 'ConcatDistinct' Customer should result as Figure 1 instead of Figure 2 - 

Figure 1-

Concat1.PNG

 

Figure 2-

Concat2.PNG

 

While this is achievable in different ways currently with a set of tools, but it gets tedious when number of fields is large from which distinct values are to be captured. 

 

Thank you,

Rohan.

18 Comments
haraldharders
9 - Comet

I just wanted to upload a very similar feature request. I would like following two sub-categories of this:

  • Unique concatenate (preserving original order)
  • Unique concatenate alphabetically ordered

Also, this feature should work also when doing multiple concatenates in the same Summarize tool.

phoebe_kelley
9 - Comet

This would be AMAZING and save so many tools. Right now I have to do a bunch of separate summarize tools and then join them back. Please please please!

phoebe_kelley
9 - Comet

Just to add my use case, which is usually many fields that I want to summarize but have to do separate summarize tools and then join back:

 

to go from this:

BranchCustomerSupplier
ATomCole's Cookies
ATomSammy's Sandwiches
AJackSammy's Sandwiches
ATomAlice's Alligators
BranchNedAlice's Alligators
BranchNed

Bam's Bananas

 

to this:

BranchCONCAT_CustomerCONCAT_Supplier
ATom, JackCole's Cookies, Sammy's Sandwiches, Alice's Alligators
BNedAlice's Alligators, Bam's Bananas

 

I have to use 4 summarize tools and a join:

phoebe_kelley_0-1629910704983.png

 

I often have more than two fields, so I have to use even more summarize tools and a join multiple to get them all back together.

 

 

CristonS
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
Status changed to: Not Planned
 
haraldharders
9 - Comet

Dear Alteryx team. Is there any chance that you revisit your decision to not implement this feature? It would prevent me from such clumpsy and slow workflows:

haraldharders_0-1653567208347.png

 

fmvizcaino
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

Countless times I wanted to do this and needed to add a few additional steps 😑

marcusblackhill
12 - Quasar
12 - Quasar

I hope Alteryx plan to put that back in the table. Concatdistinct would save some good time of workarounds.

RuHRoW
6 - Meteoroid

This is a great suggestion and I hope they reconsider. Meanwhile, if your workaround involves more than one tool try this:

 

Concatenate all fields in the same Summarize tool and follow with a formula tool. All it takes is a fairly generic regex pattern.

 

Here's an example using the same data from @phoebe_kelley's use case above...

RuHRoW_0-1657302064998.png

 

Here are the regex formulas used in the formula tool for each concatenated field:

 

REGEX_Replace(
	[Concat_Customer], //string
	'^([^\,]+?)(?:\,\1)*(\,(?!\1)[^\,]+?)?(?:\,\1|\2)*((?!\,\1|\2)\,[^\,]+?)?(?:\,\1|\2|\3)*((?!\,\1|\2|\3)\,[^\,]+?)?(?:\,\1|\2|\3|\4)*((?!\,\1|\2|\3|\4)\,[^\,]+?)?(?:\,\1|\2|\3|\4|\5)*((?!\,\1|\2|\3|\4|\5)\,[^\,]+?)?(?:\,\1|\2|\3|\4|\5|\6)*$', //pattern
	'$1$2$3$4$5$6' //replace
)

REGEX_Replace(
	[Concat_Supplier], //string
	'^([^\,]+?)(?:\,\1)*(\,(?!\1)[^\,]+?)?(?:\,\1|\2)*((?!\,\1|\2)\,[^\,]+?)?(?:\,\1|\2|\3)*((?!\,\1|\2|\3)\,[^\,]+?)?(?:\,\1|\2|\3|\4)*((?!\,\1|\2|\3|\4)\,[^\,]+?)?(?:\,\1|\2|\3|\4|\5)*((?!\,\1|\2|\3|\4|\5)\,[^\,]+?)?(?:\,\1|\2|\3|\4|\5|\6)*$', //pattern
	'$1$2$3$4$5$6' //replace
)

 

This pattern removes duplicates from a delimited list with up to 6 unique values.

Click here for an explanation of the pattern. This link shows the same pattern using a different delimiter.