Increment Function

[danielkresina]

It would be handy to have an increment function similar to SQL's Identity datatype that allows you to specify a seed and increment value.  It would seem like a really simple tool to add.  Ideally the seed value could come from an incoming connection to give the flexibility of retrieving the seed value from a database.

I've found a workaround explained on my blog here, but it would just be handy to have this built in.
 

[BenG]

Hi Daniel,

I think that the Generate rows tool comes close to what you are asking for.  Can you have a look and see where it falls short?  

Thanks,

Ben

[danielkresina]

Thanks Ben,
I gave that a try.  I may be missing something, but I found that tool to be more combersome than my initial approach.  The generate rows tools requires you to specify the condition for it to stop at, which forced me to use another sumarize tool to get the count of the number of total rows in the initial data I wanted to add an incremented ID to.  I then had to join the TTL Row count field and seed value and feed those into the generate rows tool to create a new set of rows with my incremented IDs.  I then had to positionally join those ID records back into my main data stream.  Is this the basic approach you'd have to use, or is there a simpler method?

Below is a screenshot of hte workflow.  I don't see a way to attach the project here. 

[BenG]

Hi Daniel,

The image communicates the idea. It seems that all the other solutions I can come up with have similar cumbersome steps to get it right.  The closest I got was to use the Record ID tool which has a seed value and then increments.  The problem is that the seed cannot be brought in from a field.  This could be done with a very simple macro, but again is more work than it should be.  I think the easiest approach to get the functionality would be for us to add the ability to get the seed value from a field to the Record ID tool.  However, I'm still interested in a possible increment function.  

Are you picturing something like:
IncrementKey([RowKey], [seed])  
with the seed being optional?

Thanks,

Ben

[danielkresina]

Ben, yes that's exactly what I'm envisioning.  Once could also add another optional variable such as StepValue with the default being 1.  (i.e. by entering a step value of 2, you'd get 1,3,5,7,etc.)

This could just be a simple function that could be used in the formula tool to add an incrementing ID field to a stream.

Thanks for considering,
Daniel

[KylieF]

Thank you for posting to the Alteryx Community! Our product team is interested in this idea, however we're unable to fit this idea on the current road map. However, we'd like to keep it in mind for future features and we'll update the status once we know if or when we can include this feature.

[DotDigitals]

Is there a way I can save my file in an incremental/sequential order?

For example, I am trying to run a batch macro that transforms some files from s3, after that I want to save back to s3 in an incremental way ...How exactly do I achieve that?