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

Make the Formula tool's input anchor optional

Hello all, just another little QoL suggestion!

 

There have been a few occasions recently where I've been adding some Report Text to a Rendered output and have needed to reference the current date. However, when building a quick formula to do this, I've first needed to add a dummy field within a Text Input tool so that the Formula tool doesn't error due to no incoming connection.

 

DataNath_0-1668162075491.png

DataNath_2-1668162214534.png

DataNath_1-1668162090376.png

 

I know I can create a branch off from the main dataset and just use that, but for something simple like this, I find it cleaner to isolate and generate it in this way and so it'd be great if - for situations like this - the Formula tool's input anchor was optional (obviously only when using it to create new fields).

 

There are likely many other examples where you may want to build a simple workflow (or branch of one), starting with a quick field generated within the Formula tool itself. However, just thought I'd raise this with a scenario I've encountered a couple of times recently.

 

Cheers!

3 Comments
AlteryxCommunityTeam
Alteryx Community Team
Alteryx Community Team
Status changed to: Accepting Votes
 
patrick_digan
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

This would be nice!

summit_view
8 - Asteroid

I would find this useful as well and cleaner than the alternatives.