Alteryx Designer Ideas

Hi there,

My idea comes when I've built an application, where user select filter from drop-down list. However it contains thousands of records, so it takes lot's of time to find desired record.

In Excel and MS Access when you use filter you can put many letter and filter shows rows that match the input. In Alteryx user can only put first letter, which is huge drawback to my users.

This is how it works in Excel:

Hope you like it!

We need color coding in the SQL Editor Window for input tools.  We are always having to pull our code out of there and copy it into a Teradata window so it is easier to ready/trouble shoot.  This would save us some time and some hassle and would improve the Alteryx user experience. ( I think you've used a couple of my ideas already. This one is a good one too. )

Hi

We have recently upgraded to 18.3 and noticed that the Filter tool expression box has lost its colour coding of expression elements. The Formula tool (which still has the 18.2 look and feel) however still has the old colour coding.

It would be great if the colour coding could be included for all tools with expression editing boxes.

Examples attached for clarity.

Thanks

The new insight tool offers some great charting abilities but it does not integrate with other reporting tools. The tool doesn't support pictures,tables or any way to pull text from the data in the workflow in. This really prevents it from being a solution to any of the my reporting needs.

Hi,

I would like to be able to modify my connection string in the Alias Manager.

Connection string is greyed out :

If I want to change my connection string, I have to create a new alias.

Some of the workflows I use have multiple inputs that can take a long time to initially load. The new cache function itself has been amazing, but there is one big drawback for me: I can't cache multiple tools at the same time.  Alteryx will allow me to eventually cache all of the tools I want cached, but it will take multiple times running the file.  This still saves me time in the end, but it feels a bit cumbersome to set up.

Is it possible to have Output like below in Insight?

Today, the behaviour of batch macro can be strange.

If I refer to https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Batch-Macro-not-looping-after-running-...

we can have big behaviour differences between :

-wf and app

-designer and scheduler

Example here with a batch macro running for all lines in designer and only for line in scheduler

Designer works fineScheduler only runs the first line!!

I know the turnaroud (just use a message box) but it's not natural and I think

-at least the same behaviour is needed in any use case
-if you want to do some optimization, ok, but make it an option!!

I like the new cache option in 2018.3, but I would like it to function a little bit different. Let's say you cache at a certain point and then continue to build after that. If I reach another checkpoint and want to cache, it currently re-runs the entire workflow (ie it ignores my cache upstream and just goes back to the beginning of the workflow); instead, I would rather have it utilize the upstream cache. Personally, caching is usually an iterative effort during development where I keep caching along the way. The current functionality of the cache is not conducive to this. Thanks!

I reported this to the support team but was told it was by design and to post here.

In-DB Inefficient SQL

I would like to report that the In-DB tools are generating horribly inefficient SQL code for simple operations.  It seems no matter what tools you use every statement is starting with a nested 'Select * From'.

Example Simple workflow:

This is a simple Select and Group by but the SQL Generated is:

SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit"

FROM (SELECT * FROM "_SYS_BIC"."shell.app.gsap.FL000_LSC.FL002_CTS.INT.RPT/CA_CTS_RPT_MAIN_001") AS "a"

GROUP BY "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name"

This is taking a very long time to execute:

Statement 'SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit" FROM ...'

successfully executed in 15.752 seconds  (server processing time: 15.699 seconds)

Whereas if I take the same query and remove the nested Select *:

SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit"

FROM "_SYS_BIC"."shell.app.gsap.FL000_LSC.FL002_CTS.INT.RPT/CA_CTS_RPT_MAIN_001" AS "a"

GROUP BY "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name"

It is very quick:

Statement 'SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit" FROM ...'

successfully executed in 1.211 seconds  (server processing time: 1.157 seconds)

So Alteryx is generating queries up to x13 slower than they should be thereby defeating the point of using In-DB.  As you can imagine in a workflow where we have multiple Connect In-DB tools this is a really substantial amount of time.  Example used above is from SAP HANA DB has 1.9m rows and ~90 columns but we have much bigger tables/views than this.

If you look you will see its same behaviour for all In-DB tools where each tool creates another nested Select with its particular operator.

MY SUGGESTION:

So my suggestion is that Alteryx should combine the SQL of the first few tools and avoid using SELECT * completely unless no Select tools have been used.  So it should combine:

- Connect In-DB + Select

- Connect In-DB + Filter

- Connect In-DB + Summarise

Preferably it should combine/flatten everything up until the first join or union.  But Select + Filter are a must!

Note it seems some DB's can cope OK with un-nesting these big nested queries in the query plans for some Tables but normally not for Views.  But some cannot cope at all and so the In-DB tools cannot even be used to Browse 100 records (due to select *).

There are a several ways to store the Avro schema in Hive:

1. Literal JSON string stored in the Hive table properties (Alteryx currently supports)
2. Reference to the schema file stored elsewhere
3. Pass in the schema as a run-time property in Hive

Alteryx only supports Option #1, but that runs into a 4000 Character Limitation which is the default schema limit in Hive’s internal DB. Is it possible to have Alteryx support the other two options to be able to support data sets with large schema definitions?

When commenting an expression (with // or /* <> */), the popup box shouldn't appear as it's essentially free text.

Quite irritating when writing a block explanation of logic or something similar.

Luke

Data profiling feature in the Browse tool is a great feature, however, when your working with an extremely large data set, it can a large amount of time to fully render.

My idea is if Alteryx can make a pre-determination whether the data is so large that it'll take a substantial amount of time to profile the data. If it does, to not profile immediately, rather, display a message where the profile info would be letting the user know that it may take a while to generate with a "Generate Profile" button if the user needs to see it.

Another option would be to only profile a sample of the data and present the user an option to profile everything.

Thanks,

Jimmy

Alteryx creates a Livy Session when connecting to Spark Direct 

I just want to identify easily the session.

Hi Community:

Is anyone else annoyed that the default Output Options for the output tool usually need to be changed? What I've found in my couple of years of using this (wonderful) tool is that for Excel and Tableau outputs especially, the default is always 'Create new [sheet OR Extract File]'. 

But when you use that option for your output tool, you can't use the Alteryx flow again; you get an error (Sheet already exists you moron, or Extract already exists stupid) (c'mon, you know Alteryx is judging you and the strikethroughs are there in spirit).

The 'stupid' is silent

If you ever want to run your workflow again, you've got to change it to 'Overwrite [Sheet (Drop) OR Existing Extract File (Create if does no Exist)]'. 

I'm not sure about you, but I've been (passive aggressively?) hoping that with each new release of Alteryx, I would get a means to change my defaults. I would LOVE the option to have my output tools default to the overwrite, rather than create, option automatically. That one step is just... annoying to do over and over again. 

So, I'm not going to be a passive-aggressive twit any longer. I am formally asking for what I want like an adult.

Can I please have an option in Options>User Settings>Defaults with a drop-down for Output tool preferences: Create by default, Overwrite by default, Append by default, and whatever the other options are generally categorised according to how the Output tools are done? I really only care about the overwrite one, but you're getting my gist at this point, right?

Thanks so much!

-Cedric

Colourless Green

Currently, the distance tool provides an option to calculate mileage distance (as the crow flies) between a point and the edge of a polygon, but you can only calculate drivetime to the centroid.

I'd like to see an option to calculate drivetime based on the nearest edge rather than centroid, Thanks.

I think the Nearest Neighbor Algorithm is one of the least used, and most powerful algorithms I know of.  It allows me to connect data points with other data points that are similar.  When something is unpredictable, or I simply don't have enough data, this allows me to compare one data point with its nearest neighbors.

So, last night I was at school, taking a graduate level Econ course.  We were discussing various distance algorithms for a nearest neighbor algorithm.  Our prof discussed one called the Mahalanobis distance.  It uses some fancy matrix algebra.  Essentially it allows it it to filter out the noise, and only match on distance algorithms that are truly significant.  It takes into account the correlation that may exists within variables, and reduces those variables down to only one.  

I use Nearest Neighbor when other things aren't working for me.  When my data sets are weak, sparse, or otherwise not predictable.  Sometimes I don't know that particular variables are correlated.  This is a powerful algorithm that could be added into the Nearest Neighbor, to allow for matches that might not otherwise be found.  And allow matches on only the variables that really matter.  

Never noticed this, because I always use the custom filter option, not the basic.  But I had a user come to me asking why his app wasn't updating his filter properly.

He configured the filter tool thusly (dummy data):

And here is the what the action tool looks like when you connect it to the filter tool:

So he simply highlighted the "Bob" line and picked to update "Bob".

However, since he used a basic filter, and not a custom one, this is how he should've configured the action tool:

I realize that "well, it's spelled out for you - there's an expression section & a simple section in the action tool".  But for beginners or even non-beginners, it might not be obvious.

It would be nice if when you connect the action too, it only displayed the appropriate option (either custom or simple, but not both).

We now have the ability to output to an ESRI File Geodatabase, which is great, but it only allows you to output it to the WGS84 coordinate system.  I would like to have the same functionality to export it to other projections or coordinate systems similar to the ESRI Shapefile or ESRI Personal Geodatabase output tools (we specifically need NAD83 but I'm sure others would like other options as well).