Alteryx Designer Ideas

As a best practice, I'd like to automagically change any drive mapping to UNC when saving my workflows.  This applies to both local and gallery saves.

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

With the amount of users that use the publish to tableau server macros to automate workflows into Tableau, I think its about time we had a native tool that publishes to Tableau instead of the rather painful exercise of figuring out which version of the macro we are using and what version of Tableau Server we are publishing to. The current process is not efficient and frustrating when the server changes on both the Tableau and Alteryx side.

Directory Tool retrieves today a lot of information about a file. I must say I appreciate getting easily the size and the last write time.

But why not the owner? I have developped a macro with a powershell to do that but what a nightmare for a so little piece of information.

I've had several of my users complaining about the Visual Query Builder view after the last couple of releases. When you maximize the window, half of the screen is taken up by blank gray space and there is no way to adjust it and it's very difficult for those who do not know SQL to build their queries in this very small white space. Need to be able to adjust the gray space.

 

 

Hi All,

 

Data security is very important nowadays. There is no encryption for the output file from Alteryx Designer. 

Imagine, anyone who has Alteryx designer can open any yxdb even with the sensitive data. 

 

Suggest to add an encryption option in the Output Data tool.

 

Best Regards,

Samuel

The idea is to store credentials, login/pw in a "credential alias".

 

Then, those credential aliases can be used in :

-traditional aliases/connection

-in database aliases/connection

-hdfs aliases/connection

-API

-on user aliases for connected controllers/gallery

...etc.

 

The idea is that I only have to change the credentials once for all the connection type (on Hive, I have the in db alias, the traditional alias and even an HDFS alias using exactly the same credentials !! and I have to change all that manually).

 

It would be really helpful to have a bulk load 'output' tool to Snowflake.  This would be functionality similar to what is available with the Redshift bulk loader.

Currently it takes a reaaally long time to insert via ODBC or would require you to write a custom solution to get this to work.

 

This article explains the general steps but some of the manual steps outlined would have to be automated to arrive at a solution that is entirely encapsulated within a workflow.

http://insightsthroughdata.com/how-to-load-data-in-bulk-to-snowflake-with-alteryx/

Statistics are tools used by a lot of DB to improve speed of queries (Hive, Vertica, etc...). It may be interesting to have an option on the write in db or data stream in to calculate the statistics. (something like a check box for )

 

Example on Hive : analyse {table} comute statistics; analyse {table} compute statistics for columns;

We face a big issue for our performances since we cannot as of today create tables in orc.

Connexion parameter for write :

Without option text file (default parameter in Simba) :

 

 

With the option, the WF doesn't fail but :

 

We want :
-to use the hdfs to write the data with data stream in
-to write the new tables with the write-indb in ORC

As you may know, the interrogation of Hive to get the Metadata is actually very slow on Alteryx

 

A first step of improvement (at least in the Visual Query Builder) has been proposed here

Smartest VQB

 

But the real issue for Hive is that the way Alteryx queries the Metadata : it passes "Show table" queries for all the databases. On our cluster, it means more than 400 queries that last each avout 0.5 seconds. The user has to to wait about 4 minutes.

A solution : using an API in java to ask the Hive metastore if it exists (it may be an other tab in the In database configuration). Our cluster admin has an example of a Thrift API in java that we can give you.

Result : 2 seconds for a 38700 tables in more than 500 databases !!

Hello,

 

I work for a company with circa 250K employees. We are in the process of shifting all documents over to OneDrive and I've noticed that when I have an Alteryx workflow that uses inputs stored on OneDrive the connection can be very intermittent. I use the UNC file naming protocol for my input/directory tools, but more often than not I need to run a VBA script that accesses OneDrive before Alteryx tools will connect.

 

There's a couple of posts on this community about this, but nothing in the ideas board. I believe the SharePoint connector is being updated for v11, but nothing for OneDrive.

 

I'd like there to be better integration to OneDrive for business and SharePoint Online please.

 

Thanks,

John.

 

use case : much of our users copy paste a formatted query to the Alteryx tools such as Connect in Db or Input Data (especially to reduce the data).

 

However, some of the formatting such a Carrier Return does not work

 

select 
 * from 
`re7_kerberos_za_e_*******_ee01pub_edd`.`v_*******_flux_20170511` 

 

 

Right now in order to pass a parameter to pre/Post SQL we need to make a macro as a work around.

It would be really great if this was a native capability for the output tool so we don't have to replicate all the output too fields as macro inputs

When using the Alteryx email tool to send a text to a mobile device via carrier URL (i.e. xxxxxxxxx@vtxt.com) bad characters appear. This is due to the fact that the Alteryx email tool is sending in XML format and the carriers only accept HTML.

 

This was determined after working with the Alteryx support team to determine the root cause of that bad characters appearing on the mobile phone.

 

We are using an Alteryx workflow as an early warning system for technical issues to upper management. These advisories or alerts are being sent to mobile devices via email tool.

 

Regards,

Andrew Hooper

Idea: Allow the user to set the data type including character field width in the Text Input tool.

 

The Text Input tool currently auto-senses the correct type and width of the field in a Text Input tool. However, this sometimes restricts the usage of the data downline.

 

Examples:

1 - I often run into the situation where I've copied some data from a browse tool and then pasted that as an input to a new workflow. Then I'll turn that workflow into a macro. But then I run into an issue where the data that comes into the macro is larger than the original width in the Text Input tool. This causes problems.

 

2 - The tool senses that a field containing zip codes should be numeric and then converts the data. This corrupts the data and makes me insert a Select/Formula tool combo to pad the zeros to the left.

The issue : we have to regurlary change our passwords. It implies changing it for all the connections alias (at least for standard connections). 

What I'm looking for :

A commande line to execute like :
alteryxpw.exe -connection {alias name} -connection_type {user/system} -connection_mode {standard/indb} -pw {new password}

This command line could be executed by a powerhsell script.

I often use user constants in my workflows and ever since the Workflow tab has been buried under the Canvas tab in the Workflow Configuration, I often forget to adjust my constants.   Out of sight, out of mind.  

 

My suggestion would be to create a tool that could be placed on the canvas with the constant name in the title area and a text box which shows the current value and allows the user to change the value before processing. 

It would be great if there was an option in the configuration of the Output Tool to create the output directory if it doesn't already exist. Maybe also to append instead of overwrite for all file types too?