Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

We would like to have the ability to overwrite sheets in macro-enabled Excel workbooks.  Several of our scorecarding templates leverage macros for Excel events, protection, and interaction, and the ability to directly overwrite data in these workbooks would be a huge benefit of  using Alteryx.

You can call me new school, but when I browse for inputs etc. in Alteryx, they are the old school windows interface where I have to hunt and peck through the file directory.  Can you make it so we can use the newer interface with so I can type in my location and navigate a bit easier?

I would classify this as a major bug.

 

Using Redshift ODBC connector, if I configure a Pre SQL statement inside an Input Tool, as soon as the Input tool is deselected (white space is clicked in workflow area), the Pre SQL statement executes without even executing the workflow.

 

e.g. putting a CREATE TABLE statement as pre SQL will create the table prior to the workflow being executed.

 

There should be no reason for the Pre SQL statement to execute until you are ready to execute the whole workflow. If there is, then the Pre SQL statement should be done outside of Alteryx.

 

Please change Alteryx to NOT execute Pre SQL until workflow is executed

Would be great to see a 'built-in' select on the input tool.

Appreciate you can do this when connecting to dbs but nearly every time I (and I believe most others) use the input tool to connect to a file, the next tool I use is a select tool to rename/remove/change type of the incoming data.

 

If there was a select tool 'built-in' to the input tool (as the mocked-up image below shows) it would offer three key benefits:

1) quicker for the user

2) cleaner workflow view (especially in workflows with multiple input tools, each subsequently followed by select tools)

3) more intuitive for new users - after all, they are the future of the Alteryx community 🙂

 

File Input Select

Even with browse everywhere I see plenty of workflows dotted with browses.  Old habits die hard.  Maybe a limit configuration for browses would be a good thing.  If you've recently browsed a very large set of data you might agree.

 

Cheers,

Mark

Dear Alteryx Team,

Dynamic Input Tool is a great tool to import easily multiple files using files paths parameters ... having the same tool for outputs would be great to export many files in pre-established folder.

Many thanks

Arno

Hi all,

 

Based on the thread here https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Support-for-unsigned-int-database-type/m-... - there would be value in natively supporting the Unsigned Int data type in Alteryx.   

This idea was raised by @jgreene.

 

Note: this does appear to be directly supported in the core OCBC library (as long as it's supported by the ODBC driver for the specific database in question), so hopefully this won't be a huge lift:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/odbc/reference/appendixes/sql-data-types

 

@jgreene- would you mind adding any further information about the DBMS you are using which supports unsigned int, and any other info that may help the team to develop and test this (e.g. any link you can find to an available ODBC driver for this database etc?)

 

Thank you

Sean

In a browse tool, sometimes I need to check any metrics haven’t been lost or omitted in different summarise tools (eg the totals still add up with different group by).

I would LOVE the quick win of selecting some cells in the browse tool results pane, and a label somewhere shows me the sum, average, count, distinct count, etc. I hate to use the line but ... “a bit like Excel does”. They even alow a user to choose what metrics they want to show in the label by right clicking. 🙂

This improvement would save me having to export to Excel, check they add up just by selecting, and jumping back, or even worse getting my calculator out and punching the numbers in.

Jay

It would be helpful to have the Read Uncommitted listed as a global runtime setting.

Most of the workflows I design need this set, so rather than risk forgetting to click this option on one of my inputs it would be beneficial as a global setting.

For example: the user would be able to set specific inputs according to their need and the check box on the global runtime setting would remain unchecked.

However, if the user checked the box on the global runtime setting for Read Uncommitted then all of the workflow would automatically use an uncommtted read on all of the inputs.

When the user unchecks the global runtime setting for Read Uncommitted, then only the inputs that were set up with this option will remain set up with the read uncommitted.

 

Hi all,

 

Within the last days I was confronted with a problem in a production workflow, which was not working as expected. The main problem was, that the input tool was collecting data from a MSSQL database, but some parts of the strings disappeared on the way.

 

One column was specified as a VARCHAR and contained some special characters (e.g. '…', not '...'). The input tool now drops all characters which are not included in the Latin-1 table, but this does not seem to be a good behaviour from my perspective. This is not the case for NVARCHAR fields, they are automatically imported as V_WString, which contains those special characters.

 

The solution was to just cast in the SQL query (redesign of the database layout would also work). Shouldn't this be solved a little easier, or are there good reasons to force using a V_String?

 

Best regards

Max

When a user connects the Input tool to a database, the Tables view lists the tables the user can see. Please add a search feature and an option to export the list.

The Legacy Excel output Driver has the ability to Delete Data & Append as an output option for Excel files.  This is useful to retain custom formatting and conditional formatting on a worksheet.

 

However, the new Excel Output Driver and Macro-Enabled Excel Driver do not have this option.

I think this would be very helpful for a lot of our business needs, as we still use Excel for a lot of our reporting needs.  I know that Tableau is a very powerful tool for exactly this sort of situation, but we do not yet have any widespread adoption at our company.

Particularly, conditional formatting would be a fantastic option, as it would save a lot of post-run manual process.

I want modification of the Email Tool to support running it at a specific point, defined by developer, within a workflow where currently "The Email tool will always be the last tool to run in a workflow". 

 

We use the tool to send notification of completion of jobs and sometimes attach outputs but we would like to be able to also send notifications at the start or at key points within a workflows processing.  Currently the email tool is forced to be the last tool run in a flow, even if you use block until done tool to force order of path execution to hit the email tool first.

 

If we could add a setting to the configuration to override the current default, of being the last tool run, to allow it to run at will within a flow that would be awesome!  And of course we would want the same ability for texting, be it a new feature of the email tool or a new tool all its own. 

 

The Texting option refers to an issue in Andrew Hooper's post seeking enhancement of the email tool for texting, search on "Email tool add HTML output option" or use link...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Email-tool-add-HTML-output-option/idi-p/92114...

 

When running Alteryx using parallels we were unable to start a CSV file on a specific line (greater than 1).

 

Message:  Attempted to skip more lines than in file.  Please check the import line.

 

The filename includes a UNC path.  We attempted to modify the workflow dependency to be relative (all options were tried).  Alteryx could not/did not change the path as when using parallels the directory is always UNC.

 

This problem was posted in the discussions and I'm entering it here in ideas for remediation.

 

Cheers,

Mark

Would be great to have a dynamic input tool that is a SFDC connector to update SOQL queries based on the fly. 

The Text to Columns tool allows for multiple delimeters, such as comma AND tab. It would be great if that capability was baked into the input tool.

Hello Alteryx Dev Gurus - 

 

We are migrating and some workflows that used to successfully update a datasource are now giving a useless error message, "An unknown error occurred".  

 

Back in my coding days, we could configure the ORM to be highly verbose at database interaction time to the point where you could tell it to give you every sql statement it was trying to execute, and this was extremely useful at debug time.  Somewhere down the pipe Alteryx is generating a sql statement to perform an update, so why not have something on the Runtime tab that says, 'Show all SQL statements for Output tools'?  Or allow it on an Output tool by Output tool basis?  If this was possible by changing a log4j properties file 15 years ago, I'm pretty sure it can be done today.  

 

Thank you for attending my TED talk on how allowing for detailed sql statements to bubble back up to the user would be a useful feature improvement.  

When checking the 'Disable All Tools that Write Output' option in Workflow Runtime Configuration, I would expect that In-Database Tools that wirte records to a database should be disabled in addition to standard in-memory output tools.

 

"Data Stream In" and "Write Data In-DB" immediately come to mind, but there may be others:

 

May I suggest that you include a facility to word wrap the cell viewer in a browse. When working with long OuterXML strings, for example, it would be very useful to see the full extent of the string. 

 

Thank you