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Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!
Submission GuidelinesWe have discussed on several occasions and in different forums, about the importance of having or providing Alteryx with order of execution control, conditional executions, design patterns and even orchestration.
I presented this idea some time ago, but someone asked me if it was posted, and since it was not, I’m putting it here so you can give some feedback on it.
The basic concept behind this idea is to allow us (users) to have:
This approach involves some functionalities that are already within the product (like exploiting Filtering logic, loading & saving, caching, blocking among others), exposed within a Tool Container with enhanced attributes, like this example:
The approach is to extend Tool Container’s attributes.
This proposition uses actual functionalities we already have in Designer.
So, basically, the Tool Container gets ‘superpowers’, with the addition of some capabilities like: Accepting input data, saving the contents within the container (to create a design pattern, or very commonly used sequence of tools chained together), output data, run the contents of the tools included in the container, etc.), plus a configuration screen like:
This should end a brief introduction to the idea, but taking it a little further, it will allow even to have something like an Orchestration layout, where the users can drag and drop containers or patterns and orchestrate them in a solution, like we can do with the Visual Layout Tool or the Interactive Chart tool:
I'm looking forward to hear what you think.
Best
This has probably been mentioned before, but in case it hasn't....
Right now, if the dynamic input tool skips a file (which it often does!) it just appears as a warning and continues processing. Whilst this is still useful to continue processing, could it be built as an option in the tool to select a 'error if files are skipped'?
Right now it is either easy to miss this is happening, or in production / on server you may want this process to be stopped.
Thanks,
Andy
I surprisingly couldn't find this anywhere else as I know it's been discussed in person on many occasions.
Basically the Formula tool needs to be smarter in many ways, but this particular post focuses on the Data Type component.
The formula tool, should not always default to V_String as the data type when entering data or a formula into the formula tool, it should look at the data type and estimate the most likely option.
I know there are times where the logical type might not be consistent in all fields, but the Data Preview and the Function of the formula should be used to determine the most likely option.
E.G. If I type a number or a date directly into the formula tool, then Alteryx should be smart enough to change the data type from the standard V_String to Int, Double or date.
This is an extension to the ideas posted here:
I often need to create a record ID that automatically increments but grouped by a specific field. I currently do it using the Multi-Row Formula tool doing [Field-1:ID]+1 because there is no group by option in the Record ID tool.
Also, sometimes I need to start at 0 but the Multi-Row Formula tool doesn't allow this so I have to use a Formula tool right after to subtract 1.
So adding a group by option to the Record ID tool would allow the user not to use the multi-row formula to do this and to start at any value wanted.
Love the new updates to the Browse tool in 2019.2! However, if you choose the option Open results in new window, which I do often so I can see my whole dataset, the search/filter/sort functionality goes away. Would be great if that new functionality also worked in the new window. Thanks!
Can't wait for the new base maps!
In-app screens, lot of space is wasted because components/tools can just be stacked one below the other.
It would great if we could also insert them horizontally.
Thanks !
Arno
Tags : screen, app, macro, layout, tools, UI
Please add ablity to globally, within a module, forget all missing fields.
When outputting data to a spreadsheet, the default option is "output to a new sheet". The second time you run your process, you get an error unless you are amazing enough to remember to change the output option to "overwrite sheet".
If you change to "overwrite sheet" for the first run, it actually works just fine and creates the new sheet.
Can Alteryx just eliminate the "output to a new sheet option" so that users will no longer be concerned that "Alteryx doesn't work" when they get this error after creating their first process? And the rest of us will be able to save the run time with an error, then the change of the option?
Thanks!
We have discussed on several occasions and in different forums, about the importance of having or providing Alteryx with order of execution control, conditional executions, design patterns and even orchestration.
I presented this idea some time ago, but someone asked me if it was posted, and since it was not, I’m putting it here so you can give some feedback on it.
The basic concept behind this idea is to allow us (users) to have:
This approach involves some functionalities that are already within the product (like exploiting Filtering logic, loading & saving, caching, blocking among others), exposed within a Tool Container with enhanced attributes, like this example:
The approach is to extend Tool Container’s attributes.
This proposition uses actual functionalities we already have in Designer.
So, basically, the Tool Container gets ‘superpowers’, with the addition of some capabilities like: Accepting input data, saving the contents within the container (to create a design pattern, or very commonly used sequence of tools chained together), output data, run the contents of the tools included in the container, etc.), plus a configuration screen like:
This should end a brief introduction to the idea, but taking it a little further, it will allow even to have something like an Orchestration layout, where the users can drag and drop containers or patterns and orchestrate them in a solution, like we can do with the Visual Layout Tool or the Interactive Chart tool:
I'm looking forward to hear what you think.
Best
Most of the time I use containers to help structure and layout my workflow, as well as then enabling or disabling different parts of it. It would be nice however to still see the tools within a disabled container but have the container greyed out or hashed out?
Enabled Tool Container
Disabled Tool Container
Thanks,
Sam 🙂
I think I'm liking the new UI, but I think it's necessary to bring back save, undo and re-do buttons....
1. Frequent saving of workflows is crucial and not everyone uses keyboard shortcuts
2. The ability to undo (lots) of changes is a key part of iterating and rapidly building workflows in Alteryx and again not everyone uses keyboard shortcuts to do this.
Looks like there's potentially space to add this to the right of 'help' (I suspect this might be technically quiet difficult) or to the left of 'run', 'schedule' and 'active documents' as seen in the image below.
Out of interest, where has the 'documents' terminology come from?
Dear Users, Fans, Compatriots, and Fellow Alteryx Nerds:
One of my favourite parts of using Alteryx is that in all the in-memory tools, there is a quick-and-dirty count in each of your tools' output nodes. You know, you use these all the time and when you switch back into SQL, you get frustrated with having to run the query two or three times just to see the count in each of your join outputs.
One thing I'm missing as an INDB user is that I have to employ a manual workaround to see what is happening. INDB tools are a bit black-box in that we don't see the counts.
All I want...
I've been using this workaround for a little over a year now and I haven't found it to be incredibly taxing on my resources, so I'm wondering if Alteryx may be able to look into doing this on the back end to make the INDB experience that much closer to the in-memory experience. I just want those numbers above; I don't need to know the byte count, just the record count.
What I need to do to get it
Now, I imagine this is not implemented already for a Very Good Reason. But, enough is enough! Let's shoot for the moon and make this tool all that much better!! Anyone with me?
-Cedric Justice
Cambia Healthcare
When writing a good amount of code, it is easy to get lost in a sea of parentheses. Just when you think you're all done, you get an error that can force you to scour through your code to find the missing, extra, or misplaced parenthesis.
A common feature today is to highlight a parenthesis when its partner is clicked on. This instantly lets you know if you have the wrong number of them and where.
I didn't think this was that important early on in Alteryx, at least for me. Formulas were meant to be short and easily readable at a glance. Now as I dig deeper, there's R, Python, SQL and other text-heavy inputs.
I don't need a full-fledged text editor in Alteryx, but I would love some quality of life features like parentheses matching.
While almost all interface tools allow for default values, the listbox / manually set values does not. The idea would be for a property on each line that when displayed to the user would have one or any values checked upon entry. The configuration might look like Name:Value:Default. I.e.
Alabama:01:Yes
Alaska:02:No
Arkansas:03:No
I would use this to pre-populate the listbox with entries from a database that would essentially allow the user to edit his previous entry. In this example, the user previously selected Alabama and the results were stored in a database. When editing the record using an analytics app, I would want the user to see what he chose and the other options available.
When training people on the use of action tools, something that I always have to hit on is that when you are telling the tool which piece of the XML that you are adjusting, it's sort of difficult to tell what you have selected, and super easy to accidentally select something else.
Example:
When you initially select the action to take it's this nice Blue Color. However, it still doesn't feel exactly like you have actually selected anything or told the Action Tool what to do, since it's so easy to just select any other one of these actions.
A slightly different problem is that if you are selecting an action that has been previously configured, it is just this light grey color. So it can be easy to accidentally change your settings because you may not realize it's actually set up.
Here is a recent community post that sort of outlines a few of these problems.
I do a lot of work with SQL code in the PRE/POST SQL options and when I get an error, it usually returns the entire code and a little bit about what is wrong. These long strings are hard to read in the current tooltip format as if you hover over to see the entire error, the tooltip goes away after 5 seconds. So I am frantically reading through lines of error code 5 seconds at time. Can we make it so the tooltip just hangs out until I move my cursor off of it?
This request is super simple! I love how Alteryx displays the row count and size of the data passing through each tool at run time. Can you set the default formatting for the row count indicators to be #,###? Without the commas, it's hard to easily check the row count once you get more than 6-9 digits.
In the example below, it would be so much more readable if it displayed as 75,640,320.
The drop down\list box have numerous ways to list values. One of them that I like is connecting to an external source. You simply have an external source file with a Name column and a Value column. It will display the data in the Name column and pass the data in the Value column. Now suppose instead of connecting to an external source I wanted to use connected tools. Currently, I would have to crosstab this data and the drop down\list box would display and pass the column names.
What if the drop down\list box could have an additional option added where you could connect tools and it would act identically as an external source (display the data in the Name column and pass the data in the Value column). This would be much easier and more functional!
It would be nice if we can arrange some tools on the canvas neatly by one click and having them distributed evenly (horizontally/vertically).
See this picture which worth thousand words.
I've recently been delving into using the interface tools and there are a couple of glaring issues for me as a developer/designer, all having to do with the UI, ironically (yes, I used that correctly!) with the interface tools. The irony here is that the interface tools utilise a poor user interface.
Firstly, I finished this video to ensure I was indeed doing things correctly, and I was.
The UI for designer's interface tools is incredibly sluggish. In order to rearrange tools, each time you create a new one, you have to push the up arrow for each tool and you have to traverse the groupings.
This will take forever. I counted 36 clicks.
Instead of this, I suggest two changes to the interface designer.
I know not everyone is building macros/apps and dealing with this, so I have little faith that this will jump to the top of your queue. But this is a painful part of the UI. I don't know if your UX designers could easily fix this or if it is more pain on your end than the pain you're giving me, but I just want to say: This hurts. 35 clicks every time I add a new element with no option to 'move to top' like you (wonderfully) do in the select tool is a big drag on my time (hint: maybe add that sort of functionality too; the select tool manages this stuff so well!). Which is supposedly valuable. In theory. But it certainly doesn't feel that way when I've spent 10 minutes clicking an up arrow (and yes, my UI is slow. And I may be exaggerating, but not by much!).
Thank you for your continued improvement!
-Çædric Justice
Alteryx Developer
Cambia Healthcare
Add an option to the tree tool generate custom lists similar to the list box. When building apps for teams to use and we need them to select from either a product or store hierarchy it would greatly simplify the process if the tree tool could generate a custom list of the lowest level of the hierarchy that we could feed into a sql pull in the dynamic input tool. On top making the workflow cleaner, I think it would make the user interface a lot cleaner, instead of a giant lists of stores/departments etc. they could drill down to the relevant area much faster.
Similar to previous ideas from @patrick_mcauliffe and @shailesh_patel - would like to request 2 things:
Default on Folder Picker Interface tool
The folder picker tool does not currently allow a default value - this unnecessarily adds work if users have the same value 90% of the time.
Please add a field for the default value that will show when the interface starts up
Similar ideas:
- Default on Date interface: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Default-Date-for-Interface-Tool/idi-p/35770
- Default on File Selector: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Default-file-location-in-file-broswer-Interf...
It is just a bit of annoyance, really. I'd like to see the option of inputting a hexcode of color and/or a screen color picker in the color dialog. At the moment, you have to change R, G, B separately or play around with the cursor to find the right color.
The color dialog is relevant for the documentation purposes but also reporting tools and I'm sure it would make life easier to some people, especially when branding colours are important.
I'd like to hold CTRL, click on a tool and drag it to somewhere else on the canvas to copy it.
This is functionality common in other software (e.g. Tableau, MS Office).
Currently I have to either:
right click > Copy, right click > Paste, or
Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V.
Hello,
Please can we have some drawing tools, so we can add another dimension to our workflows. I would like to draw arrows and lines across my workflow, so I can show the different stages of the workflow. I could use containers as an alternative, but feel lines would be better.
Also, is their a grid-line option, and a space equally (to spread tools evenly across work page), and an auto straighten!
Also, when you FIND, it would be nice if the Find box is allowed to stay on screen, whilst you work on the tool that has just been found; and if the founded tool can be highlighted more clearly so it can be seen.
Also, a timer, so we can see how long the workflow runs for.
That's it for now.
Thanks
Hi Alteryx,
Can you add the search functionality in the dropdown (Apps) where the user enters specific text and the dropdown list gets filtered accordingly?
It would enhance the user's experience while using large lists in dropdown.
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.
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