Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Could we please change the Interactive Chart tool, to:

• recognize when upstream types have changed and reconfigure (in the case of numerical types marked as string)
• For line charts - sort the values in order of the X value

Sample Flow - derivation of challenge 201:

Issue 1:

- The first interactive chart on this flow has no sorting at all performed by the charting tool - this may be due to the fact that the X & Y axes are in string fields.   Generally line charts would attempt to sort both the axes and the values (where the values should order according to the X axis).   Please can you add a default sort anyway?

Issue 2:

- If you then change the data types on these fields to be numeric - the charting tool still does not sort them until you reconfigure the tool manually
- REquest: please can you get the tool to remember the data types, so that it can prompt you; or even better just reconfigure?

(image looks identical after retyping the fields)

Issue 3:

- When you do a manual reconfigure of the tool after changing the types - the axes are sorted, but the values are not - so you end up with a chart that crosses back and forth.   Generally line charts are ordered in the order of the X Axis for the values

- Request: Please sort values on the line chart automatically in order of the X value?

NOTE: Finally got the outcome needed by forcing the sort before the interactive chart tool

Having just participated in weekly challenge 293 there is a requirement to output a table with certain conditional row colours. However the configuration is based on rgb colour codes, whereas the desired output displays the colours using hex codes. 95% of the development time on this challenge was to get matching colour formatting, so being able to insert hex codes would improve this experience.

Roughly, in all versions of Alteryx Designer, you can use the Annotations tab and rename a tool.  This is awesome for execution in designer, because you can then easily search for certain tool names, better document your workflow, and see the custom tool name in the Workflow Results.

However, when log files are generated, either via email, the AlteryxGallery settings, or an AlteryxEngineCMD command, each tool is recorded using only its default name of "ToolId Toolnumber", which is not particularly descriptive and makes these log files harder to parse in the case of an error.

Having the custom names show in these log files would go a long way towards improving log readability for enterprise systems, and would be an amazing feature add/fix.  For users who prefer that the default format be shown, this could be considered as a request to ADD renames in addition to the existing format.  EG "Input Data 1" that I have renamed to "Load business Excel File" could be shown in the log as:

00:00:0.003 - ToolId 1 - Load business Excel File: 1 record was read from File Finished in 00:00:0.004

I know this has been posted before, but the posts are fairly old, and I have just confirmed with Support that it is still an issue.  Seems to be a pretty basic request, so I'm putting it out there again under this new heading.

The issue is that if you have data in a field, and you have that data separated by a new line (\n), it will show up fine in a browse tool, or pretty much any other output (database file, Office Document file, etc.). But if you try to use the Table Tool under Reporting, it ignores the line break and strings the data together.

Example:

The field data looks like this in a browse or most other outputs:

Hello, my name is 

Michael Barone

and I love

Alteryx

But when I try to pull this field into a Table Tool, it shows up like this:
Hello, my name is Michael Barone and I love Alteyrx

Putting this out here again in hopes that it gets lots and lots of stars so it gets put on the road map!!

Please add reply-to field for email tool.

Scenario:

Upstream tools end in a Summarize Tool that has set of records with the following fields:  EmailAddress, AttachmentUNCPath.  So you get a bunch of recipients with various attachments.  Each recipient can have different attachments, and this will change each time it's run.  In other words, it's fully dynamic.  

If the same recipient has multiple attachments, then it would be nice to group the recipient and just separate the attachments with a semi-colon (or whatever) in the same field.  Essentially creating one record per recipient, and therefore one email per recipient, and having the Email Tool attach each file.  In other words, mbarone@paychex.com gets one email with 5 attachments.  And next week maybe only 3 attachments, and so on.  

Currently the only way I see to accomplish this is with a batch macro.  

Would be infinitely more convenient to just have the Email Tool by default accept multiple attachments in a field as long as they are separated by a semi-colon, much like occurs in the "to" field.

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 see an enhancement that at the install level (through an XML configuration file for example), the use of the From field in the Email reporting tool could be disabled for population by the end user and instead would auto-populate with that current users e-mail address.  Currently users can populate the field with any address on their domain, which is useful, but also poses a risk in that messages can be made to appear to be coming from a party that is not aware of it.  We'd like to be able to control that on install and "turn off" access to the From field

As pointed out by @Joshman108 in this post, you can lose some/all of your work in the table tool if the metadata is ever not flowing correctly. Losing your metadata can happen for a number of legitimate reasons (copying/pasting, crosstab tool upstream, python tool upstream etc.) There are a number of tools (including the table tool) where losing the matadata can prove catastrophic. 

Consider these 2 simple examples:

1) We have the dynamic box checked and apply a rule to field 1:

If our table tool loses its metadata, our row rule is completely erased! I would expect the tool to remember our row rule once metadata is reestablished.

2) We have the dynamic box unchecked, as well as Field4 unchecked. We setup the same rule as before that references field4.

Now when the metadata is lost and restablished, the table tool does a good job of remembering that Field4 is supposed to be unselected, and that I had a rule for Field1; however, the rule has now been changed! I would expect the rule to also remember that I was referencing Field4. Note that if my rule had reference a field that was included in the table, it would have remembered the rule. It's only because my rule referenced Field4 which was not included in the table that my rule got messed up. In my rule, it now references Row# which is completely wrong:

The email tool, such a great tool!  And such a minefield.  Both of the problems below could and maybe should be remedied on the SMTP side, but that's applying a pretty broad brush for a budding Alteryx community at a big company.  Read on!

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

What I said the first time I ran the email tool without testing it first.

1. Can I get a thumbs up if you ever connected a datasource directly to an email tool thinking "this is how I attach my data to the email" and instead sent hundreds... or millions of emails?  Oops.  Alteryx, what if you put an expected limit as is done with the append tool.  "Warn or Error if sending more than "n" emails."  (super cool if it could detect more than "n" emails to the same address, but not holding my breath).

2. make spoofing harder, super useful but... well my company frowns on this kind of thing.

First of, let me say that I really love that the render tool adds commas to your numbers when you output them to excel. You can even control the number of decimals!

However, there are those times that I wish I could turn the commas off. For example, I have a column that represents years. In this case, I want it to be a number, but I don't want commas. I can see this xml coming out of my table tool:

.de41ddeb2857c4579b858debce63bfbec tbody .column0 { numeric:true; decimal-places:0; } 

I would love an additional item like: separator:false that could be set in the table tool to shut off the separator. I've mocked up the table tool here:

In my limited knowledge, I'm guessing Alteryx would need to change/enhance the way their pcxml is structured.

Hi,

The basic table report tool could be improved by including a title option, such as a checkbox that allows you to add a title above the table.

When you want to add a title to a table, you must create a report text specifically for that purpose. The more significant improvement would be for situations in which you want to create tables grouped by a specific field. It would be nice to have the option to add a title per group as well, this would make it easier to add all of them to a report in a more dynamic way without having to do workarounds.

Hello Alteryx folks!

I think it would be awesome to be able to dynamically rename headers right in the Table tool so that the headers can stay in their intended position. For instance, if you use a Dynamic Rename tool, the Table tool will put the new "unknown" column at the end of the output. We have the ability to rename and add formulas to the fields, but we cannot do the same with the headers.

Thanks!

I believe that in addition to the already suggested idea of having an option to avoid sending one email per record, the attachments capability should be overhauled. Sending multiple attachments in a single email is a common need, but the only Community idea is a partial address of the issue by requesting an ability to use semi-colon separated paths in a single field as the attachment criterion. This doesn't seem to be an optimal method given the potential usefulness of the tool and ease of use considerations. 

I think that a full solution should include:

• The capability to select a (file paths) field of all desired attachments which can then be uploaded into a single email
• The ability to use wildcards or directories in the file input mode (as you find in the Input Tool) in order to upload multiple attachments to a single email)

This would be a transformative solution to a common email need, and I think greatly appreciated!

With the new intelligence suite there is a much higher use of blob files and we would like to be able to input them as a regular input instead of having to use non- standard tools like Image, report text or a combination of directory/blob or input/download to pull in images, etc. I would like to see the standard input tool capable of bringing in blob files as well.

Blob InputImage InputText Input

I am trying to add additional functionality to my existing workflow.

We have a common workflow pushed to the Alteryx server and there will be multiple people running this workflow.

Every time the workflow is run, the expectation is that an automatic email should be sent to the person who has triggered it(and won't be sent to multiple other people).

Currently, we have it set up using the Email tool but I do not see an option to dynamically update this “To” field to automatically use the email of a person running the workflow on the server.

Currently saving file output as PowerPoint is possible only doing workaround as in Megan's article (link below) using Render Tool. It might be more intuitive to implement PowerPoint to supported options in "Output Mode" dropdown.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Engine-Works/Reporting-in-Alteryx-Generating-a-PowerPoint-With-a-Gr...

Cheers,

Pawel

I would like to see the same functionalitly that the Output Tool has in the Render tool.  In the Output Tool, you can specify the Excel Worksheet along with the Sheet Name that you want to output too.  Meaning Same Worksheet, different tab:

     C:Output FilesExample_Worksheet.xlsx|Report_1
     C:Output FilesExample_Worksheet.xlsx|Report_2

This functionality is not currently available in the Render Tool and would be very useful and cut out some manual operations on the back end that requires us to copy/paste from one file to another.

I tried using the Section Break technique that was offered as a suggestion, but it did not perform what I needed.

Using other data viz tools like Tableau, we often plot yearly timeseries of data onto the same line chart so we can quickly compare year-on-year differences.  All data viz tools seem to have complexities but the logical approach is the same.  What you do is map all the years data to a relative year, i.e. this year, and then give each year it's own title.  See the example below snipped from a Tableau dashboard:

In this example 7 years of data have been plotted on the same chart.  Note the x-axis,  In Tableau we are able to format the X-Axis labels to only show month and day (Mon-D).  This removes the common relative year, i.e 2019.

As expected, Alteryx is awesome at preparing data to do this kind of thing.  Using the interactive charting tool you can build really nice charts.  However there is currently no way to format the X-Axis label, you must show the relative year too, as shown in the picture below (snipped from the browse tool, outputted from the interactive chart tool):

It was really easy to prepare the 5 year min, max and average lines, which is almost impossible to do in Tableau!

My idea in a nutshell is, please change the interactive chart tool so that the labels on the axis can be formatted to the user's choice, i.e. in this case formatted from datetime to "%B-%d".

Please note, the workflow i'm building in this case, is creating 3 line charts of related data, each by year.  The end product is a daily email sent to users.

Thanks, nick