Alteryx Designer Ideas

With the 2019.3 release the summarize tool now includes prefixes for grouped fields. While a nice addition, in application it makes using this data downstream (like joining to other tables) more involved because of needing to remove this prefix. 

It would be nice to have this as an option (a checkbox to add/remove prefixes maybe) or just revert back to pre-2019.3 behavior...thanks!

Currently the cross tab tool automatically sorts alphabetically by the "New Column Headers" field. Often times I have to output data with dates across the columns and therefore have to do a cross tab to achieve this. The problem is when I have the dates formatted with month names, the crosstab automatically sorts it in alphabetical order instead of date order (i.e. Apr, Aug, Dec, etc vs Jan, Feb, Mar). To get around this issue, I have to use a dynamic rename tool. It would be great if there was a way to choose the order of the crosstab (i.e. in the order of the data, crosstab, another field, etc.).

Please add measures of statistical central tendency to the Summarize tool, such as:

Mid-range

Midhinge

Quartile

Thank you.

Hello Alteryx Devs - 

When I got to write some scripting in the formula tool, my data stream properties should be the first to be suggested once a user starts typing a letter, not the last. 

uppercase(Ad -> gives me:

DateTimeAdd

FileAddPaths

PadLeft

PadRight

ReadRegistryString

[Address]

I think we would need a dedicated R macro to ascertain the chances anyone in is going to need [ReadRegistryString] before they need a column of their own data that starts with [Ad...]

Easy fix.  Makes a big difference.  

Thanks.

With the continued growth of Graph Databases, it would be nice for Alteryx to creates a new tool set that would allow input/output connectors for Graph Databases like Neo4j which software tools like Pentaho and Talend already have.

Keith. 

Hi, I have searched through the community, and I wasn't able to find a duplicate for this idea. If in fact there is, I apologize and please point me to that post. I think that it would be a good idea to have date options in the summarize tool that would allow for grouping at higher levels of the date. I often have a date field that is specific to the day (i.e. 2018-01-01), and I just want to group by the year or month. Currently in order to do this, I have to create a formula before the summarize tool that formats the date according to how I want to group it, and then I am able to group off that field in the summarize tool. It would be nice if in the summarize tool, I could select the date field, and then have the option to group it at year, month, week, etc. 

These tools seem to be volatile, as in if you click on them before you run the workflow they lose their configuration. This is infuriating. Can we change this to be like every other tool where you can copy, paste or click into it at any time and it remembers its config.

Nick

I would love to see a "Product" option added to the summarize tool. I can currently count, sum, mean etc., but I can't multiply my data while grouping. There are numerous "work arounds", but a native product function built into the summarize tool would be great.

Thanks for listening!

Is there a way we can turn on and off any tools in the workflow. This way we can run the tool and when a certain tool is marked off it is not executed. This way we can test the workflow and check different output without deleting the tools existing on the workflow, we can just turn then on or off.

A problem I'm currently trying to solve and feel like I'm spending way too much time on it..

I have a data set which has some data in it from multiple languages, and I only want English values.  I was able to get rid of the words with non English letters with a little regular expression and filtering.  However, there's some words that do contain all English letters but aren't English.  What I'm trying to do is bring in an English dictionary to compare words and see which rows have non English words according to the dictionary.  However, this is proving to be a bit harder than I thought.  I think I can do it, but it feels like this should be much simpler than it is.

It would be great to have a tool that would run a "spell check" on fields (almost all dictionaries for all languages are available free online).  This could also be useful also just for cleaning up open text types of data where people type stuff in quickly and don't re-read it! 🙂

Access to only MD5 hashes via MD5_ASCII(String) and MD5_UNICODE(String) found under string functions is limiting.  Is there a way to access other hashing algorithms, ideally via the crypto algorithms from OpenSSL or the .NET framework? 

  - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.cryptography.hashalgorithm(v=vs.110).aspx
  - https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Command_Line_Utilities#Signing_.2F_Digest 

Hashing functions are a very useful tool to have. There are many different types of hashes and each one has tradeoffs for different uses. This can range from error checking, privacy shielding, password protection, forensic analysis, message authentication (HMAC) and much more. See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/800685/which-cryptographic-hash-function-should-i-choose 

- For workflows with data containing existing hashes, being able to consistently create hashes from non-hashed data for comparison is useful.
- Hashes are also useful because they are the same outside the Alteryx environment. They can be used to confirm correct operation of a production system or a third party's external process.

Access to only MD5 hashes via MD5_ASCII(String) and MD5_UNICODE(String) found under string functions in the formula tool is a start, but quite limiting. 

Further, the ability to use non-cryptographic hashes and checksums would be useful, such as MurmurHash or CRC.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hash_functions

Having the implementation benefit from hardware acceleration (AES-NI / CUDA) would be a great plus for high volume applications. 

For reference, these are some hash algorithms that could be useful in workflows:

SHA-1

SHA-256

Whirlpool

xxHash

MurmurHash
SpookyHash
CityHash

Checksum
CRC-16
CRC-32
CRC-32 MPEG-2
CRC-64

BLAKE-256
BLAKE-512
BLAKE2s
BLAKE2b
ECOH
FSB
GOST
Grøstl
HAS-160
HAVAL
JH
MD2
MD4
MD6
RadioGatún
RIPEMD
RIPEMD-128
RIPEMD-160
RIPEMD-320
SHA-224
SHA-256
SHA-384
SHA-512
SHA-3 (originally known as Keccak)
Skein
Snefru
Spectral Hash
Streebog
SWIFFT
Tiger

Hi,

This feature isn't a must - but would definitely be a nice to have.

Similar to the excel having a tab with key figures like average, count and sum 

It would be a really good idea to do something similar within Alteryx just to have a quick glance on key figures/functions (example attached - apologise for the bad paint job but definitely would look good with Alteryx colour scheme)


Thanks

I am on a forecasting project where we convert one vector of forecasts into another vector of forecasts by multiplying by a conversion matrix. This is very clumsy and fragile to do in Alteryx meaning we have to drop out to Excel. The ability to do very simple matrix multiplication in Alteryx would be very useful here and in other use cases. I realise you can probably exit to R and do the job, but for something so basic that shouldn't be required.

The relational representation of an mxp matrix is a three column table of cardinality mxp with columns { I , J , A }, where I labels the first index set with index i, J labels the second index set with index j, and A labels the numeric values with value a(i,j).  Given a second pxn  matrix { J, K, B } in relational form we should be able to multiply them to get a mxn matrix { I, K, C} in relational form where of course c(i,k) = sum over j in J of a(i,j)*b(j,k).

Vectors can of course be represented as 1x and x1 matrices. If you really wanted to go to town this could be generalised to array processing ala APL2.

It would be a handy feature if it were possible to choose a data type for an input tool to read the data in as. For example, if a dataset has multiple fields with different data types, it would be handy to be able to make the Input Tool read and output them all as a string, if needed. This would also make a handy tool, a sort of blanket data conversion to convert all fields to the specified type.

It was discovered that 'Select' transformation is not throwing warning messages for cases where data truncation is happening but relevant warning is being reflected from the 'Formula' transformation. I think it would be good if we can have a consistent logging of warnings/errors for all transformations (at least consistent across the ones based on same use cases - for e.g. when using Alteryx as an ETL tool, 'Select' and 'Formula' tool usage should be common place).

Without this in place, it becomes difficult to completely rely on Alteryx in terms of whether in a workflow which is moving/populating data from source to target truncation related errors/warnings would be highlighted in a consistent manner or not. This might lead to additional overhead of having some logic built in to capture such data issues which is again differing transformation by transformation - for e.g when data passes through 'Formula' tool there is no need for custom error/warning logging for truncation but when the same data passes through 'Select' transformation in the workflow it needs to be custom captured.

I'd like to see a tool that can take an input, then send it in different directions (similar to formula tool), but with many options... based on filters and/or formulas and/or fields.

Sometimes I need to perform actions on parts of my data or perform different actions depending on whether the data matches certain criteria and then re-union it later.

Right now, the filter tool only allows true or false. If we could customize further we could optimize our workflows rather than stringing filter tools together as if they are nested if/then.

So either the filter tool could have more options than true/false, and infinite ouputs, or the join multiple tool could be flipped, as shown below.

I envision something that says:

Split workflow:

• By Field: Field Name (perhaps with summarize functions such as min/max, etc.)
• By Formula (same configuration as current)
• By Filter
  • Field
  • Operator
  • Variable

Please create the ability to Concat a field in the In-DB Summarize Tool similar to the regular Summarize tool. This would enable much faster processing on concatenating fields using the database's processing power vs. the local machine.

PLEASE add a count function to Formula/Multi-Row Formula/Multi-Field Formula!

I have searched for alternatives but am just confused about how to store the result for the total number of rows from Summarise or Count Records in a variable that can then be used within a Formula tab. It should not be that difficult to just add equivalents to R's nrow() and ncol().

Would it be possible to add some additional options to the running total, in particular average (max, st dev. may be useful) to the running sum tool or create a rolling average tool where you can group by multiple fields and have a rolling window for the last x rows, which you select?  I know this can be done in the Multi-Row formula and with the moving summarise tool tool (http://www.chaosreignswithin.com/2014/12/moving-summarize.html), however the former is capped by 10,000 rows and alteryx crashes on my mac when trying to click on the multi-row formul tool with 6000 rows.  Also it takes a several hours to analyse 1 file, and would like to have a solution to do this on a daily basis. Also I need to be able to so a rolling average over the last 11,999 rows, as this would be the last 20 minutes of data using a 10Hz GPS unit. This would be a great tool I think.