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Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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Hello all,

When using in-database, all you have in select or formula are the Alteryx field types (V_String, etc..).

However, since you're mostly writing in database, in the end, there is a conversion of Alteryx field types to real SQL field types (like varchar). But how is it done ? As of today, it's a total black box. Some documentation would be appreciated.

Best regards,

Simon

Many users will probably follow best practice style guides with Alteryx to use comment boxes under tools to describe in detail what is happening with these tools - such as this one shared by @BenMoss.

 

However a limitation of this is the comment boxes do not move with the tools, so if you have a well documented workflow but then need to add a new tool, you need to adjust all the spacing and re-align the tools, which with a large workflow can be time consuming. 

 

Alteryx Community Idea.gif

 

Therefore the improvement would be to have an ability to lock comment boxes to individual tools (similar to a group function in Office).

 

Hi,

Add to the feature where you can open a workflow to show how to use a tool.  Allow a user (and share this within an organization) to add a tool template workflow to a tool so one can open the template workflow and then copy the tools in the template into the workflow being worked on.  There are instances where we use the same tool combinations like for dynamic file naming and output.

 

Regards.

I was just responding to a post about the Make Columns tool, and I noticed that there is not an example workflow for this tool built into Designer. It is also missing from the Transform category, so I never think of it.

 

Capture.JPG

 

2022-06-11_16-16-12.png

 

 

@peyton-louden @binuacs @Luke_C 

At the moment containers either expand and overlap other tools, or you have to leave space for them (defeating the original purpose of using them). Is there a way we can have the containers expansion shift the workflow so the others tools shift down / right to account for this expanision?

  • Documentation

Taking inspiration how you work with Jupyter notebooks and use the notebook to show your workings,  wouldn't it be great if you could document your workflows directly on the canvas more in a notebook style.

I think this essentially can be summarised down into two features:

1) Markdown functionality in the comment tool

2) Ability to import results from IRG and  / or browse tool directly into the canvas.

 

I have mocked up a version of what this could look like in the screenshot below.

cgoodman3_0-1637103136947.png

 

Overall I think it would improve the experience of documenting workflows as you can show your workings in-line while building the workflow. Plus it solves the debate around team vertical vs team horizontal as you build using both! 

 

Dear Alteryx GUI Gang,

 

I'll create a container and then customize the colours, margins, transparency, border and then want consistency for other containers.  It would be nice to have a format painter function (brush) to apply the format of one container to another.  This of course could be extended to other tools like comments.  There might be a desire to apply this to more tools too, but the comments and containers would be my focus as they are almost always custom configured.

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

It would be useful to have the WorkflowName captured as one of the default Engine constants. The WorkflowDirectory is included so why not the WorkflowName as well?

 

I often have to use configuration files to pass in values to workflows meaning the workflow name needs to be manually entered into the workflow, either as a text input or User Constant, which feels like an unnecessary step as Alteryx must know the name of the workflow once it has been saved.

  • Documentation

It would be extremely useful to quickly find which of my many workflows feed other workflows or reports.

 

A quick and easy way to do this would be to export the dependencies of a list of workflows in a spreadsheet format. That way users could create their own mapping by linking outputs of one workflow, to inputs of another.

 

Looking at the simple example below, the Customers workflow would feed the Market workflow.

 

WorkflowDependencyType
CustomersSQL Table 1Input
CustomersSQL Table 2Input
CustomersExcel File 1Input
CustomersExcel File 2Input
CustomersExcel File 3Output
MarketExcel File 3Input
MarketSQL Table 3Output

 

It would be CRAZY AWESOME if we could get a report like this for all scheduled workflows in the scheduler. 

Inspire 2021 Call Center Demo.png

 

Having the ability to call-out via ARROWS/SYMBOLS (gold star) would be nice without requiring the user to create images and call them to the canvas.  This makes the workflow even more readable.

 

Watermarks (e.g. DRAFT, AMP, Do NOT AMP, FINAL) would be useful on the canvas as well.  

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

When creating a workflow I generally open a "TEMPLATE" first and then immediately save it to the "NEW WORKFLOW NAME".  My template includes all my preferences that aren't set naturally within the user settings and won't get RESET by them either.  It has a comment box and containers as well as logos and copyrights.  It would be nice to have ready access to this feature.  Maybe others have standards that they want applied to all users and their workflows too.

 

Thanks,

 

Mark

When viewing results of a workflow that has Errors, could we add External error resolution data if the user clicks on the error message?  Like browse everywhere it could lookup the error in help and in community posts.  

cheers,

 

 mark

When building a workflow with testing tools, you tend to want to be able to put these in container and then minimise this to improve readability of the workflow.

For example instead of this:

cgoodman3_0-1628770540533.png

You might want to minimise the error checks like this:

cgoodman3_1-1628770595708.png

However when running apart from reading through the results window, there is no immediate indicator that there is a tool inside the container that has errored:

 

cgoodman3_2-1628770664560.png

So the feature enhancement request is to add in an exclamation marker to show the user that a tool inside has an error and you can then easily open it up and investigate further.

cgoodman3_3-1628770798324.png

 

 

To get simple information from a workflow, such as the name, run start date/time and run end date/time is far more complex than it should be. Ideally the log, in separate line items distinctly labelled, would have the workflow path & name, the start date/time, and end date/time and potentially the run time to save having to do a calculation. Also having an overall module status would be of use, i.e. if there was an Error in the run the overall status is Error, if there was a warning the overall status is Warning otherwise Success.

 

Parsing out the workflow name and start date/time is challenge enough, but then trying to parse out the run time, convert that to a time and add it to the start date/time to get the end date/time makes retrieving basic monitoring information far more complex than it should be.

  • Documentation

Hi Community,

I didn't have a clue where to post this. That is why I am sharing it here.

 

A small portion of the community users are content creators\community builders\people active on social media. Let's take me, for example. I am writing yammer announcements about Alteryx to our internal user group in my current company.

One of the materials that I recently started to share are weekly challenges, and I know other Alteryx communities that are internal often share them weekly.

I would love to have an opportunity to copy-paste some announcements that someone from Alteryx would prepare.

Please see the screenshot below as a reference:

 

Emil_Kos_0-1631015631904.png

 

The only thing that I would add is information about the level of difficulty + Main subject. In similar manner, to what we see on the weekly challenge index:

 

Emil_Kos_1-1631015724096.png

 

If this would be posted on the same topic week over week, community builders like me could follow a threat and copy paste a new post weekly.

 

At the same time, if someone would like to post it on social media. They can always showcase them on the network.

More information about Alteryx in many sources for almost free.

 

You must upvote this idea 😄

 

 

In order to make the interface tools more accessable - please could you add explicit documentation to the help-text that explains how the data is returned to the canvas?

 

For example - the text input tool is documented here: https://help.alteryx.com/2019.3/QuestionTextBox.htm

What is missing from this is whether the multi-line version will provide the data to the canvas as a semi-colon delimited; comma delimited; newline delimited etc?

 

Would be very valuable if the documentation could explicitly define how the output of checkboxes; multiline textboxes; tree views etc are passed to the action tool.

 

Annotation 2019-12-27 183346.png

  • Documentation

Make the Container Caption Font Size Adjustable

 

I find it helpful to see the entire workflow at once.  It would be very helpful for the container size font to be adjustable.  For example, I am documenting a workflow with many containers and tools.  The containers represent segments of my workflow.  When I am looking at or printing the entire workflow, the container heading is too small to be read.  If the font size were adjustable, it could be increased to be readable and still fit easily into the length of the container.  

 

Thanks to zuojing80 and tcroberts for their comments on 9/10/2018.

  • Documentation

When you drag a comment box into a workflow it should sit underneath all other data tools by default.

 

Currently, the order of tools is set by the order of placement (that is, tools placed in the workflow first are placed below subsequently placed tools).

 

  • Documentation

 

We are using Alteryx designer to bulk upload to Snowflake database. We also use Alteryx Connect to pick up metadata from Snowflake. It would be awesome if the designer can add table and field description and snowflake loader can pick up the description automatically. 

 

As of now, the metadata loader doesnt pick up metadata content in real time. This feature will motivate our analysts to document which will improve Connect adoption in our department. 

  • Documentation

After hitting "Test" in Workflow Dependencies:


Failed result = Bold red text (and a message)

Success result = Nothing? 

 

Maybe we could get bold green letting us know that the test completed successfully. 

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