Alteryx Designer Ideas

New Runtime configuration option.

Check box = Do not output ANY file if an ERROR is present.

HOLD all output functions until workflow runs every tool (cache them) and then start writing to output if no errors are found.  If one of the output files fails, we'd like to not output any, but that would be Christmas.  Let's just know that all processing of data was successful before outputs are generated.

Maybe in a cloud or future environment this would look like step #1 build cache.  Step #2 is load output files.  In a local implementation, you've got to have adequate temp space available for the cache.

Cheers,

Mark

When configuring a FILTER tool, the results of your formula are uncertain until you RUN/PLAY the workflow.  Compare that experience with the configuration of a FORMULA tool where you see a "Data Preview" of the first record results.

TRUE or FALSE could readily be added to the Filter Tool and save the execution time for the workflow.  

When you get to HTML tool versions, you could check many rows of data and potentially give back counts of TRUE and FALSE results as well.

I'll put this on my x-mas list and see if Santa has me on the naughty or nice list.

Cheers,

Mark

When using the Sharepoint Output tool - we have seen a few situations (which are widely reported in the designer discussions thread) where the write to sharepoint fails, but no error is raised.
This often happens because of mismatch in data types, but we've also seen this for other reasons (e.g. we had this once due to column ordering).   In the worst case - this can end up with the sharepoint list being emptied out if the write fails on the first item, again with no error indicator.

The Sharepoint Input and Output are very widely used as a way of giving users a very simple UI to input data that can flow into an Alteryx Canvas - so this is a very commonly used pattern in our environment.

Could we request that the Sharepoint output tool be changed to include explicit errors and warnings on write, so that the user has a guarantee that either the write took place or there was an error to reflect the issue?

Thank you.

When I proceed with this command in a python tool:

from ayx import Package

Package.installPackages(package='pandas',install_type='install --upgrade')

in Alteryx it only updates to 0.25, but the Latest version is 1.1.2.

When I would like to upgrade from the Python side i get the following:

ERROR: ayx 1.0.54 has requirement pandas<0.25.0,>=0.24.2, but you'll have pandas 1.1.2 which is incompatible.

Can you please make sure we can upgrade to the latest version of pandas without any compatibility issue?

This is important because of json_normalize. Really useful tool, available from pandas 1.0.3!

#Deployment #LargeScale #CleanCode #BareBonesCode

Request to add and option to strip out all unnecessary text within a Workflow / Gallery App when deploying to the Alteryx Server to be scheduled or used as a Gallery App.   Run at file location still causes the reading of unnecessary information across the network.  

Often the workflows are bloated with un-used meta data that at a small scale is not an issue, but with scale... all the additional bloat (kBs to MBs in size) - sent from the controller to the worker does impact the server environment.

The impact explodes when leveraging the Alteryx API to launch the same job over and over with different parameters - all the non-useful information in the workflow is always sent to the various workers to handle each one of these jobs.

Even having a "compiled" version of the workflow could be a great solution. #CompiledCode

Attached is a simple workflow that shows how bloated the workflows can become.

I appreciate your consideration.

Currently in 2020.2 (but I assume all versions), when you have a workflow running and click on the Tool Name/ID (1 - in the picture below) in the results window it is then not possible to click on the canvas OR get back to the messages for the full workflow as it is then locked to that tool.

The idea is that it should be possible to get back to all of the workflow messages if you click on a tool name in the results window whilst the workflow is running.

However, a neat little tip that I found is if you click on the input, output or browse hyperlink (2 in the picture below), it will open a pop-out browse rather than show the data in the results window, meaning you can still see all of the messages)

This leads me to think that it could and should be possible to see browse anywhere data whilst the workflow is running if this is fixed. Here's a separate idea for that. 

Can we have an option to save a workflow in a prior version for backward compatibility? I think Tableau offers this functionality.

Example:

If I have 2019.4.8 and a colleague has 2019.1.x, I cannot share my workflows because my colleague will receive a notice that the workflow was built in a newer version. I want to be able to save my workflow in 2019.1.x and send to my colleague.

This is predicated on the workflow not containing any tools/features not present in the older version. In that case, give me a warning about the specific tools/features that are not backward compatible. Thank you.

Please enhance the dynamic select to allow for dynamic change data type too.  The use case can be by formula or update in an action for a macro.  If you've ever wanted to mass change or take precision action in a macro, you're forced to use a multi-field formula.  It would be rather helpful and appreciated.

Cheers,

Mark

So I discovered this neat little tip today where if you have a browse tool in your workflow and click on the hyperlink (2 in the picture below) whilst the workflow is running, it will open a pop-out browse rather than show the data in the results window, meaning you can still see all of the messages). However, If you click on the Tool name/ID (1 in the image) is locks the results window to that tool. Idea for a fix here

And this lead me to think that Alteryx must be populating the temporary browse anywhere in memory as it's running, so it would be great if it was possible to either click on the tool anchors or the tool names in the results window whilst the workflow is running to see the browse anywhere data.

The current version of the Publish to Tableau macro retrieves an API key at the start of the workflow run.  Often times the workflow may take several hours to run before it's ready to write to Tableau by which time the API may have expired.  (I think the default tableau server setting times out in 2 hrs)  It's one of those soul crushing "I should've forked the output!"

Sample Log Error - 

•         Tool #46: TableauServer.UploadChunks (238): Iteration #1: Tool #19: Tool #4: Tableau Server API Request (Upload file) Error Code 401002: Unauthorized Access -- Invalid authentication credentials were provided. 
•          Tool #46: Tool #252: Tool #4: Tableau Server API Request (Publish file) Error Code 401002: Unauthorized Access -- Invalid authentication credentials were provided.

The idea would be to change when the macro obtains the API from when the workflow is initiated to just before the workflow is ready to write to the Tableau avoiding these timeouts.

(If you're having this issue in the meantime you can have your Tableau server admin up the timeout)

Today when we install custom tools that use DLLs, the DLLs must be placed in the Plugins folder inside the Alteryx installation directory.  This requires a second step after the YXI installer runs.  I would like to be able to package the DLL with the YXI installer and Alteryx will search for the DLL inside the tool's directory, just the same as what happens with custom Python tools.  This will allow custom tools that use DLLs to be installed just as easily as the 1-step installation process for Python tools.

For example, this today does not work, but I want it to:

With an increasing number of different projects, involving different machine learning models, it's becoming difficult to manage different package versions across workflows. Currently, the Python tool has a single virtual environment, so we need to develop models in different projects always using the same Python and package versions as the Python tool venv. While this doesn't bother the code itself too much, it becomes a problem as soon as we store and load pickled models, which are sensitive to even minor changes in packages.

This is even more so a problem when we are working on the Alteryx server, where different teams might use different packages. Currently, there is only the server admin who can install packages on the server and there can only be one version per package.

So, a more robust venv management in the Python tool would be much appreciated!

Hello all,

A whole field of performance improvement have not been explored by Alteryx : the hardware acceleration by using something else than a CPU for calculation.

Here some good readings about that :
https://blog.esciencecenter.nl/why-use-an-fpga-instead-of-a-cpu-or-gpu-b234cd4f309c

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit

The kind of acceleration we can dream !

Currently we can't use any PaaS MongoDB products (MongoDB Atlas / CosmosDB) as Alteryx Gallery doesn't support SSL for connecting to the MongoDB back end.

SSL is good security practice when splitting the MongoDB onto a different machine too.

Environment variables act as a shortcut so that different computers can be configured in different ways, but a particular path will still point to the right place.

For example if you open up explorer and go to %TEMP%\  - you will open up whichever folder is set up as Temp on this machine.    This is super useful so that you can use a particular logical folder without knowing the actual placement on every machine (for example the Windows Directory)

This works partially in the Directory / input - when you put in the environment variable, it is able to search possible subdirectories (screenshot 1) but it does not work once you run the workflow (screenshot 2).

It seems as if the designer hits the Windows API directly, but it does not work within the engine.

Please could you alter the engine to be able to make full use of the environment variables on the machine in question in the directory path or input tool path?

Screenshot 1 - works in designer

The Alteryx Python tool currently throws an error if the inbound record set has zero rows (screenshot 1).

In order to manage that - you need to create try-except block around the Alteryx.read that instead creates an empty record set data frame. (screenshot 2).   This is inefficient because every time you change the canvas before the python tool, you need to re-code a static field list into the try-except block (i.e. you can no-longer deal with variable fields)

Please could you change the Alteryx.read method to create a zero-record dataframe with the correct column names if the input is zero-length?

Thank you

Sean

Screenshot 1:

Screenshot 2:

I love Workflow Meta info, especially the ability to put the Author, the search tags,the version, the description, etc...

But why can't we use it as Engine Constant? It doesn't seem very hard to implement and it would change life for development.

Hello Alteryx,

Would it be possible to extend the "Cache and Run" functionality also to tools with multiple outputs? Our clients use the R and Python tools very frequently and the runtimes tend to be pretty long. For the development purposes, it would be great to have the caching possibilities also on these tools.

Thank you very much for considering this idea.

Regards,

Jan Laznicka

Hello,

we have several environment in our organization : dev, recept, production.

In order to make that change safe we intend to make several connection (standard alias)  like

PRODUCTION_HIVE

DEV_HIVE

RECEPT_HIVE

In our workflows, we want to use aka:%Question.v_environment%HIVE

Sadly, this solution does not work despite the value defaut.