Alteryx Designer Ideas

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!

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!

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.

Transfer of records from Python SDK RecordRef seems to be slow sending large amounts of data to the Alteryx Engine (e.g. discussion here). Although unclear of the exact specifics, it seems that there's a copy and convert process in play.

Apache Arrow appears to be addressing this issue, and the roadmap and specs are impressive! It seems like (again I have no understanding of the Alteryx Engine specifics) that something like this would be excellent for expanding SDK use cases as well as for other connectors such as the Apache Spark connector.

And it looks like it'd be fun to build into Alteryx! 🙂

When we industrialize our workflows, we often use a parameter file with a command like :

AlteryxEngineCmd.exe MyAnalyticApp.yxwz AppValues.xml

I would like to have the parameter file path with its extension as an engine constant, like we have the workflow name.

Idea:

I know cache-related ideas have already been posted (cache macros; cache tools), but I would like it if cache were simply built into every tool, similar to the way it is on the Input Tool.

Reasoning:

During workflow development, I'll run the workflow repeatedly, and especially if there is sizeable data or an R tool involved, it can get really time consuming.

Implementation ideas:

I can see where managing cache could be tricky: in a large workflow processing a lot of data, nobody would want to maintain dozens of copies of that data.  But there may be ways of just monitoring changes to the workflow in order to know if something needs to be rebuilt or not: e.g. suppose I cache a Predictive Tool, and then make no changes to any tool preceeding it in the workflow... the next time I run, the engine should be able to look at "cache flags" and/or "modified tool flags" to determine where it should start: basically start at the "furthest along cache" that has no "modified tools" preceeding it.

Anyway, just a thought.

A lot of popular machine learning systems use a computer's GPU to speed up some of the math to a huge degree. The header on this article on Medium shows a 15x difference from a high-end CPU vs a high-end GPU. It could also create an improvement in the spatial tools. Perhaps Alteryx should add this functionality in order to speed up these tools, which I can imagine are currently some of the slowest.

Please test/certify Teradata 16.2 for designer, server, scheduler, and Gallery applications.  

If progress bar or overall process completion percentage can be displayed somewhere, adds great value for the users running complex processes (with multiple databases/ files as input and complex queries especially spatial queries).

Hi!

It would be cool if the Overlap tool also worked with report layouts, instead of just the map image. For example, once I've pieced my different report tables into one layout, it would be cool if I could just add my company logo using image tool, add a Overlay tool, and add the logo to the top corner of my finalized report. I realized there are other ways of doing it, this would seem the most straight forward though. Just an idea.

Please evaluate the option to add 2 new containers:

1. parallel - execute tasks inside in parallel
2. serial - execute tasks in strict  order, imposed at design time. In the future the oder of operations could be enforced by parameters or other input conditions at runtime.

Please Give us the capacity to mix and match these 2 containers.

Thank you

Regards,
Cristian.

I just noticed in a workflow I'm looking at, that I derived a column but after a bit of developing, forgot about it, so there it sat, unused.  It doesn't hurt anything, but it would be useful if that sort of thing would automatically generate a soft warning on the tool in question: e.g. any item not referenced downstream automatically generates an "Unused variable" warning.

The excel driver (.xlsx) converts these values to 0.  If you use the legacy excel driver (.xlsx) it brings in the #N/A values.  This issue was reported in the community and I am forwarding it to the New Idea as a problem that needs to be addressed on behalf of @JohnDoe.

In case of system crash/ upgrade, transfer of Alteryx license from one system to another system or from one user to another. User should be able to surrender/ borrow/ transfer license from one machine to another. This helps for more flexible use of product.

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.

When Alteryx 2018.4.3.54046 reads an xlsx, it can "introduce" a float where there was none before. This only happens in a specific situation and it's not clear WHY it is doing this. The actual numbers are exact to 2 and 3 decimal places in Excel. It isn't a matter of formatting or display. That's what they are. An example number: 1.43.

If there is a string value in the same column, then Alteryx will read the entire column as a string. So far, so good. When it does this, some of the numbers now look like floats. 1.43 now looks like 1.42999999998 in Alteryx. Not all of the numbers get this weird float treatment.

I cannot control the source files and they may have strings in various cells of the "numeric" fields. I have to read everything as strings. I want to know why this happens and what to do about it. Thank you.

As per this discussion, I'd like to create constants that stay with me as I create new workflows rather than creating a user constant across multiple workflows.

This could perhaps be done by editing an xml file in the bin.

It'd be nice to have Engine Constants that follow us across all workflows. Having an XML file in the bin that we can update could be a way of doing this. 

Hi,

Noticed an issue in the Browse tools, specifically if you’ve run a module once, where browse tools are displaying information, and then you add new browse tools into the process (without clicking run yet). What I’m seeing is if I’m looking at the “existing” Browse that is showing data, and then click directly onto a Browse tool that was added after the run (not remembering I just added it), the “new” Browse tool is showing the previous Browse tools info, I literally have to click on the canvas, and then back to the new Browse tool for Alteryx to recognized there isn’t any data to display in it yet. My point being it can be misleading to the user if they don’t recognize the wrong info is being displayed (because as you click back & forth between the two, the data stays the same, making the user think the issue is in the process rather than just the display, can waste a lot of time backtracking for no reason). I’ve seen this behavior over at least the past 3 engine updates, just FYI.