Alteryx Designer Ideas
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We have discussed on several occasions and in different forums, about the importance of having or providing Alteryx with order of execution control, conditional executions, design patterns and even orchestration.
I presented this idea some time ago, but someone asked me if it was posted, and since it was not, I’m putting it here so you can give some feedback on it.
The basic concept behind this idea is to allow us (users) to have:
- Design Patterns
- Repetitive patterns to be reusable.
- Select after and Input tool
- Drop Nulls
- Get not matching records from join
- Conditional execution
- Tell Alteryx to execute some logic if something happens.
- Record count
- Errors
- Any other condition
- Order of execution
- Need to tell Alteryx what to run first, what to run next, and so on…
- Run this first
- Execute this portion after previous finished
- Wait until “X” finishes to execute “Y”
- Orchestration
- Putting all together
This approach involves some functionalities that are already within the product (like exploiting Filtering logic, loading & saving, caching, blocking among others), exposed within a Tool Container with enhanced attributes, like this example:
The approach is to extend Tool Container’s attributes.
This proposition uses actual functionalities we already have in Designer.
So, basically, the Tool Container gets ‘superpowers’, with the addition of some capabilities like: Accepting input data, saving the contents within the container (to create a design pattern, or very commonly used sequence of tools chained together), output data, run the contents of the tools included in the container, etc.), plus a configuration screen like:
- Refers to the actual interface of the Tool Container.
- Provides the ability to disable a Container (and all tools within) once it runs.
- Idea based on actual behavior: When we enable or disable a Tool Container from an interface Tool.
- Input and output data to the container’s logic, will allow to pickup and/or save files from a particular container, to be used in later containers or persist data as a partial result from the entire workflow’s logic (for example updating a dimensions table)
- Based on actual behavior: Input & Output Data, Cache, Run Command Tools, and some macros like Prepare Attachment.
- Order of Execution: Can be Absolute or Relative. In case of Absolute run, we take the containers in order, executing their contents. If Relative, we have the options to configure which container should run before and after, block until previous container finishes or wait until this container finishes prior to execute next container in list.
- Based on actual behavior: Block until done, Cache, Find Replace, some interface Designer capabilities (for chained apps for example), macros’ basic behaviors.
- Conditional Execution: In order to be able to conditionally execute other containers, conditions must be evaluated. In this case, the idea is to evaluate conditions within the data, interface tools or Error/Warnings occurrence.
- Based on actual behavior: Filter tool, some Interface Tools, test Tool, Cache, Select.
- Notes: Documentation text that will appear automatically inside the container, with options to place it on top or below the tools, or hide it.
This should end a brief introduction to the idea, but taking it a little further, it will allow even to have something like an Orchestration layout, where the users can drag and drop containers or patterns and orchestrate them in a solution, like we can do with the Visual Layout Tool or the Interactive Chart tool:
I'm looking forward to hear what you think.
Best
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!
In-app screens, lot of space is wasted because components/tools can just be stacked one below the other.
It would great if we could also insert them horizontally.
Thanks !
Arno
Tags : screen, app, macro, layout, tools, UI
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
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.
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.
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 !
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:
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:
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?
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,
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.
It appears that the Workflow Dependencies window does not report dependencies from all tools. In the example image, you can see that the file input from the Amazon S3 Download tool is not listed. Some tools may have dependencies that do not easily fit the current field structure of the window, but maybe the input/download tools could be listed with an asterisk or partial reference.
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