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
I personally think it would work better to tab from 'Select Column' to 'Enter Expression Here' and not the 'Functions' List as probably people who are tabbing would immediately like to start typing the formula rather than going through functions, fields, etc.
The "Manage Data Connections" tool is fantastic to save credentials alongside the connection without having to worry when you save the workflow that you've embedded a password.
Imagine if - there were a similar utility to handle credentials/environment variables.
- I could create an entry, give it a description, a username, and an encrypted password stored in my options, then refer to that for configurations/values throughout my workflows.
- Tableau credentials in the publish to tableau macro
- Sharepoint Credentials in the sharepoint list connector
- When my password changes I only have to change it in one place
- If I handoff the workflow to another user I don't have to worry about scanning the xml to make sure I'm not passing them my password
- When a user opens my workflow that doesn't have a corresponding entry in their credentials manager they would be prompted using my description to add it.
- Entries could be exported and shared as well (with passwords scrubbed)
Example Entry Tableau:
| Alias | Tableau Prod |
| Description | Tableau Production Server |
| UserID | JPhillips |
| Password | ********* |
| + |
Then when configuring a tool you could put in something like [Tableau Prod].[Password] and it would read in the value.
Or maybe for Sharepoint:
| Alias | TeamSP |
| Description | Team sharepoint location |
| UserID | JPhillips |
| Password | ********* |
| URL | http://sharepoint.com/myteam |
| + |
Or perhaps for a team file location:
| Alias | TeamFiles |
| Description | Root directory for team files |
| Path | \\server.net\myteam\filesgohere |
| + |
Any of these values could be referenced in tool configurations, formulas, macro inputs by specifying the Alias and field.
I think I'm liking the new UI, but I think it's necessary to bring back save, undo and re-do buttons....
1. Frequent saving of workflows is crucial and not everyone uses keyboard shortcuts
2. The ability to undo (lots) of changes is a key part of iterating and rapidly building workflows in Alteryx and again not everyone uses keyboard shortcuts to do this.
Looks like there's potentially space to add this to the right of 'help' (I suspect this might be technically quiet difficult) or to the left of 'run', 'schedule' and 'active documents' as seen in the image below.
Out of interest, where has the 'documents' terminology come from?
Currently when you add an event to notify you of workflow failure / success - you have to enter the SMTP settings every time. It would be more efficient to set this up as a user setting which can be used for the default across all canvasses that this user creates.
The desginer autosave feature is fantastic when you need it. However, it's pretty annoying when you don't need it as it seems like it:
- Autosaves blank workflows
- Autosaves workflows that are saved and haven't had any changes made to them
Hopefully all of the above can be filtered out from Autosave:
The only workflow from the screenshot above that I'd want Autosaved would be the Parse Directory workflow as this is the only one which I made changes to:
- New Workflow1 - Completely blank
- PureGym Log In - Saved and no changes made
- New Workflow2 - Completely blank (however, I had dragged a tool onto canvas and deleted it, so something had changed)
However, Alteryx brings up all of the workflows:
Hi Dev team,
As well as this much needed UI feature to scroll through workflows https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Scrolling-functionality-added-to-Workflow-sh...
Could you please change the order of workflow names in the 'Active Documents' button to be ordered in the same order as the workflow tabs and not alphabetically as it currently is?
When you have more than 5 workflows open (or less if they have long names) it's so tricky to quickly and easily cycle through them to find the ones you need. This is especially important when demoing, training and presenting to others!
Thanks,
Joe
Hi all,
Would it be possible to update the What's new page for 2019.4 to include the key features in this release (in my mind, one of the biggest features is the SQL formatting)?
Currently if you go to the What's new link in Designer, it takes you to the right webpage, but there is no content for 2019.4
Additionally - would it be possible to keep a few releases on this page - often people skip 2 or 3 updates so it's worth keeping the top highlights of the last 4 releases there so that people can see the new features and explore them.
The great thing about What's New pages is the ability to explore new features, so it's worth linking out to examples on a page like this if possible.
Ever tried to copy a field rename from one select tool to another, or from one summarize tool from another.
Have you noticed that it doesn't work?
I think it should. 🙂
i.e., if you click on the rename box ("Total") and enter ctrl-c, when you enter ctrl-v in the other tool, it pastes this:
Field2 Sum Total
not just the name "Total"
Instead of just the renamed field "Category", the select tool pastes this:
True Field1 String 1 Category
The select tool does a great job at flagging up when something has changed from its original state. However why does this not happen with the checkboxes to keep or remove a field? It would be much faster and easier to read if we could have the same color conditional formatting as the rest.
We have a need to be able to trace the lineage of fields being processed through Alteryx - and it has to be done at a field level to satisfy our regulator. In essence, we have to be able to show exactly where a particular field came from, and demonstrate that we can trust this field. NOTE: If we could do this - then we could also use this information to make EVERY canvas faster, by checking for unused fields and making suggestions to remove these unused fields early in the flow.
In order to do this - it would be great if there were an option to force explicit field names in the Alteryx XML so that we can trace a specific field.
- Alteryx currently only makes a note of a field name if it is changing that field which is very economical - but it makes tracing fields impossible.
- Desire is for every tool to write the field list to the XML definition for every field that it knows about (just like it looks in the UI)
Example:
Here's a simple canvas:
- 3 fields coming in from an input
- Select tool with these 3
- output of three fields into a file
These three fields are not mentioned anywhere in the XML
It would be really nice to be able to easily trace a selected field through a workflow (see below, trace in green). This would greatly help with troubleshooting.
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