Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!
The Product Idea boards have gotten an update to better integrate them within our Product team's idea cycle! However this update does have a few unique behaviors, if you have any questions about them check out our FAQ.

Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Share your Designer Desktop product ideas - we're listening!
Submitting an Idea?

Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!

Submission Guidelines

Featured Ideas

I know this has been suggested before, but it would be great if calculations and transformations could be cached between workflow executions.  Perhaps the browse tools could be configured as caches.  Any spot that has a browse tool fixes the value of that node between runs provided that there are no upstream tool changes. The cache could be optional (or flushed) to allow for dynamic input data that could change between executions, even if the tool chain didn't.

  • General

Some of us work in teams to build complex workflows, resulting in various versions that have to be stitched together. It would be amazing to have the workflow on a shared drive and have a mode where multiple users can build, review, and modify simultaneously. (This was one of the biggest sells for our company migration from Microsoft Office to Google suite). 

 

This would promote collaboration, learning, and more efficient and quality driven workflows. 

The are a lot of SQL engines on top of Hadoop like:

  • Apache Drill / https://drill.apache.org/
    Schema-free, low latency SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage
    It's backed up at enterprise level by MapR
  • Apache Kylin / http://kylin.apache.org/
    Apache Kylin™ is an open source Distributed Analytics Engine designed to provide SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Hadoop supporting extremely large datasets, original contributed from eBay Inc.
  • Apache Flink / https://flink.apache.org/
    Apache Flink is an open source platform for distributed stream and batch data processing. Flink’s core is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations over data streams. The creators of Flink provide professional services trought their company Data Artisans.
  • Facebook Presto / https://prestodb.io/
    Presto is an open source distributed SQL query engine for running interactive analytic queries against data sources of all sizes ranging from gigabytes to petabytes.
    It's backed up at enterprise level by Teradata - http://www.teradata.com/PRESTO/

 

My suggestion for Alteryx product managers is to build a tactical approach for these engines in 2016.

 

Regards,

Cristian.

  • General

Hey all,

We have a policy (similar to the best practices guide published recently by the Copenhagen user group - thank you @danielbrun2) that Alteryx canvasses should run without warnings.

 

However - some of the warnings are tremendously painful to track down. For example - a union that brings together 20 or 30 input streams which gives you a warning saying "not all fields contain field X".

 

Can we change this to multiple warnings saying "Input X does not contain field X" so that we click straight through to the offending warning?

Additionally - when there's a conversion error - we then have to run the flow again with filters and diagnostics to find the offending row. Can we have a way that alteryx automatically sidelines an example row so that you can solve it in one pass?

 

If we look at all the warnings with the intention of "how do we make this something that can be solved right now, without having to run complex diagnostics, so that the very next run is 100% clean" that would be a big help.

 

Thank you Sean

 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Inspire-2017-Buzz/24-Best-Practices-for-Moving-from-Ad-Hoc-Analysis...

 

Please offload map rendering, in Browse Tool, to the video card using DirectX or OpenGL, the software rendering currently used is embarrassingly slow and disruptive.  

Can get the global search to include the Toolkits? They are currently not in the Alteryx community pages and are extremely useful for helping people get started. They are located https://www.alteryx.com/analytic-starter-kits , which seems to be outside the realm of the global search. 

  • General

For deeply structured XML - it would be very helpful to be able to search XML (as you would using the DOM).     Even better would be to implement XML Query capability (a visual tool) within Alteryx so that XML data can be directly queried: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuery

If your "Dedicated Sort/Join Memory Usage" setting is set higher than the actual amount of RAM available on your machine, you will get a message in the Results window like this:

Memory Usage Message.PNG

 

 

 

My understanding is that the Alteryx workflow will continue to limit itself to the lower memory level throughout the entire duration of running that workflow, even if more memory opens up while the workflow is running. If Alteryx were to check the amount of available RAM periodically while running workflows, Alteryx could take advantage of additional RAM that may open up, resulting in getting results faster. This is particularly valuable for Server environments when many jobs of all sizes are running concurrently.

  • General

With complex ETL jobs, we often have a very similar ETL process that needs to be run for multiple different tables (with different surrogate and natural key column IDs)

While you can do a bulk-replace by opening this up in notepad (in XML format) - it would be better if the user could do a find/replace for all instances of a table-name or a columnID from the designer UI (a deep find/replace into all the tools).

 

This can also be used when a field is renamed in the beginning of the flow, so that we can update this for the remainder of the flow without having to do this by trial/error.

 

 

Alteryx Designer should automatically save my modules on a regular basis so that if I have a failure of some sort, my hard work will not be lost.

I think it would be extremely beneficial to have the customization option to rearrange tools within their panels in the tool palette.

This would allow the user to group frequently used tools in their desired order, which would make navigation of these tools easier.

As an example, having the ability to place Data Input as the first tool in the palette would make a lot of sense to me, as its usually where I start building a new workflow.

Recently my trial license expired, and after receiving our activation licenses, I needed to upgrade from the 'User' version to the 'Admin' version.

 

When uninstalling the previous 'User' version, it appeared to complete successfully, and I then started installing the 'Admin' version from the installer.

 

After installation completed, I noticed that three versions of Alteryx appeared in my Windows 'Programs and Features' in Control Panel - Alteryx (Remove Only), Alteryx (Admin), and Alteryx (User).

 

When attempting to uninstall the 'User' version, it appeared to complete as expected, but did nothing when examining the application or root directory location, and I could still access and open and use the 'User' version of Alteryx.

 

To make a long story short, after going into regedit and removing all registry keys named 'Alteryx' including the SRC source key for Alteryx, I was able to manually remove all three of these versions and reinstall the 'Admin' application successfully.

 

Some kind of an uninstaller to wipe out all Alteryx directories, installations/versions, etc. to perform a clean uninstall/reinstall would be super valuable and probably save some folks a ton of time who are evaluating the product and moving from a Trial(User) version to an activated Admin license.

  • General

We often build very large Alteryx projects that breakdown large data processing jobs into multiple self contained workflows.

 

We use CReW Runner tools to automate running the workflows in sequence but it would be nice if Alteryx supported this natively with a new panel for "Projects"

 

Nice features for Projects could be:

  • Set the sequence
  • Conditional sequence
  • Error handling
  • Shared constants
  • Shared aliases
  • Shared dependencies
  • Chained Apps
  • Option to pass data between workflows - Input from yxmd Output - no need to persist intermediary data
  • Input/output folder/project folder setups for local data sources in dependencies window
  • Ability to package like "Export Workflow" for sharing
  • Results log the entire project

I'll admit it, I'm a coder, a keyboard guy, a sublime text typing junkie; but I love Alteryx.  Currently if I open a new workflow and start typing what happens? nothing... Wa wa.  Now lets imagine I'm already pretty familiar with Alteryx and I'm 5 moves ahead of my click and drag. 

 

Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could click a whitespace and start typing?  Typing would bring up a context menu search with tools found by the search (similar to the "search all tools" in the upper left corner, but next to the cursor, and vertical).  I could continue typing until one tool was left or select a tool using my cursor keys. Hitting 'Enter' would insert the tool where I had originally clicked and open another tool search window, selecting the next tool would automagically connect the two and on down the line (if multiple leg outputs exist for the tool the context menu would appear allowing me to select the leg I want it to connect to, hitting Enter would again bring up the tool search...

 

Now get this, go back to just after my first search... if instead of Enter I hit the "Tab" key, boom, it would take me to the configuration panel and allow me to fill in/tab through the configuration.  Hit enter again and I'm off to the races with another tool search.

 

All you click and draggers don't lose any functionality, and we keyboarders can swiftly race through development with ease.  How about that?  (the standard syntax check/path validation would need to be paused to keep development quick until I clicked again on the workflow which would execute the Rapid development mode.)

Hi Team,

 

If you can please work on the idea of auto arranging the tools on Alteryx Designer. This would save a lot of tedious efforts, when we create a very big flow then it becomes very tough for us to arrange the tools properly and it becomes confusing sometimes.

 

Thanks

Please add option to right-click a module tab to rename the yxmd file.  This would be easy to do, for you, and quite handy.

In Dec I had an issue where I could not uninstall or upgrade Alteryx. As part of troubleshooting and the eventual solution I had to manually delete any registry key related to Alteryx. As these were hundreds of entries this took a long time. It would be handy if Alteryx could provide a tool that cleaned the registry of all Alteryx related entries. Related: "Case 00088264: Unable to uninstall Alteryx"

Data profiling feature in the Browse tool is a great feature, however, when your working with an extremely large data set, it can a large amount of time to fully render.

 

My idea is if Alteryx can make a pre-determination whether the data is so large that it'll take a substantial amount of time to profile the data. If it does, to not profile immediately, rather, display a message where the profile info would be letting the user know that it may take a while to generate with a "Generate Profile" button if the user needs to see it.

 

Another option would be to only profile a sample of the data and present the user an option to profile everything.

 

Thanks,

 

Jimmy

 

 

Oracle (https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28318/datatype.htm#CNCPT413😞

  • DATE = yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss
  • TIMESTAMP  = yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.ssssss (6 decimal seconds .. and timezone?)

Alteryx (https://help.alteryx.com/2018.3/Reference/DataFieldType.htm😞

  • DATE = yyyy-mm-dd
  • DATETIME  = yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss

In an ideal world the Alteryx DATATIME would map to the Oracle DATE ... and only to the Oracle TIMESTAMP if it had fractional seconds.

 

Currently DATETIMEs get mapped to Oracle TIMESTAMP.

  • General

In a multi-person BI team; or where you have a multitude of different flows hitting similar data - it's easy to loose track of the right connections; the right data sets etc.

 

Could we please add to the Alteryx toolset, the ability to:

- Register a set of connections with readable names

- Register a set of data-sets which are community managed.

 

Connection Registration:

I frequently connect to 5 different datastores to bring together analytical results.   Because Alteryx remembers the connections once-used I don't have to keep on building these connections from scratch, but these don't have a human-readable name; and they cannot be shared among the team to make workflow creation easier.

Suggestion: 

  • Create the ability in Alteryx Designer to set up a data-store connection, with a human-readable name (e.g. "Timesheet Server").   
  • Allow me to share this connection list with my team
  • Allow me to either do pass-through password (i.e. don't save a password in the connection); or embed a password but make sure it's masked & encrypted so that the receiver cannot use this to get the password for the DB
  • For enterprise customers - it would be great if I can connect to the enterprise connection store and use known good connections that way too...

 

Known Good Data Sets:

The other part of this is the community effect once a large number of people in the company start to get data-savvy.    for e.g. One person has found a good way to query the actual timesheet data (username; project; hours) - and another person has found a good way to query the HR systems to get user demographic information (username; location; contracted working hours).   

  • Can we add to the Alteryx server, in the same way as Tableau and IBM Cognos / Watson have done; to allow users to publish a data-set connector which is known to work.
  • That way - if I want timesheet data - I just browse the known good data-sets through Alteryx designer, and if I have questions I can go back to the connector owner
  • additionally - the central administration team can then identify the ones that are certified as "golden source" or "clean; valid; governed data", and which ones are in a state of "user supplied - use at own risk"

 

For enterprise customers - this would transform alteryx from a stand-alone tool where everyone is re-inventing the wheel every time - to a Data Platform where each additional piece of work done increases the net value of the full ecosystem in a virtuous cycle.   It would also MASSIVELY accelerate every workflow build.

 

Happy to talk through this live with the Alteryx team if that's appropriate and helpful.

 

Thank you

Sean

 

 

  • General
Top Liked Authors