Alteryx Designer Ideas

There are quite a few instances reported in my ognization that user terminates the intallation process since it takes more than one hour and user tends to believe that the intallation process is somehow "failing". So they terminate the installation and try to install again.

A kind reminding message such as "This will approximatly take one hour, and you can enjoy your coffee break" something like that would definetely help.

Please kindly consider.

Hello all,

According to wikipedia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_(SQL)

CROSS JOIN returns the Cartesian product of rows from tables in the join. In other words, it will produce rows which combine each row from the first table with each row from the second table.[1]

Example of an explicit cross join:

SELECT *
FROM employee CROSS JOIN department;

Example of an implicit cross join:

SELECT *
FROM employee, department;

The cross join can be replaced with an inner join with an always-true condition:

SELECT *
FROM employee INNER JOIN department ON 1=1;

For us, alteryx users, it would be very similar to Append Fields but for in-db.

Best regards,

Simon

The data view of any anchor is searchable. I want to search the metadata view please.

Hello Alteryx Dev Gurus - 

We are migrating and some workflows that used to successfully update a datasource are now giving a useless error message, "An unknown error occurred".  

Back in my coding days, we could configure the ORM to be highly verbose at database interaction time to the point where you could tell it to give you every sql statement it was trying to execute, and this was extremely useful at debug time.  Somewhere down the pipe Alteryx is generating a sql statement to perform an update, so why not have something on the Runtime tab that says, 'Show all SQL statements for Output tools'?  Or allow it on an Output tool by Output tool basis?  If this was possible by changing a log4j properties file 15 years ago, I'm pretty sure it can be done today.  

Thank you for attending my TED talk on how allowing for detailed sql statements to bubble back up to the user would be a useful feature improvement.  

This is a QoL-request, and I love me some QoL-updates!

While I'm developing I often need the output of a workflow as input for the next phase of my development. For example: an API run returns job location, status, and authentication ids. I want to use these in a new workflow to start experimenting what'll work best. Because of the experimenting part, I always do this in a new workflow and not cache and continue in my main flow.

Writing a temporary output file always feels like unnescesary steps, and tbh I don't want to write a file for a step that'll be gone before it reaches production. Esp if there is sensitive information in it.

Thanks.

So many times, a given source field name could change. If you have a complex workflow it can be time consuming to update various join, select and other tools to replace the old field name with the new field name. For example in sales you may have fields that include the year  "Sales_2020".

It would be nice to "mimic" the functionality that Tableau provides where you can somehow click/select a field (e.g. Sales_2020) and then select "Replace Reference" and select the new field you want to use instead (e.g Sales_2021). This functionality would then automatically carry through the entire workflow and wherever you used Sales_2020 you will now automatically use Sales_2021.

Thoughts on this?

I was looking at the ideas history to see if this was already posted and couldn't find it, but feel free to merge if there is a existing one.

The motivation for this is that I have a workflow that works perfectly when you hit the run button in Designer, but fails when runs from schedule (To local computer).

So the idea is to allow the users to run the workflows from within the scheduler, once a workflow has been scheduled (So it runs exactly as it'll be when the schedule triggers it, but without having to reschedule every time).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this possible in old (I mean very old)  versions of Designer?

Alteryx is unlike many BI tools in the sense that it joins NULL. It is difficult to think of another platform that has this behaviour. Either people know about this and work around it or they don't and their joins are a ticking time bomb. Please add a check box to the Join and Join Multiple tools to allow or prevent joining NULL. This will serve to remove the need for workarounds as well as educate users about this default behaviour.

I like to suggest having a Batch Macro Container (besides the existing Container) which acts as a Batch Macro within a Workflow and is stored within the Workflow.

I understand that having a batch macro available as a separate tool can be very powerful and reduces redundant work.  However, very often Batch Macros are set up for a specific workflow only and are of no use for other workflows. The Creation of a Batch Macro in a container will significantly reduce the time to deploy a batch macro and keeps the Macro folder clean of one-time Batch Macros.

Attached a picture of how this could look like

Thanks

Manuel

I've been spending some time looking at low-code app development platforms, and one of the features that these have which it would be great to see added into Alteryx Analytic Apps is the ability to display results directly in the app interface pane.

At the moment when an app successfully runs the results can be shown in a pop-out window, as shown below:

An example from a low code built app is this:

Therefore the new feature it would be great to add is a browse result window within the interface tool, or a way to render the results and display that in the window.

Looking forward to hearing from others and what else have you seen with web apps that it would be great to improve Alteryx Analytic Apps with?

#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.

Hello all,

In addition to the create index idea, I think the equivalent for vertica may be also useful.

On vertica, the data is store in those projections, equivalent to index on other database... and a table is linked to those projections. When you query a table, the engine choose the most performant projection to query.

What I suggest : instead of a create index box, a create index/projection box.

Best regards,

Simon

When viewing results of a workflow that has Errors, could we add External error resolution data if the user clicks on the error message?  Like browse everywhere it could lookup the error in help and in community posts.  

cheers,

 mark

Currently, if you download and Alteryx package from an alternative version it doesn't allow import into a newer version.

Workflows allow this with a warning it would be good to allow it on packages too. 

Can we please have a tickbox (ideally one that remembers your preference to be ticked or unticked) on the Save to Gallery pop up that would allow us to save a (timestamped?) copy of that workflow on a local drive (perhaps one that is preset in the user settings)?

We store valuable data in our MS Teams sites (which are sharepoint folders behind the scenes). Currently, there is no way to connect to sharepoint directly (only if I sync sharepoint to my local drive, which is problematic and doesn't work on Alteryx server).

My recommendation is to have a sharepoint connector which works on both the desktop and server.

Thanks!

I would like for it to be easier to change input (and output) tools to UNC pathing. I think adding it to the right click menu would be great. Currently, I have to go to options >> advanced >> workflow dependencies. A right click option would be easier.

Thanks!

Have External Tables in Snowflake be accessible in the Visual Query Builder.

Current state: External tables in the Snowflake DBMS are not available in the "visual query builder" tab of the green input tool. These tables are only available in the "Tables" tab.

Idea: Build a version of Designer that runs on ARM devices without requiring an emulator.

Windows 10 on ARM is becoming an increasingly popular option for new devices.  Also, with Apple's move toward ARM, virtualized instances of Windows on Mac will either need to be the ARM version or will have much better performance over an emulated version of x64 Windows 10.

Emulated software is considerably slower than native binaries, so to maintain Alteryx's fast performance, an ARM version of Designer would be the best way forward for those looking to move to ARM platforms.