Alteryx Designer Ideas

There's often a need to do a cascade of filters which would normally be handled in a programming language by a Case or a Switch statement.

For example:

- if it's a cat then go left, otherwise go right 

      - if it's a dog then go left otherwise carry on right

             if it's a fish then go left otherwise carry on right

                   otherwise do xxxx

This could be handled more elegantly by a conditional split tool that allowed you to specify multiple conditions like a case statement, and which then generated multiple output nodes; with the last one for any leftovers.

When I use the Comment Tool its difficult to select the tools inside it, but when I use the Container Tool the Container Text doesn't support Font Sizes, and doesn't support multiple lines of text so I end up moving the Comment into the Container, but still have problems selecting a group of tools.

So a combined Comment and Container Tools would be wonderful!

Bonus: If the Comment Tool could support Multiple Font Sizes.

While In-db tools are very helpful and cut down the time needed to write complex SQL , there are some steps that are faster by directly writing SQL like window functions- OVER (PARTITION BY .....). In Alteryx, we need to create multiple joins and summaries to perform a window function. It would be immensely helpful if there was a SQL editor tool for in-db workflows where we can edit the SQL code at any point in the workflow, or even better, if they can add an "edit" function to every in-db tool where we can customize the SQL code generated and then send to the next tool.

This will cut down the time immensely and streamline the workflow to make Alteryx a true contender for the ETL solution space.

I think this is fairly self-explanatory and is a very common use case.

Would like to have a tool that can natively support DateTimeAdd functionality where you can define working days of the week for inclusion and holidays for exclusion.

Must be able to handle both adding and subtracting.

I've seen this question before and have run into it myself.  I'd like to see a new tool that would allow a developer (of a workflow) to choose a path of logic based upon criteria known only during the execution of a module.

If LEFT INPUT Count of records < 10,000 THEN Path1 (e.g. use a calgary join)

ELSE Path 2 (e.g. use a standard join)

endif

Thanks,

Mark

Unsupervised learning method to detect topics in a text document.

Helpful for users interested in text mining.

I constantly find my using pre and post SQL Commands in the Output tool to run SQL when I don't actually have any data to output.

One example is when I load data into S3 and want to load it into Redshift. I have SQL code to run but no data to Output - I end up running a dummy row into a temp table.

So can we have an SQL tool that simply acts the same as a Pre-SQL command without the associated data output. Once the command is run we should be able to continue the workflow, so the tool should have an option input and output, like the Run Command tool.

DELETE from Source_Data Where ID in

SELECT ID from My_Temp_Table where FLAG = 'Y'

.... 

Essentially, I want to update a DB table with either an update or with the deletion of rows.  I can't delete all of the data.  My work around will be to create/insert into a table the keys that i want to delete and try to use a input/output tool with SQL that performs the delete.  Any other suggestions are welcome, but a tool is best.

Thanks,

Mark

The introduction fo a rank tool would be hugely beneficial. Whilst there are currently means to rank using a combination of other tools formula/running total/multirow etc... a specific "Rank Tool" would be provide a seemless and smoother way to rank your data either for further analysis or purely to output this field.

This tool should include a sort by and group by functionaility as well as options for ranking (such as dense ranking or unique ranking) and in addition multi levels of ranking (ie. Rank by "Field A" Then By "Field B" etc...).

XGboost regression is now the benchmark for every Kaggle competition and seems to consistently outperform random forest, spline regression, and all of the more basic models. For those of us using predictive modeling on a regular basis in our actual work, this tool would allow for a quick improvement in our model accuracy. And I think, from a marketing standpoint, having a core group of users competing in Kaggle using Alteryx would be a great way to show off Alteryx's power.

It is readily available as an R package: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/xgboost/index.html

Here's a twist on the iterative macro.  Suppose, like a generate rows tool, you could initialize a container to iterate on it's internal processes without having to construct a macro?  The container could include anchors for iterations and for output and allow the user to DoWhile inside of the container.

Just a thought....

I need support for outbound data streams to be gzip compressed.  Ideally, this would be done by a new tool that can be inserted into a workflow (maybe similar to the Base 64 Encoding tool).  Just including it in the Output Tool will not address my needs as I will be sending gzip payloads to a cloud API.  There are two main reasons why this is necessary (and without it, quite possibly a roadblock for our enterprise's use of Alteryx):

1. Some APIs enforce gzip encoding, therefore Alteryx cannot currently be used to interact with such APIs
2. When transmitting large volumes of data across the Internet, gzip compression will significantly decrease transmission times

Visio is our organization's most common method of communicating business processes and workflows. Being able to export an Alteryx workflow to Visio would help us communicate the tool's functionality to process owners.

It would be handy to have a tool that mirrored another specified tool in the workflow.  I frequently use the same regex or filter configurations in multiple parts of my workflow.  If I could just update one of those tools and have every other one where I want the same logic applied to automatically update, that would make things easier. 

Users would just have to enter the tool ID of the tool they want mirrored.  

In a future release, I'd love to see the whole concept of browsing for and installing new macros/apps brought into Designer itself.  It's always great finding new macros, but the expereince is inconsistent- sometimes you have to run an installer file, sometimes run a package, sometimes just put the file in a directory and add a 'watched macro' directory to your preferences.

I'd like to see a cleaner expereince where you can choose to 'Add Tools', browse the gallery, check the thing i want, and click the tools group I want to put it under, then have Alteryx take care of the rest.  There would also be the need for a 'Manage tools' screen where could could uncheck and remove them later if you no longer need them.

For inspiration, check out the way MS handles 'Adding Apps' via their catalog to build out your Sharepoint 2013+ site

Due to a challenge a customer threw at me, I recently found this on Github and shared with the Community (http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/LDAP-AD-as-data-source/m-p/17461#M1327):

https://github.com/tobiasmh/Alteryx-Ldap-Input-Plugin-Binaries

Tested it, and it works great. I connected to the developer (Tobias Montagna Hay), and he offered to share the source code with the product team.

So It'll be good that this plugin/Tool can be considered for future releases of Alteryx (mostly because it's already developed).

Hope this helps others as much as it did to me.

Best,

_AG_

I find the concept of Batch and/or Iterative macros, when done specifically for the simple purpose of iteration, to be a fair bit of overhead. If we could extract the fundamental qualities of a loop and get that into an "Iteration Tool," it could become a well-used tool from the pallette.

Implementation Ideas:

• Assume that the iteration is over the rows of a given input data set.
• For the "body of the loop" allow multiple expressions, each of which iteratively assigns the i'th position of a given variable (which could be either existing or derived just like the Formula tool and it's expression).
• Allow referencing of the loop index variable from within expressions

An example problem this could solve is from: http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Looping-and-dynamically-changing-output/m-....  As discussed therein, the concept of "row dependent iteration" makes this difficult to solve with standard tools.

If the input data set from that example were sent into the proposed Iteration Tool... it would automatically loop over the dataset rows; and three expressions could be supplied in the Tool configuration to solve the problem:

VarE:   IF [i] > 1 THEN VarF[i-1] + VarG[i-1] ELSE VarE ENDIF
VarF:   VarA + VarB
VarG:   VarC + VarD

For implementation purposes, this would be logically equivalent to:

VarE[i]:   IF [i] > 1 THEN VarF[i-1] + VarG[i-1] ELSE VarE[i] ENDIF
VarF[i]:   VarA[i] + VarB[i]
VarG[i]:   VarC[i] + VarD[i]

 (so, basically, the i'th row is assumed unless otherwise provided in the expression syntax).

I hope this isn't too outlandish - I've tried to think through how this could be accomplished (1) as a tool that is not too fiendishly difficult for Alteryx to implement and (2) which would also be easy for us, the end users, to utilize.  Thanks!

Hi, I'm new to Alteryx; we've had for just about a month. We started publishing our workflows to Tableau and it's working great.

One issue I foresee:

User credentials to the Tableau server are updated occasionally. When this occurs, I will have to update the credentials manually in each workflow. 

The number of workflows we are publishing is growing. Is there a way to automate this process?