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

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.

1-3-2019 12-43-52 PM.png

I love this tool,  but think it would be improved by including an option to create a column per delimiting character.  This could be added in the number of columns selector box.  In the case where 1 row has more delimiters than another, null columns can be created.  Without this option you have to Regex count the delimiters, select the max and then embed the Text to columns tools in a macro and then pass the max columns as a param.  Would be nice to resolve all this in the main tool.

 

Thanks, nick

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.

 

joe_lipski_1-1589790965393.png

 

 

If you forget to put a name on a new column in the formula tool - the error message is 

The field "" is not contained in the record. (Expression #1)

 

Please could you replace this with a user-friendly message which is self descriptive like:

"Please provide a name for the new column created in expression 1"?

 

 

 

errorMessage.png

  • Tool Improvement

Please add ablity to globally, within a module, forget all missing fields.

  • Tool Improvement

A common problem with the R tool is that it outputs "False Errors" like the following: "The R.exe exit code (4294967295) indicted an error"

I call this a false error because data passes out of the R script the same as if there were no error. As such, this error can generally be ignored. In my use case, however, my R tool is embedded within an iterative macro, and the error causes the iterator to stop running.

 

I was able to create a workaround by moving the R tool to a separate workflow and calling it from the CReW runner macro within my iterator, effectively suppressing the error message, but this solution is a bit clumsy, requires unnecessary read/writes, and uses nonstandard macros.

 

I propose the solution suggested by @mbarone (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Boosted-Model-Error/td-p/5509) to only generate an error when the R return code is 1, indicating a true error, and to either ignore these false errors or pass them as warnings. This will allow R scripts and R-based tools to be embedded within iterative macros without breaking.

 

 

Hi Alteryx community,

 

It would be really nice to have v_string/v_wstring and max character size as a standard for text columns.

fmvizcaino_0-1587008811932.png

it is countless how many times I found that the error was related to a string truncation due to string size limit from the text input.

 

Thumbs-up those who lost their minds after discovering that the error was that! 😄

This has probably been mentioned before, but in case it hasn't....

 

Right now, if the dynamic input tool skips a file (which it often does!) it just appears as a warning and continues processing. Whilst this is still useful to continue processing, could it be built as an option in the tool to select a 'error if files are skipped'? 

 

Right now it is either easy to miss this is happening, or in production / on server you may want this process to be stopped.

 

Thanks,

 

Andy 

 

 

Please add xlsx files within the onedrive input/output tool

  • Tool Improvement

I propose another wildcard, %ErrorLog%, that would simply output the error codes and narratives instead of having to use the %OutputLog% to see these.  I'd rather not have a 4 MB text email depicting every line of code and action in the module when all I really need to see are the errors.

Hi there,

 

We often get the following error message from the download tool 

"00:00:23.555 - Error - ToolId 106: Error in libCURL: You have found a bug.  Replicate, then let us know.  We shall fix it soon."

 

Unfortunately this seems to be a transient error so we've not been able to replicate this in a useful & repeatable way.  However - we see this happening at least a few times per week on one of our servers, so this is a continuing issue.

 

Please could you provide more detailed error messaging on the download tool so that this error can be debugged and/or replicated?

 

Many thanks

Sean

  • Tool Improvement

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.

 

Annotation 2019-12-27 180328.pngSettings.png

It would be great if there was an output option for excel files where you could overwrite the data in the sheet, but keep the formatting in the sheet. Similar to how the Paste Values option works in Excel. This would allow me to create a template with data validation, conditional formatting, column widths, cell fill colors, etc and set a workflow to run on a schedule and just paste the data into the existing template.

 

To get around this right now I have to output it to a separate tab and then paste the columns as values over the existing template. This is fine unless I am out of the office and need to bother someone else to do it. I know there have been many times where i wish this was an option outside of the report I am currently building. I am honestly surprised I couldn't find an idea already submitted about this!

 

Thanks,

Wes

  • Tool Improvement

TIBCO Data Virtualization is a Data Virtualization product focused on creating a virtual data store consolidating data from throughout the enterprise.  It can be accessed via a SQL query engine, and has a variety of supported connectors, including an ODBC driver.

 

This data source can be connected to via ODBC in Alteryx today, but error messaging is unclear/unhelpful, and attempting to use the Visual Query Builder causes Alteryx to crash.

 

Adding TIBCO Data Virtualization as a supported ODBC connection would empower business users to leverage this product and easily utilize this enterprise data store, enhancing the value of the Alteryx platform as a consumer of this data.

In order to debug a call to a REST API - it is often necessary to take the web call, and pop this into a web browser. Can you add a second output to a RestAPI tool (a derivative of the Download tool) that has a second output that provides the full web call that was made, including the full parameterised URL. This would make it MUCH easier to debug rest API calls.

 

 

cc: @TashaA

 

Similar to this idea https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Download-tool-Request-and-Response-details/i...

except my preference would be to pull Rest API calls into a more specific tool and give a second output for the responses

  • Tool Improvement

Some of the workflows I use have multiple inputs that can take a long time to initially load. The new cache function itself has been amazing, but there is one big drawback for me: I can't cache multiple tools at the same time.  Alteryx will allow me to eventually cache all of the tools I want cached, but it will take multiple times running the file.  This still saves me time in the end, but it feels a bit cumbersome to set up.

I recently came to know that Alteryx doesn't support Denodo Data sources. We at our company are using Denodo as a data virtualization tool and also Alteryx is used for data blending. The request is for Alteryx to start supporting Denodo as a data source so that our company can reach out to Alteryx for any support related issues with Denodo.

  • Tool Improvement

At the moment if a part of your python code takes more than 30s to run, Jupyter times out and Alteryx cancels the workflow. This makes the Python Tool unusable for anything intensive and the timeout should be removed by default or be configurable per workflow.

 

I've made this idea as none of the solutions in these threads feel satisfactory:

 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Python-tool-NbConvertApp-Timeout/m-p/3...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Python-Tool-Timeouts-When-Running-Work...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Python-SDK-timeout-error-cell-executio...

The Source field of the field metadata is very useful, but has some problems.

 

  • It is repetitious. A long connection string repeated for many fields from the same source can bloat the size of the workflow above 10 MB, and when removed is around 0.5 MB.
  • It exposes sensitive information about a company's infrastructure, such as server names, ports, user ids, and proprietary data structures.

I first started paying attention when we found a user's password in the metadata because they had passed it as a string to the Dynamic Input Tool (separate Idea submitted for that - LINK). Then when I had to share an App with the Alteryx Support team for support with an issue, I thought to check the metadata, and I noticed that the file was too big and was exposing information that I would not normally share with another company.

 

I'm not sure how you want to handle this, but here's some thoughts:

 

  • Default the Source field to 'off' and provide users the option to turn it 'on' in the workflow/app settings.
  • Provide a mechanism to strip the 'Source' field at time of saving or exporting the workflow.
  • If nothing else, provide education to users on the implications of including this information in the file.

 

Thanks for listening!

 

Cameron

The email tool, such a great tool!  And such a minefield.  Both of the problems below could and maybe should be remedied on the SMTP side, but that's applying a pretty broad brush for a budding Alteryx community at a big company.  Read on!

 

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

What I said the first time I ran the email tool without testing it first.

 

1. Can I get a thumbs up if you ever connected a datasource directly to an email tool thinking "this is how I attach my data to the email" and instead sent hundreds... or millions of emails?  Oops.  Alteryx, what if you put an expected limit as is done with the append tool.  "Warn or Error if sending more than "n" emails."  (super cool if it could detect more than "n" emails to the same address, but not holding my breath).

ephij_1-1588630915039.png

 

2. make spoofing harder, super useful but... well my company frowns on this kind of thing.

ephij_0-1588630793894.png

 

 

 

 

Top Liked Authors