Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

As an admin - we currently need to download a large number of different binaries for every release; then package them for internal deployment; then send them out.

This creates unnecessary work for our admin teams, our packaging teams, our deployment teams etc.

This problem is becoming more acute now that Alteryx is shipping add-on tools via the public gallery - so our standard desktop designer can now require 10 or more separately packaged installs.

Can we please change the download experience to allow enterprise admins to:

- Select the components that they want in a standard download

     - This would allow for a menu selection across all the starter kits (e.g. Tableau; microsoft; qlik); the standard designer; the predictive

     - it would also allow for a menu selection across public gallery assets so that we can include things like the model comparison tool and other new predictive capabilities

     - the addins for Microsoft R Server

     - database drivers

     - Connect data loaders

     - Server components

- Given this set a name (like "Standard designer install") since in a large enterprise we will have several different configurations (some for super-users; some for standard users).    In our world we'd have "Standard Designer"; "Admin"; "Connect Controller"; "SuperUser" as our starting list.

- Then download one installer which is the aggregated set of these in one place 

- ... and finally allow the Admin to be notified when any component in the install set changes so that they can download the new version.

cc: @dataMack @AshwiniChezhiyan @LizaNemchynova @revathi

Idea:

I know cache-related ideas have already been posted (cache macros; cache tools), but I would like it if cache were simply built into every tool, similar to the way it is on the Input Tool.

Reasoning:

During workflow development, I'll run the workflow repeatedly, and especially if there is sizeable data or an R tool involved, it can get really time consuming.

Implementation ideas:

I can see where managing cache could be tricky: in a large workflow processing a lot of data, nobody would want to maintain dozens of copies of that data.  But there may be ways of just monitoring changes to the workflow in order to know if something needs to be rebuilt or not: e.g. suppose I cache a Predictive Tool, and then make no changes to any tool preceeding it in the workflow... the next time I run, the engine should be able to look at "cache flags" and/or "modified tool flags" to determine where it should start: basically start at the "furthest along cache" that has no "modified tools" preceeding it.

Anyway, just a thought.

When the append tool detects no records in the source, it throws a warning. I would like to have the ability to supress this warning. In general, all tools should have similar warning/error controls.

There should by a Python Tool that is just a code paste (more like the R tool) and allows selection/packaging of venvs, similar to an IDE or we should be able to package scripts with workflows/macros.

A python tool that is easily integrated into macros for powerful and quick custom tools while avoiding Jupyter's failures would be incredibly beneficial. This would highlight how Python and Alteryx can work together, and don't need to be all or nothing competitors in the ETL space.

Jupyter is not a tool that should be used for production level processes - it is for teaching. Nobody has airflow or Luigi spinning up Jupyter and executing code in their ETL pipeline, so our Workflows shouldn't either. Yes, yes I have used to SDK to work around and I have also run scripts from the cmd tool but the first solution is time consuming and imposes a high skill wall and the latter has a lot of moving, non-packaged parts.

You guys have the API to do this and venv management from the SDK already so I don't think it would be expensive to implement.

If Alteryx encounters an error in a RegEx tool - it throws an error:

 RegEx (9) The field "Field1_Matched" is not contained in the record.

This is a somewhat confusing and misleading error message because the input data and the regex configuration have no "Field1" at all, so the error message does not assist with resolving the issue.

Could you please re-look at the error messaging on the RegExt tool to see if we can make RegEx errors easier to resolve by giving a self-descriptive error message?

Example below:

Here I was trying to tokenize by using the . to represent any character - however Alteryx is struggling with this.

In order to perform audit-trail logging - it would be valuable to have 2 new capabilities

a) environment variables which show the workflow name; filepath; version; run start date and time; etc.   For any worklows we build, we need to have a solid audit trail to be SOX compliant, so having this detail available as a data field to write and manipulate is essential

b) A logging component.   What would be great is a component that you can drop on a workflow, not connected to anything, which is able to trap the start; end; runtime; version; etc of a workflow; and commit this to any output data format (CSV or ODBC etc).   This logging tool would need to be able to capture the full runtime, so it would need to be the last thing that runs (which means it may need to exist in parallel to the main workflow in some way).    This is not currently possible with a complex workflow with outputs, because it's not possible to identify when the entire workflow ended; or the runtime (since output tools don't have an onward connector to pass flow-of-control to catch the final end-time)

Again, both of these are necessary to meet audit requirements for workflows and prodcution-quality ETLs for BI data warehouses.

Hi, due to this time we are living, creating and analysing exponential charts has become a part of our rotine. And there are some times that we need to transform the chart scale to a log scale to better understand the data's behaviour. However, there is no option within Alteryx's Interactive Chart tool to change the scale of an axis, like Excel does so easily. It'd be great to that! 

Improve "Select Tool" by by moving the select/deselect All from the Options and placing in the header.

The Data Cleansing Tool already has all/none posted in a better position.

Meanwhile you have to go to Option for this same feature in Select.

The Alteryx Python tool currently throws an error if the inbound record set has zero rows (screenshot 1).

In order to manage that - you need to create try-except block around the Alteryx.read that instead creates an empty record set data frame. (screenshot 2).   This is inefficient because every time you change the canvas before the python tool, you need to re-code a static field list into the try-except block (i.e. you can no-longer deal with variable fields)

Please could you change the Alteryx.read method to create a zero-record dataframe with the correct column names if the input is zero-length?

Thank you

Sean

Screenshot 1:

Screenshot 2:

When you right click on a macro, and say Open Macro - it opens up a new copy even if there's an existing copy of exactly the same file open already.

Please can you change this to focus on the existing copy by default?    I've wasted hours editing the wrong one, or doing split editing across two copies of the same file.

the SQL Editing screen has recently been changed (thank you @JPoz  and team!) - and now has syntax indenting and keyword coloring.

Could I ask that you make a minor change in the indenting, where the on part is indented underneath the Join?

Select

    Field1,

    Field2,

    field3

from

    Table1

    inner join table2

        On Table1.key = table2.key

        and table1.keyb = table2.keyb

    inner join table3

        on table3.key = table1.key

        and table3.date = table1.date

I'm really liking the new assisted modelling capabilities released in 2020.2, but it should not error if the data contains: spatial, blob, date, datetime, or datetime types.

This is essentially telling the user to add an extra step of adding a select before the assisted modelling tool and then a join after the models. I think the tool should be able to read in and through these field types (especially dates) and just not use them in any of the modelling.

An even better enhancement would be to transform date as part of the assisted modelling into something usable for the modelling (season, month, day of week, etc.)

The Input Data tool has a "Field Length" option for CSV files. The default is 254 characters. In most cases, this is woefully inadequate. I tend to add several zeroes to the end to prevent truncation. When I don't remember to do this, I get flooded with conversion errors:

"Input Data (2) The field "hours" was truncated in record #38"

I want to set a global default, that I can override per tool, for length so I don't have to do this every time.

Alteryx does not currently have to email tool that is configurable to use SMTP Authentication for Microsoft Office 365 or any server requiring authentication.  Our office printer can authenticate over SMTP and with TLS enabled why not my Alteryx mail tool - 'mic drop!'. 

Further explained, Alteryx is a tool that needs to live within abide by the policies and security standards in the organization not vice versa.  Therefore, it shouldn't be a big surprise, or a big ask for that matter, that a mail client should have the ability to authenticate prior to sending email of SMTP.   I'm very surprised this tool is so arcane.  Please implement quickly.  Thank you

It would be great if you could create default settings for the Tool Containers. As workflows become larger, I use containers a lot. But once I have 10-15 containers, I have to set all of them to have a Transparency of 1 and a margin of None. While the changes don't take long to make, it would be nice if they could be preset.

I've seen several posts and questions concerning NULL dates.  Is 09/31/2010 a valid date?  I know that 02/29/206 isn't valid and that 02/00/2006 isn't either, but I really don't like finding out about these in conversion warning messages.

I might suggest a function that returns True or False on the date check and let the user configure appropriate rules to rethink the attempted date prior to committing the field to the date data type.

Cheers,

Mark

Please enable "Friendly Name" in the e-mail tool.

e.g. None <none@none.com>

When using this configuration, the workflow fails with error:

Error: Email (1): ComposerEmailInterface: Record#1 From Field contains 2 entries

"Fiendly Name" does work when sending a Workflow Event e-mail, but not in the e-mail tool.

I love how the new (as of 2018.3) Python tool has a Jupyter notebook in the config panel. Jupyter is great, has a lot of built-in help, and is so robust that there is really no need for an external installation of any Python IDE anywhere else.  I would love to see that with the R tool as well.  For now (as of 2018.3), it's much easier to develop R outside of Alteryx, e.g. in R Studio, and then copy the code in the R tool.

Therefore, this request is to implement R just like Python, using Jupyter. This would allow us to script it and see our visualizations (etc) right in our Jupyter window.  It would eliminate the need to have R-Studio off on the side.  Here are a couple links that may hint how to make it happen:

• http://docs.anaconda.com/anaconda/user-guide/tasks/use-r-language/
• http://docs.anaconda.com/anaconda/navigator/tutorials/r-lang/

Hope you can make it happen -- thanks!