Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Recently we had a situation where installing the data packages was expected to take over 20 hours!  We do not have the ability to run a machine undisturbed for this length of time at the office, and VPN automatically times out after 12 hours.  Okay, so these items are company-specific, but how nice would it be to be able to download/install the data in smaller portions so you don't have to worry about setting up shop for 8-10 hours?!

 

I was able to copy the DataInstall.ini and name only the portions of the data I wanted to install in each session.  But then I had to separate the installs into different network folders otherwise you end up overwriting the DataInstall.exe file, which users need for each install in order to register from a network location (for each install).

 

Needless to say, it took SEVERAL weekends and quite a few mistakes before I was able to do it this way successfully!

 

Please vote for data installs in smaller portions!

Would be great if when copying and pasting tools onto the canvas they would appear next to the cursor, instead of near where they are being copied from. On large workflows it's annoying to copy the tool/s, paste, then drag to their new location.

I think a lot of us have run into this problem at some point.  We are running a longer workflow and right at the end everything will stop with an error.  The problem is that someone has a file Alteryx is reading or writing to open in another program.  When this happens, it will stop with an error and the whole process will need to be started again from the beginning.  I think it would be great for Alteryx to be able to halt, alert the user of the problem, and give the option to retry reading or writing.

Currently there is no option to edit an existing macro search path from Options-> User Settings -> Macros. Only options are Add / Delete. Ideally we need the Edit option as well.

 

Existing Category needs to be deleted and created again with the correct path, if search path is changed from one location to another.

 

 

It would be cool if a connector line would turn red when you select it, making it easier to trace the path (similar to how the lines turn red when you click on a join tool).

Hi!

 

I just installed 2020.2 & I LOVE this update within the Formula tool:

 

• When you double-click a column name inside of an expression, the brackets around the column name are also selected.

 

Are there any plans to bring this ability to the Filter tool as well, where I can double click on my column name & have it grab the brackets as well?

 

Not going to lie, love that you added the Open/Save/Undo buttons back to the top toolbar too! Latest version looks great, thank you!

As with Output Data tool, it would be very helpful to have this option within the Calgary Loader tool.  I have a series of ordered analytic apps and if I could name the Calgary database using the "Take File/Table Name from Field" option I would be able to chain the apps and be much more efficient.

 

Thanks.

Model evaluation (including feature importance) is only available in assisted modelling within the machine learning tools.

 

It would be great if there was a tool to do this when using the expert mode so that you could see some standard performance metrics for your model(s) and view the feature importance.

I'm converting some old macros that were built in 8.6 for use in 10.6 and found something that could potentially be changed about the Alteryx .xlsx drivers. Specifically this refers to the field types passed from a Dynamic Input tool when the data fields are blank when using an .xlsx file as the data source template. 

 

When the new .xlsx file has fields populated, it works fine. If data is not populated in the new file, the field types are converted to Double[8]. This doesn’t cause a problem for the Dynamic Input, but it can cause problems for downstream tools. In the second case below, the field names are retained but the downstream Join tool errors when trying to join this now double field to a string (rather than returning no results from the join output as desired). This also occurs when a single field is empty, only that field will be converted to a Double[8] field. When the legacy .xlsx drivers are used, the field types are retained from the data source template.

 

File Source Template vs. file that is returned upon running

       

 

There are other solutions for this scenario such as using a Select tool with a loaded .yxft file of the correct field types, or selecting the Legacy .xlsx drivers from the File Format dropdown when configuring the Dynamic Input. However I thought this is something that could be improved about the Alteryx .xlsx drivers. 

Idea:

Let's add the universal PMML predictive markup language to rapidly deploy our predictive models. 

 

Rationale:

Most of the predictive models created are essentially built to be deployed into well known enterprise level decisioning tools.

 

These decisioning tools are working at banks, non bank financial institutions, credit card issuers, insurers on a daily basis.

If Alteryx want's to replace SAS, SPSS and similar competitor this PMML addition seems to be a must.

They all have a common markup language and even with the newer version we can deploy almost all data pre-processing steps too...

 

Current status in Alteryx as I'm aware of:

Only case where Alteryx and PMML comes close is the following link; http://www.alteryx.com/topic/pmml promising including PMML in the upcoming releases in 2012. And then no word of it. The writer is retired already and no word since 2012 (3 yrs is a long time span). 

 

What to do:

 

On easy way is already done for R, this is a Java library for converting R models to PMML https://github.com/jpmml/jpmml-converter

 

Clients:

FICO is one of the well known credit bureaus worldwide and also the vendor of decisioning software. They also have an Analytics Modeler Suite. All FICO systems are PMML compliant. Chek it out: http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/2014/10/17/first-look-fico-analytic-modeler-suite-jtonedm...

 

Also Experian is one of the other big software vendors in the Analytics space with decision management tools and they are actually a partner of Alteryx too... Their well known widely implemented Powercurve tool has PMML language import too... Check it out: http://jtonedm.com/2014/05/13/first-look-experian-powercurve-update/

 

IBM ODM is a nother vendor for decisioning tools in the enterprise level. They also have PMML integration, look; http://www.prolifics.com/blog/odm-integration-spss-predictive-analysis-suite-part-1-pmml-import

Competitor status:

SAS supports PMML export from SAS Enterprise Miner

IBM SPSS products (Modeler and Statistics) offer a great deal of support for PMML

KNIME is one of the leaders in processing PMML documents 

RapidMiner has a PMML extension

MicroStrategy strongly supports the standard

 

It would be nice if we could change the tool numbers and effect which one gets done first. If I'm working on a module and I later add some more analysis upstream it won't get done or pulled first since it has a greater number. a simply ability to change the numbers would really make things a lot easier and it will allow the flow of work to flow smoothly visually

I want to check out which things downstream are receiving data from the true and false branches of this filter.

I could step through them one by one.

It would be much easier if I could simply select the tool and see directly which tools are connected to which output by colour, or line style.

Could the Input connector have capability to load data from an ODS / OpenDocument Spreadsheet?

 

Currently file with an ODS has to be opened using Microsoft Excel. Save file as xls or xlsx extension.

 

Also an ODS file with 373 columns/fields required to have fewer columns /fields to use the Alteryx Input connector.

 

Submitting this idea, after initially logging on the community board.

I've had to look through a few logs recently and I had expected the information to match with what is displayed in the results window

 

Reference the tool name, type of tool (in/out, prep, etc).   Only the toolid shows up in the log where the results window shows the name

 

It would be nice to have the annotations that a user gives a tool with a different background color on the canvas than those tools where the annotation is being automatically populated.  Example would be the user gives a tool a specific name that shows up in blue but the formula tools that display the formula preview under the tool show up in yellow.

1) Add cURL Options support from within the Download Tool

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/File-Transfer-Protocol-FTP-Download/tac-p/41...

 

The Download tool allows adding Header and Payload (data), which are key components of the cURL command structure. However, there is no avenue to include any of the cURL options in the Download tool. Most of the 'solutions' found have been to abandon the use of the Download tool and run the cURL EXE through the Run Command tool. However, that introduces many other issues such as sending passwords to the Run Command tool, etc. etc.

 

With the variation and volume of connection requests that are being funneled through the Download tool, users are really looking for it to have the flexibility to do what they need it to do with the Options that they need to send to cURL.

 

2) Update cURL version used by Alteryx Download tool to a recent version that allows passing host keys

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Download-Tool-with-SFTP-and-multiple-K...

 

cURL added the option to pass host keys starting in version 7.17.1 (available 10/29/2007). The option is --hostpubmd5 <md5>:

 

https://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html

 

And it appears that the cURL shipped with Alteryx is 7.15.1 (from 12/7/2005😞

 

PS C:\Program Files\Alteryx\bin\RuntimeData\Analytic_Apps> .\curl -V
curl 7.15.1 (i586-pc-mingw32msvc) libcurl/7.15.1 zlib/1.2.2
Protocols: tftp ftp gopher telnet dict ldap http file
Features: Largefile NTLM SSPI libz

 

Thanks for considering!

 

Cameron

When running an app (not in the Gallery), the status bar appears to complete for each tool, then start over for the next tool.  It'd be great if while it was doing that, the tool name that it was running displayed.  Now, I know for most processes this will be instantaneous and your eye won't even catch it.  But if we have, for example, several join/sort tools with lots of data going through them, it would be nice to know which one it's on.

Hi team,

There are some things that we would like to do with the download tool that currently are not possible:

 

1. use client side certificates to sign requests. This is a requirement for us in a project where we are interacting with the API of our customer's financial system. They provide us with a certificate and it is used to sign our requests, along with other authentication.Currently we have to use the external command tool to execute a powershell script using invoke-restmethod to do this interaction. I would much prefer to not have more tools in the chain.

Client certificates are described in the TLS 1.0 specification: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2246 (page 43), and I believe them to be supported by cURL.

 

2. Multipart form-data. We have a number of workflows where we need to send multipart form data as part of a POST request. As this is not supported by the Download Tool, we have again used the external command tool to execute invoke-restmethod or invoke-webrequest in powershell. I don't know if modification of the Download Tool would be the best thing here, vs having either a dedicated tool for multipart form data, or having an HTTP POST specific tool that was able to handle multipart form data. What I envisage is something like the formula tool, with the ability to add an arbitrary number of cells, where we could use formula to either directly output a value from a column, synthesise a new value, or directly enter a static value). The tool would then compose this with boundaries between the parts, and calculate the content-size to add to the http request.

We have a lot of workflows with a lot going on in them, as I'm sure a lot of you do.

Sometimes, the way that Alteryx draws the connections between tools is loopy, literally.

It would be very helpful if we could explicitly control how the connectors were routed, as this would allow us to prevent them from cutting across other complex areas of the workflow.

Also if we could bundle the connectors (think tying together a bunch of cables with a cable tie) so that things that were heading to the same part of the canvas could route there as a bundle.