Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Alteryx Server is great, but very costly.  Having the ability to install the Alteryx engine without the Designer, thus allowing you to share Workflows/Apps with users directly.  This could be licensed on a per user basis as well, but a reduced cost.

This also allows for some more advanced workflows that do not work in the Gallery.

Hello,

 

We use the pre-sql statement of the input to set some parameters of connections. Sadly, we cannot do that in a in-db workflow. This would be a total game-changing feature for us.

 

Best Regards,

 

Simon

...and now for probably the most trivial request in a long time, but also one of the most annoying things (for me anyway)..........

When viewing a browse window, it's so darn awesome to be able to sort and search.  However, it would be even awesomeer (yes, I just made up a word) if when you actually conducted a sort or search, you could make your selection (for sorts) or type in your criteria (for searches) and simply press the "Enter" button on the keyboard and  have it do the same thing that selecting "Apply" with the mouse does.  This is common Windows functionality and I think should be easy to implement.

I think it would be great to have a tool that allows you to update a dataset with another dataset. For example, this could be used in updating an archive table on a daily basis as data changes. Having a tool available that streamlines this data operation would be helpful to simplify workflows.

 

In the tool, you would be given the option to select your primary key fields, which are the fields used to identify records. Additionally, you have the option to perform an insert, modify, or delete operation, according to the primary key fields that you choose in the configuration.

 

Obviously this is something that anybody could create a macro for if they wanted to. But it would be nice to have a tool in place so that we dont have to worry about it. I think this would be a nice use case to bolster Alteryx usage as a data engineering tool for relational database management in particular.

It would be useful to be able to select a single container (containing a data input) or multiple containers using Shift, and run those and only those.

 

When building a new element to a larger workflow, I often enter a new Input in a new container, the ability to run just that container without having to turn off all my other containers would be really useful in speeding up the start of joining things together.

 

Hope that makes sense.

 

Thanks,

 

Doug 

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.

 

 

 

It would be absolutely marvellous if the ability to use a field as the replace value could be incorporated into the Regex tool. Currently the "Replacement Text" field is a hardcoded text value, and so to make that dynamic you have to wrap the tool in a batch and feed in the value as a Control Parameter. If we could just select a field to use as the replacement value, that would be spiffy.

 

 

M.

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"?

 

 

 

I'd like to see Alteryx allow a second install of your license on a second, personal machine.  Tableau allows this and IMO is why there is such a robust online / blog community around that product.

 

For those of us that work at mid-size to large organizations, there are often strict rules governing internal data and use of cloud-based data sources.  If I discover some new trick I'd like the share with my fellow Alteryx analysts outside of my company, I have no clear way to do that the same way I can with Tableau where I can do it at home not using my company's data.

 

Being able to learn new features and test things out on commonly available public data (ever notice that Superstore data set everyone who gets Tableau has?) would accelerate what we're able to do with the community site here and the larger analytics blogging community.

 

 

Hi Community Microsoft wil deprecate basic Authentication, so users will need OAuth2 to be included in the email tool. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients-and-mobile-in-exchange-online/deprecation-of-basic... Microsoft is removing the ability to use Basic authentication in Exchange Online for Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), POP, IMAP, Remote PowerShell, Exchange Web Services (EWS), Offline Address Book (OAB), Outlook for Windows, and Mac. This change will be efective on October 1, 2022. Best regards, JP

It would be wonderful for Alteryx to be able to connect to and query OData feeds natively, rather than using a 3rd-party driver or custom macro.   

 

OData querying is supported by quite a few familiar products, including Excel and PowerBI, SSIS/SSRS, FME Safe, Tableau, and many others. And the protocol is used to publish feeds from Microsoft Dynamics and Sharepoint, as well as many of the 10,000 publically available government datasets with API's (esp. those hosted by Socrata)   

 

I didn't see it as in the Idea section, but questions and workarounds have been discussed in the community a few times (11/15, 3/18, 4/18), and suggestions seem to be just to buy the $400-600 ODBC driver from CDATA (or ZappySys), or I could use a VBA script in Excel trigger a refresh, or create my own Alteryx connector macro (great series btw, though most was beyond my understanding!) 

   

While not opposed paying, kludging, or learning to program, they're just one more thing to build/buy, install, maintain, and break at the most inconvenient time 🙂

 

Thanks,
Chadd

 

OData Overview:

OData (Open Data Protocol) is an ISO/IEC approved, OASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful APIs. OData helps you focus on your business logic while building RESTful APIs without having to worry about the various approaches to define request and response headers, status codes, HTTP methods, URL conventions, media types, payload formats, query options, etc. OData also provides guidance for tracking changes, defining functions/actions for reusable procedures, and sending asynchronous/batch requests.  OData RESTful APIs are easy to consume. The OData metadata, a machine-readable description of the data model of the APIs, enables the creation of powerful generic client proxies and tools.

More info at at http://odata.org

When working in the Designer, I sometimes have to undo changes. And this experience is quite often very confusing and annoying.

For every change in the workflow, you have to press undo once. However, quite often, one user interaction results in other actions such as automatic move of the donwstream tool, change of size of a tool container etc. In such cases, you have inserted a single tool but need to press undo a couple of times to get back to the original situation. It is, however, often not clear how often. In most cases, I fail using undo at the end and revert my changes by hand.

 

Please change undo towards undoing one user-action in one undo step.

In case there might be users who like the current behaviour, you might make this a user setting how to deal with the undo history.

One of the most frequent issues I have with my workflow is when the Join Tool reorders columns for no reason. There is an option in the configuration to have the columns revert to the incoming order. It would be nice if the workflow automatically had this set as a default, or provide a toggle option in the settings for this to happen. In many of my flows I've had to create macros to keep the integrity of the column order or remember to go into the settings of this tool and re order the columns before a workflow run. 

 

Hello,

SQLite is :

-free

-open source

-easy to use
-widely used

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQLite

It also works well with Alteryx input or output tool. 🙂

However, I think a InDB SQLite would be great, especially for learning purpose : you don't have to install anything, so it's really easy to implement.

Best regards,

Simon

The Output tool currently creates a zero-row file if you filter all the rows out (an empty file)

 

However - there's a very common need to say "don't generate a file at all if there are zero rows" - for example if you are generating a "Daily Details" file and there are no daily details today, you want to suppress this file.   This frequently trips up newer users since the only way to suppress a zero-row output file today is to it with macros.

 

Could you add a flag to the output tool to "Suppress empty files" so that if there are no rows to be written, Alteryx does NOT create an empty file?   This way the user can be in control of what to do with empty record sets?

Idea: Prompt the user to find a missing macro instead of the current UX of a question mark icon.

 

Issue: When a macro referenced in a workflow is missing, then there is no way to a) know what the name of the macro was (assuming you were lazy like me and didn't document with a comment) and b) find the macro so you can get back to business.

 

When this happens to me know, I have to go to the XML view and search for macros and then cycle through them until I find the one that's missing. Then I have to either copy the macro back into that location or manually edit the workflow XML. Not cool man.

 

Solution: When a macro is missing, the image below at the right should be shown. In the properties window, a file browse tool should allow the user to find the macro.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hello all,

 

A few weeks ago Alteryx announced inDB support for GBQ. This is an awesome idea, however to make it run, you should use Oauth2 Authentication means GBQ API should be enabled. As of now, it is possible to use Simba ODBC to connect GBQ. My idea is to enhance the connection/authentication method as we have today with Simba ODBC for Google BigQuery and support inDB. It is not easy to implement by IT considering big organizations, number of GBQ projects and to enable API for each application. By enhancing the functionality with ODBC, this will be an awesome solution.

 

Thank you for voting

Albert

When I import an Excel file in to Alteryx I get an error: “shared strings root=x:sst” and Alteryx cannot read the file.

I can work around this by manually opening and saving the excel before importing it into Alteryx but this is not ideal, especially considering the automation implications.

I believe this may be happening because the XLSX generated by the source of the report has a prefix “x:” in all the tags in the Shared String XML embedded in Excel. See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/open-xml/working-with-the-shared-string-table 

Essentially, it would appear Alteryx is not able to read generated Excel sheets which has the prefix "x:" (e.g. from a bot). The second file which has been opened and saved in Excel manually can be read by Alteryx correctly.

 

Example of file as exported from ”BOT”:

 

How the same file looks once it is manually opened and saved:

Ideally Alteryx would read the file as is, i.e. with the "X:SST" tag seen above as having to manually open and save the excel before it can be read is rather clunky.

 

Thanks!

Hello all,

I suggest a new string function Repeat()

 

Repeat() forms a string consisting of the input string repeated the number of times defined by the second argument.

Repeat(text[, repeat_count])

 

Repeat('to',3) gives tototo

It's also a standard SQL function
https://www.w3schools.com/sql/func_mysql_repeat.asp

Best regards,

Simon