Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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.

Hi,

I did do some searching on this matter but I couldn't find a solution to the issue I was having. I made a Analytic App that the user can select columns from a spreadsheet with 140+ columns. This app looks at the available columns and dynamically updates the list box every time it is run.  I wanted users to use the built in Save Selection they don't have to check each box with the columns they want every time they run it. However I seem to have found an issue with the Save Selection option when the Header in the source has a comma in it e.g. "Surname, First Name".

As the saved YXWV file seems to save the selection in a comma delimited way but without " " around the headers. So as you can see in my example below when you try and load this again Alteryx appears unable to parse the values as it thinks "Surname" and "First Name"  are separate values/fields and not "Surname, First Name" and doesn't provide an error when it fails to load the selection.

Last Name=False,First Name=False,Middle Name=False,Surname, First Name=False,

So perhaps the Save Selection when writing the file can put string quotes round the values to deal with special characters in the Selections for the List Box. I have made a work around and removed special characters from the header in my source data but its not really ideal.
Thanks,
Mark

It would often be very useful to have the ability to search for a field in a browse too.

At the moment i don't think there's an easy way to manually trace data through a workflow

For example you have created a workflow with various Joins, filters, etc. and notice that the final output is missing data for "ABC limited". The only way to find at what step ABC limited dropped out of the workflow is to add 10 filter tools branching out from before and after each step in the workflow's logic then re-run the workflow (which might take 5-10 minutes) to see if where "ABC limited" has gone. You fix the problem "ABC ltd" didn't join to "ABC Limited", but now you want to also check for XYZ limited so you have to manually edit all 10 filter tools. It seems you have fixed the problem, but now your workflow is a mess of 10 filter tools.

Alternatively you could copy and paste the data from every browse tool into an excel workbook and use their search function instead, but that's obviously a cumbersome and unhelpful process, particularly as the excel sheet will have to be remade with every run of the workflow.

You could also use sort tools throughout before a browse tool, but that is still slow and doesn't help with cases where "ABC Ltd" is matching to "The ABC Co ltd"

Perhaps it would be much easier to just have a small search box in every browse tool?

Or is there a feature that I'm not aware of that makes this process of quality checking your workflow easier already?

When using ConsumerView macro from Join tool palette for demographic data matching from Experian, the matching yield is higher than compared to Business Match marco. It would be great if the matching key for telephone number could be added to Business Match (US) tool the yield might increase and will provide more value to the firmographic data sets than it currently yields by matching just the D&B Business Names and addresses only.

I'd like to see an enhancement that at the install level (through an XML configuration file for example), the use of the From field in the Email reporting tool could be disabled for population by the end user and instead would auto-populate with that current users e-mail address.  Currently users can populate the field with any address on their domain, which is useful, but also poses a risk in that messages can be made to appear to be coming from a party that is not aware of it.  We'd like to be able to control that on install and "turn off" access to the From field

When I create a new table in a in-Db workflow, I want to specify some contraints, especially the Primary Key/Foreign Key

For PK/FK, the UX could be either the selection of some fields of the flow or a free field (to let the user choose a constant).

From wikipedia :

In the relational model of databases, a primary key is a specific choice of a minimal set of attributes (columns) that uniquely specify a tuple (row) in a relation (table).[a] Informally, a primary key is "which attributes identify a record", and in simple cases are simply a single attribute: a unique id. 

So, basically, PK/FK helps in two ways :
1/ Check for duplicate, check if the value inserted is legit

2/ Improve query plan, especially for join

Hello

Alteryx Desktop 2018.4 has a new interface which looks nice, but the labels and texts of its interface is difficult to read (as seen in the below screenshot).

It's seem that the interface's font type or size is not appropriate!

(Knowing that we didn't have any problem with the previous versions of Alteryx Desktop 11.7, 2018.2, & 2018.3)

So, I suggest to change the interface's font type or size of Alteryx Desktop 2018.4 as it was in the previous versions or to another font which is easy to read,

or at least having an option that allow the user to adjust the interface's font type and size.

My solution now is to downgrade to version 2018.3 where I have no problem at all regarding the interface's font.

Hello,

My issue is very easy to solve. I want to use the generic ODBC In database for a specific base (monetdb here but it isn't important).

The connexion works just fine. However, I cannot create table because the data types are changed and does not even exist. Here is my data with some Date type :

And here the error in my data stream in give me this very interesting message  :

Error: Entrée du flux de données (2): Erreur lors de la création de la table "formation.temp1" : [MonetDB][ODBC Driver 11.31.11]Type (datetime) unknown in: "create  table "formation"."temp1" ("AccountNumber" varchar(255),"BillToAddressID"
syntax error, unexpected IDENT in: ""Freight""

CREATE  TABLE "formation"."temp1" ("AccountNumber" varchar(255),"BillToAddressID" float,"BusinessEntityID" float,"Comment
" float,"CreditCardApprovalCode" varchar(255),"CreditCardID" float,"CurrencyRateID" float,"CustomerID" float,"DueDate" datetime,"Freight" real,"OnlineOrderFlag" float,"OrderDate" datetime,"OrderDate_Month" varchar(255),"OrderDate_Year" float,"PurchaseOrderNumber" varchar(255),"RevisionNumber" float,"SalesOrderID" float,"SalesOrderNumber" varchar(255),"ShipDate" datetime,"ShipMethodID" float,"ShipToAddressID" float,"Status" float,"SubTotal" float,"TaxAmt" float,"TotalDue" float)

1/ My field is a date, why do you want to convert it in Datetime??

2/ Datetime is not even a usual field type in sql database (at least not supported by monetdb, vertica, postgresql, oracle, etc, etc...)... it should obviously be timestamp

Currently, this non-specific in database ODBC connexion cannot be used at all!

Unsupervised learning method to detect topics in a text document.

Helpful for users interested in text mining.

I usually don't mind the bell sound at the completion of workflow run.  But when wearing earphones the ding can be a bit jarring.

There is a "fix" as evidenced here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Remove-Workflow-Completion-Sound/td-p/...

Another option is to use the Sound Mixer to mute system sounds

However, we could enjoy more granular control if we could mute the sound within Designer.  An option to choose our own Alteryx-specific sound would be gravy.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

David

Hey everyone,

I'd like to suggest making use of Windows Taskbar progress feature to highlight running workflow status, it would be helpful for when you start a workflow and continue working on another application.

I made a workaround tool I append at the end of my workflows alongside with output tools to do the same thing, having the feature natively in the designer would be better.

the tool doesn't take care of other running workflows or different alteryx windows, it can't detect warnings and errors from other tools, although Alteryx Engine API might be better for this implementation, a quick python one is done for demo purposes.

Attached are the tool and a test workflow to demonstrate the feature, all the best.

I made a search on LDA - Linear Discriminant Analysis on Alteryx Help and it returned "0" Results.

Idea: LDA - Linear Discriminant Analysis tool

to be added on the predictive tool box.

Rationale: We have PCA and MDS as tools which help a lot on "unsupervised" dimentionality reduction in predictive modelling.

Bu if we need a method that takes target values into considerations we need a "supervised" tool instead...

"LDA is also closely related to principal component analysis (PCA) and factor analysis in that they both look for linear combinations of variables which best explain the data.[4] LDA explicitly attempts to model the difference between the classes of data. PCA on the other hand does not take into account any difference in class, and factor analysis builds the feature combinations based on differences rather than similarities. Discriminant analysis is also different from factor analysis in that it is not an interdependence technique: a distinction between independent variables and dependent variables (also called criterion variables) must be made."

In order to fully take advantage of Alteryx spatial features it would be great to have the ability of using Openstreetmap extract files natively.

While there are some sources available in SHP format they tend to be heavily cut down in detail, while the native OSM and PBF have the full feature set.

As it's an open format licensing shouldn't be an issue and it may pave the way to new features.

What do you think?

A functionality that my team really needs is the ability to use update and delete statements through in database tools. We use Teradata on my team and I'm sure many other platforms also need this functionality. I am really shocked and disappointed that in the update to 2018.4 Alteryx decided that it would add this new functionality to it's Write In DB tool, but only added it for SQL server. Moreover, this functionality is a hole that has been missing in these tools for a long time. Patches in functionality like that need to be added to all platforms, not just one. So please add update functionality to the Write In DB tool for Teradata and other platforms. The original post where Alteryx decided to make only this small change is here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/In-Database-Update-and-or-Delete/idi-p/13153...

I would like to share some feedback regarding the Principal Component tool.

I've selected the option "Scale each field to have unit variance" and 1 of the 4 PCA tools was displaying errors. However, the error message is not very intuitive and I couldn't use it to debug my workflow. The problem was that for my type of data, scaling could not be applied since it had a lot of 0 values.

Couldn't find anything related to this, so hope my feedback helps others.

Thanks!

With the release of 2018.3, cache has become an adhoc task. With complex workflow and multiple inputs we need a method to cache and save the cache selection by tool. Once the workflow runs after opening, the cache would be saved at the latest tool downstream.

This way we don't have to create adhoc cache steps and run the workflow 2X before realizing the time saving features of cache.

This would work similar to the cache feature in 11.0 but with enhanced functionality...the best of the old cache with the new cache intent.

Embed the cache option into tools.

Thanks!

Add application certificate to PINGID request from Alteryx as part of a mutual app authentication process for SAML 2.0. At the moment when enabling SAML 2.0 for Alteryx there is not application certificate being sent with the authorisation request. Request is to add this. The risk that request without certificate will be abused is very low but still we would like mitigate this small risk by adding an application certificate.

Hi there,

I noticed that here: https://help.alteryx.com/current/DataRobotAutomodelTool.htm it is mentioned that the number of workers can be set, and that the default is 2. However, this option seems to be removed, and the default seems to be max.

In a short workflow, this might not be necessary as the information related to each tool is spelled out in the progress windows.  However, in a complicated and lengthy workflow, tracing such msg can be a tedious task. In addition, using a tool with multiple outputs and only one output is selected while the residual outputs may be used to validate the result in the selected output; for example, joint tool where left or right output should be zero, a visual queue could be a quick way to alert operator on any potential problem.  Certainly, a browse tool can be added but in a big workflow, couple with a large data set, it might be a drain to the system resource. What if there is a tool that would activate a visual alert, like a light bulb, based on a preset condition to tell user that something is wrong and perhaps additional work needs to be done to either remedy or to account for the residual data. As in the case of a joint where 100% match is desired, any unmatched row would require an update to the reference list which maybe an additional adhoc process outside the current process. Certainly, an additional steps can be added to first explore the possibility of unmatched data and to update the reference list accordingly.  The workflow would in hold until 100% match is achieve. This would require additional system resource in order to hold; especially with large set of data and lengthy workflow.  If the unmatched situation rarely occurs, just a lightweight visual queue that 'pop' while allow the process either to break or to go through might be a sensible solution.  Just a thought.