Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Experts:  

The Select Tool is great - except when it comes to reordering a large number of fields for a custom output, load etc.  Single clicking every time you need to move a field up or down is time consuming (the ability to highlight multiple fields and move them in unison is great - assuming they are already in the right order).  

I suggest two improvements to the Select Tool:

1) The ability to select a field and hold down either the "Up" or "Down" arrow so the field keeps moving without requiring one click per row and 

2) The ability to drag and drop fields (skip clicking altogether if desired)

The combination of these 2 functionalities (or even one of them) will make field reordering much more efficient when using the Select Tool.

Thanks! 

Hello All,

I received from an AWS adviser the following message:

_____________________________________________

Skip Compression Analysis During COPY
Checks for COPY operations delayed by automatic compression analysis.

Rebuilding uncompressed tables with column encoding would improve the performance of 2,781 recent COPY operations.
This analysis checks for COPY operations delayed by automatic compression analysis. COPY performs a compression analysis phase when loading to empty tables without column compression encodings. You can optimize your table definitions to permanently skip this phase without any negative impacts.

Observation

Between 2018-10-29 00:00:00 UTC and 2018-11-01 23:33:23 UTC, COPY automatically triggered compression analysis an average of 698 times per day. This impacted 44.7% of all COPY operations during that period, causing an average daily overhead of 2.1 hours. In the worst case, this delayed one COPY by as much as 27.5 minutes.

Recommendation

Implement either of the following two options to improve COPY responsiveness by skipping the compression analysis phase:
Use the column ENCODE parameter when creating any tables that will be loaded using COPY.
Disable compression altogether by supplying the COMPUPDATE OFF parameter in the COPY command.
The optimal solution is to use column encoding during table creation since it also maintains the benefit of storing compressed data on disk. Execute the following SQL command as a superuser in order to identify the recent COPY operations that triggered automatic compression analysis:
WITH xids AS (
SELECT xid FROM stl_query WHERE userid>1 AND aborted=0
AND querytxt = 'analyze compression phase 1' GROUP BY xid)
SELECT query, starttime, complyze_sec, copy_sec, copy_sql
FROM (SELECT query, xid, DATE_TRUNC('s',starttime) starttime,
SUBSTRING(querytxt,1,60) copy_sql,
ROUND(DATEDIFF(ms,starttime,endtime)::numeric / 1000.0, 2) copy_sec
FROM stl_query q JOIN xids USING (xid)
WHERE querytxt NOT LIKE 'COPY ANALYZE %'
AND (querytxt ILIKE 'copy %from%' OR querytxt ILIKE '% copy %from%')) a
LEFT JOIN (SELECT xid,
ROUND(SUM(DATEDIFF(ms,starttime,endtime))::NUMERIC / 1000.0,2) complyze_sec
FROM stl_query q JOIN xids USING (xid)
WHERE (querytxt LIKE 'COPY ANALYZE %'
OR querytxt LIKE 'analyze compression phase %') GROUP BY xid ) b USING (xid)
WHERE complyze_sec IS NOT NULL ORDER BY copy_sql, starttime;

Estimate the expected lifetime size of the table being loaded for each of the COPY commands identified by the SQL command. If you are confident that the table will remain under 10,000 rows, disable compression altogether with the COMPUPDATE OFF parameter. Otherwise, create the table with explicit compression prior to loading with COPY.

_____________________________________________

When I run the suggested query to check the COPY commands executed I realized all belonged to the Redshift bulk output from Alteryx.

Is there any way to implement this “Skip Compression Analysis During COPY” in alteryx to maximize performance as suggested by AWS?

Thank you in advance,

Gabriel

In the Configuration section of the Formula tool, the “Output Column” area is resizable.  However, it has a limit that needs to be increased.  Several of the column names I work with are not clearly identifiable with the current sizing constraint.  I do not think the sizing needs to be constrained. 

I have a process that sends out about 1,500 emails. Every once in a while, it will get stuck at some Percentage and I will have to eventually cancel the workflow, figure out how many emails were sent, and then skip that many emails in order to avoid sending duplicate emails. The process of figuring out how many were sent is currently taking the % of the tool at cancellation minus 50%(since that is where it starts), Multiplying it by 2, and then multiplying that % by the number of lines to get the approximate line of data where it froze up, and then reaching out to individuals to see if they received the email to narrow down exactly where the error occurred. 

Example: 60% - 50%= 10% * 2 = 20% * 1249 = 249.8.

This has been pretty accurate in the past, but obviously is not ideal. Is there no way for it to show us how many were sent even if we cancelled the workflow mid processing of the tool?

Hello Alteryx Community!

My suggestion is for a ColdFusion connector - specifically Web Services built in *.cfc files....

Perhaps being able to connect to any *cfm webpage to bring in and identify the data from a webpage or Web Service and then import into an Alteryx Workflow & thus be able to output some meaningful informational reports.

Our company is loving the Insight's Tool, but I am constantly being asked by users if they can export the data behind the graphs that is feeding in. For example we have an inventory dashboard for vehicles that starts at a Corporate level, but is drillable down to a "Regional" and then even more focused "Managed Area" level. Once users get down to the "Managed Area" level they want to export the line level data that is feeding into the Insight chart to actually view, work, and action the data at a vehicle level. 

Essentially an option to export the data feeding into the graphs. 

Good Afternoon,

Working with the Alteryx Insight tool there are a few functionality features our team believes would be quite useful:

-When you have multiple charts within an Insight the ability to "Drill Out" of an individual graphs versus having to "reset" the entire dashboard would be incredibly useful and save a lot of time

-When drilling into graphs we have found users often forget what particular category they drilled into leading to them having to reset the entire dashboard and start over. Could a "legend" type area be added to drill able graphs to show the user what they have drilled into?

-The ability to "select all" or "de-select all" options in a filter on the right hand side of the Insight

-The ability to drill into your graphs when in the Design Mode or "Configure Insight" to see how any formatting changes impact all layers of your graph once you begin to drill versus having to switch over to Preview Mode and test all layers and then switch back to Design Mode to make necessary changes

-The ability to adjust formatting on individual layers of a drilled graph. For example on the x-axis of your first layer have labels set at font size 10 with no angle, but then on your second layer once you drill have the x-axis font size adjusted to font size of 6 at 45 degree angle in the case where your data labels are longer once you drill

Thanks,

Nathan Brock 

Since we know Alteryx uses R for a lot of its predictive and data analysis tools. It takes a while to run the workflow whenever there is R based tool is involved. I was told by a solution engineer that its because its opening and closing R in the background.

Sometimes my workflow has a bunch of tools which are running R in the background and it takes forever to run the workflow.

I think there should be a user setting which allows user to choose if the want to start R along with Alteryx and keep it running in the background.

Thanks,

Hi there,

As a beginner in Alteryx with experience in other analytics software, I noticed that there may be a very simple thing that I think could be adjusted which I feel could improve the experience of a beginner in Alteryx. Also happy to know if this is already possible.

When I was doing a introduction training, I noticed that a lot of the questions were regarding not being able to see the right output, regardless of the usage of the right tools & settings. Luckily, we were provided with a good trainer that immediately saw that there was a very simple reason for this: the 'output' button (sometimes called differently, for instance in a select it is called 'true' or 'false') was not selected. Instead people were looking at the input or something else. I can even imagine that some more advanced users have spend a few minutes wondering what was wrong until they realised they weren't looking at the output.

It seems to me to be a bit random when output or input gets selected, and as someone with experience in (preventing) addiction in the gaming industry, I know that the first experience is crucial for someone to get 'hooked' :-), and this small inconsistency seems to break the flow a bit. Could you make the default setting such that a tool shows the output rather than the input by default? A possible addition would be an option that switches a tool back to input every time a button gets deselected. From a programmers/data science perspective, that would also make a lot of sense.

Regards,

Charles

The older versions of the Publish to Tableau Server Macro had an option to Request an authentication token however the latest version does not.  Please return this option to the tool as it is very useful for constructing Rest API call scripts.

Thank you!

~ Eric Marowitz

Please allow a hover over that would show you the value of a variable in the formula tool. At times I get long formulas and it would be nice to see the values of each variable by just putting your mouse on top of it. Just show the first row like the preview. There is similar functionality in visual studio and it makes coding easier. 

Hello,

If I go to Options --> Advanced Options --> System Settings, why do I have to click [Next] button several times before I can get to the "Engine" tab at  the very bottom? Why not simply create a user-friendly UI screen where we could directly navigate to the section we desire?

Please improve the UI.

Thanks!

There should be a macro which could be used as read input macro for in-db tools.

Similarly, there should be a write macro for in-db tools.

If you have a field length of say 10 in a Select Tool, then you use a Left Join tool and change that length to say 4. This turns that field red - as it should.  Then add a Select tool after the Union.  It should say 4 in the second Select tool.  But instead it says 10.  If it was changed to 10 (and it wasn't) then the field s/b red.

It would be great if we could change the name of a variable upstream it follows through in formulae etc.

This is more of an enhancement than a new idea.  When building an application and upon success using separate browsers to display the results, it would be nice to be able to give the browser windows a title.  Currently you see Browse (22) and Browse (38) etc.  My app checks a certain key value in multiple tables/files and presents the table results if found.  I need to rename the data to know which file the data is coming from whereas if the browser windows had a title, you would know from which file they represent.  The titles could be added in the interface designer (see attached)

As per this discussion, I'd like to create constants that stay with me as I create new workflows rather than creating a user constant across multiple workflows.

This could perhaps be done by editing an xml file in the bin.

Hello!

There this very handy functionality in Alteryx that when you drag files from a Windows explorer onto the Canvas, the tools automatically convert to Input Tools. When making Alteryx smaller using this  - button, the canvas gets minimalized to nothing. This means I cannot drag files onto the canvas. The suggestion is to always keep a little bit of canvas space here to drop files onto. Just another small QoL issue. 

Cheers,

Marco 

I just downloaded the new 2018.4 version of Desktop, and I feel like it's going backwards with the Window UI. I prefer to keep my Results window on a separate screen where I can review it side-by-side with my workflow. I have three large monitors, and I have no need to keep that window tabbed, or docked. 

With the removal of he 'Close' option, I no longer have a way of closing that window without putting back in a mode I do not want. 

When i first started using Alteryx, the results window acted the same as any normal Windows window, but over time I've lost the ability to quickly maximize the window AND now I can't even close it. One of the most critical windows is getting harder and harder to use.

Pretty please!