Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I have had multiple instances of needing to parse a set of PDF files. While I realize that this has been discussed previously with workarounds here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Can-Alteryx-Parse-A-Word-Doc-Or-PDF/ta-p/115...

having a native PDF input tool would help me significantly. I don't have admin rights to my computer (at work) so downloading a new app to then use the "Run Command" tool is inconvenient, requires approval from IT, etc. So, it would save me (and I'm sure others) time both from an Alteryx workflow standpoint each time I need it, but also from an initial use to get the PDFtoText program installed.

I noticed that Tableau has a new connector to Anaplan in the upcoming release. 

Does Alteryx have any plans to create an Anaplan connector? 

When posting an alteryx job to the gallery; or packaging them for transport - any deep dependancies are lost (I think that we start to have trouble once you're 3 levels deep).

For example - you have a canvas; which uses macros; which in turn have macros; which in turn have macros.

this is not as uncommon as it may sound on the surface - due to the current lack of flow-of-control support in Alteryx; we need to wrap all of our ETL jobs in Batch Macros to force them to run in a specific order.   Within these ETL jobs, it's common to decompose for lookups; master data management; etc.

Is this something that the team is currently looking into fixing - this does cause quite a bit of pain when deploying to the gallery because the jobs need to be manually stitched together and packaging does not carry the full working solution?

CC:  @rijuthav; @jithinmony; @HengHe; @RajK; @ydmuley; @revathi; @Deeksha; @MPistone; @Ari_Fuller; @Arianna_Fuller; @JoshKushner; @samN; @avinashbonu; @Sunder_Sriram; @Rahul_Thakur; @Rahul_Singh

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

Could I ask for a minor change:

- The tool seems to be doing a word-wrap even if the container doesn't need it - for example in the screenshot below, the entire on clause can fit on one line because I've expanded the window so that it doesn't need to wrap.

- Could you also default to putting the ON clause for a join 4 spaces indented underneath the join clause?   worked example below.

Wordwrap:

Indenting Structure:

Could we use a default structure for queries 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

So far, Alteryx Products are offered in 6 different languages, which is a great thing indeed !!

However there is a lack of a toggle option to effortlessly switch the interface to a different language.

As a standard feature users should be allowed to switch language without re-installing the product (applicable to all Alteryx products)

 Ref: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/How-to-Change-Alteryx-Designer-Language/ta-p...

Hello Alteryx,

It seems that the Endpoint parameter for the Amazon S3 Upload tool only support "Path Like" URL. It would be great if the Endpoint parameter could also take into account "Virual Hosted" URL.

When we enter a "Virtual Hosted" URL, the "Bucket Name" and "Object Name" parameters don't respond correctly.

The three dots option for the "Bucket Name" parameter returns the bucket name and the object name at the same time. And the three dots option for the "Object Name" parameter doesn't suggest any object name.

We can enter those manually but we lose some of the Alteryx functionnality. 

It would be a great improvement that the Endpoint parameter takes into account "Virtual Hosted" URL so we keep "Bucket Name" and "Object Name" suggestions once the Endpoint is registered.

Is it in the roadmap?

François

Our company is implementing an Azure Data Lake and we have no way of connecting to it efficiently with Alteryx.  We would like to push data into the Azure Data Lake store and also pull it out with the connector.  Currently, there is not an out-of-the-box solution in Alteryx and it requires a lot of effort to push data to Azure.

While I strongly support the S3 upload and download connectors, the development of AWS Athena has changed the game for us. Please consider opening up an official support of Athena compute on S3 like support already show for Teradata, Hadoop Hive, MS SQL, and other database types.

Not sure what detail needs to be added.  This is obviously a widely used RDBMS.

On shared collection , users have access to the collection shared by other  team members. When users copy the ‘Publish to Tableau Server ‘  tool from one workflow to another it copies with the credentials embedded in the tool as well. 

As user John Doe’s workflow publishes data on to tableau server with  Peter’s credentials as the publish to dashboard tool was copied from Peter’s workflow.

The concern really is  Users copying tools from one workflow can really copy the credentials as well. Enhancement to the publish to Tableau tool would be much appreciated. 

Hello,

As of today, if you want to add a PostgreSQL in database connection, you may feel embarrased :

However, the help states that PostgreSQL is supported by in-database.

https://help.alteryx.com/current/In-DatabaseOverview.htm

Whaaaaaaaaat?

oh, I forgot to mention : with a little luck, you can find tis help page : https://help.alteryx.com/current/DataSources/PostgreSQL.htm

Yep, you have to configure a "greenplum" connection if you want to use a PSQL.

i think this is not user-friendly and can lead to mistake, errors, frustration and even lack of sales for Alteryx :

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Do-you-use-generic-in-database-connect...

Also, Greeenplum and PSQL will have separate features so I think having two separate entries in the menu is pertinent.

Best regards,

Simon

I recently began using the SharePoint Files v2.0.1 tools to read and write data. The SharePoint Files Output tool allows you to take a sheet or filename from a column but that column is still included in the output. The standard Output Data tool has a "Keep Field in Output" checkbox that allows you to control if the column stays in the XLSX of CSV file. It would be great if this same functionality could be included in the SharePoint Files Output tool.

When creating annotations in the new image template tool as part of intelligence suite, a feature improvement would be the ability to modify the annotation, to change the dimensions of it.

Currently the only option is to cancel and redraw but being able to edit and drag the existing annotation would be a great addition. This is because the sizing and position of the annotation is important in the OCR process, and when there are many annotations on a page a user is likely to only need to make minor adjustments instead of deleting and redrawing. A mock up is below.

When you are navigating within the text input tool, it would really help if we can navigate to next/previous cell upon pressing right/left arrow keys. If the cursor is at the end of a cell value then pressing the right arrow should go to next cell. Similarly, if the cursor is at the beginning of value of a cell, it should go to previous cell.

I'm only just starting to explore the python and html sdks, but I think this functionality would be really useful for Alteryx tools.

I foresee cases where a custom tool is developed and we want to install it for 20+ users.  Rather than having each user manually open and install the file, and troubleshooting for each of them (which could also become challenging if we want to deploy an enhancement to a tool in the future), I'd like a method (preferably via command line) to automatically install a tool for a user without any interaction/input.

This would allow for targeted tool deployment as well as large-scale tool maintenance as custom Python tools mature in the enterprise space.

In the newer versions of Alteryx - if you open up a canvas that was created in a newer version, alteryx offers to auto-fix this by opening the canvas anyway.

However if that canvas includes custom macros - these macros are not imported if they are a newer version.

Please could you extend the Newer Version process to include macros used on a canvas, and attempt to import these too?

Thank you

Sean

cc: @mbarone  @Claje @jpoz 

We've been looking into the phoneHome information that collects usage of Designer in the enterprise, and it looks like this data set (in the UsageReports collection, I believe).

Please can you add the CanvasFilename that was run to this data - we need to be able to surveil the use of Alteryx in our enterprise which is not being done within the server environment, and without the canvas name this becomes tremendously difficult.

Reference:

https://help.alteryx.com/server/11.0/admin/index.htm#Configuration/SaveDesignerUsageData.htm%3FTocPa...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Analytics-Blog/Alteryx-Analytics-11-0-Monitoring-and-Reporting-on-A...

cc: @BenG @avinashbonu @Deeksha @BenBu @revathi

Unsupervised learning method to detect topics in a text document.

Helpful for users interested in text mining.

Functions such as Year([Date Field]), Month([Date Field]), and Day([Date Field]) would really help with date-based formulas and filter tests.