Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I want a feature to enable join by custom conditions. Currently, in Join tool, allowed condition is only equality of specific fields and specific position, however, in SQL, we can join data by much more flexible conditions like;

SELECT TableA.id FROM TableA INNER JOIN TableB ON TableA.id=TableB.id and TableA.value > TableB.value  

Of course, my idea can be easily realized by using combination of Appendix Field + Filter tool, but I meant to say is that Appendix-Fields is quite expensive operation in calculation cost, and it would generate many unnecessary records, which is annoying us in case of handling a huge dataset.

I suppose this kind of flexible conditions can be specified by using expression editor, thereby configuration window of this feature would look like the below image; Adding one more radio button option, and expression editor similar to one used in Filter tool.

Any positive/negative feedback on my idea would be appreciated. Thank you for your attention!

The Find Replace tool has a checkbox to do a case insensitive find. It would be fabulous if the Join and Join Multiple tools had a similar checkbox.

I frequently have to create a new field in each data stream, convert the data I want to join on to upper case, perform the join and remove the extra "helper" fields. Using the helper field is needed in my case in order to preserve unique capitalization (i.e., acronyms within the string, etc.). 

I would love a tool to be created for looking up a value in a table based on a condition. It could be called "Lookup." One input to the tool would be the lookup list, the other is the main database. Inside the tool you could enter functions that can query the lookup table and return the results either as an overwrite of an existing field in the main DB or as a new field in the main DB, similar to the options in the Multi-Row Formula tool.

Here is a link to my post in Community that explains the problem. The solution, in a nutshell, was to create a Join (which resulted in millions of additional rows), run the conditional formula, then filter to get rid of the millions of rows that were created by the Join so only those that met the condition remained (the original database rows).

Here is the text of my Community post describing my project (slightly modified for clarity):

Table 1:  A list of Pay Dates (the lookup table)

Table 2:  Daily timekeeper data with Week Start and Week End Date fields.

The goal:  To find the Pay Date in Table 1 that is greater than the Week Start Date in Table 2 and no more than 13 days after the Week End Date in Table 2.

[Table 2: Week Start Date] < [Table 1: Pay Date]

and [Table 2: Week End Date] < [Table 1: Pay Date]

and DateTimeDiff([Table 1: Pay Date], [Table 2: Week End Date], 'Days') <= 13

There are many different flows I could use this type of tool for that would save time and simplify the flow.

Thanks!

As an international organization we deal with clients in multiple-countries.

Name matches for names including Chinese characters generate a unicode conversation warning and are excluded from the fuzzy match.

It would be good if fuzzy match could be enhanced to handle Chinese characters.

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.

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. 

hi team,

Currently the join tool doesn't have option to join the data irrespective of its case sensitivity. this causes issues while doing the analysis.

This tool is widely being taking as a replacement of Excel Vlookup formula (which is also case insensitive),so can we have the similar functionality for Join tool also?

We can have an option like a radio button or checkbox to select if we want to have case insensitivity while joining.

Thanks

Have Alteryx have different colored lines for the different paths that come in and go out from a tool like how Excel colors references in a formula.

Having the ability to specify columns to be "coalesced" (essentially filled in automatically when records aren't present) across all inputs of the Join Multiple tool would be very useful, and save lots of tedious setup. In fact, I avoid that tool if possible, currently, because of the extra steps necessary in maintaining key column integrity after the join.

In the screenshot below "RecordID" is present in all 4 inputs. When they are joined together, however, not every record is present in all inputs, therefore each of the 4 "RecordID" columns has nulls. We then have to go through an extra step to find the first "non-null" record ID, and put that in a new column (or in the first "RecordID" column).

This could be simply fixed by adding a menu to specify columns that should be coalesced, or auto-filled from other inputs if it's missing in the first one.

The columns in the menu could be based on the first input, and then alteryx would look for columns with the same name in all other inputs and complete the logic below, for instance:

If isnull([RecordID]) then

      if isnull([Input_#2_RecordID]) then

           if isnull([Input_#3_RecordID]) then

                    [Input_#4_RecordID]

           else [Input_#3_RecordID] endif

     else [Input_#2_RecordID] endif

else [RecordID] endif