Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

In the dynamic input tool,

Where you “Read a List of Data Sources”, there should be a radio button below the “Action” field, to   

“INCLUDE FIELD OF DATA SOURCES”,

Then you’d have an output field with the isolated name from which the data was sourced. You wouldn't be required to "include full file path" then parse out the sheet the data came from. 

Sometimes, Control Containers produce error messages even if they are deactivated by feeding an empty table into their input connection.

(Note that this is a made up example of something which can happen if input tables might be from different sources and have different columns so that they need separated treatment.)

According to the product team, this is expected behaviour since a selection does not allow zero columns selected. This might be true (which I doubt a bit), but it is at least counter-intuitive. If this behaviour cannot be avoided in total, I have a proposal which would improve the user experience without changing the entire workflow validation logic.

(The support engineer understands the point and has raised a defect.)

Instead of writing messages inside Control Containers directly to the log output (on screen, in logfile) and to mark the workflow as erroneous, I propose to introduce a message (message, warning, error) stack for tools inside Control Containers:

1. When the configuration validation is executed:
1. Messages (messages, warnings, errors) produced outside of Control Containers are output to the screen log and to the log files (as today).
2. Messages (messages, warning, errors) produced inside of Control Containers are not yet output but stored in a message stack.
2. At the moment when it is decided whether a Control container is activated or deactivated:
1. If Control Container activated: Write the previously stored message stack for this Control Container to the screen and to the log output, and increase error and warning counts accordingly.
2. If Control Container deactivated: Delete the message stack for this Control Container (w/o reporting anything to the log and w/o increasing error and warning count).

This would result in a different sequence of messages than today (because everything inside activated Control Containers would be reported later than today). Since there’s no logical order of messages anyways, this would not matter. And it would avoid the apparently illogical case that deactivated Control Containers produce errors.

When a user wants to use the find nearest to say find the nearest within 200 miles the dropdown stops at 100.

Similar if they want a number in between IE 15 the interface is not intuitive.

While you can just type the number in the interface doesn't look like you are able to.

Simply adding a "Custom" selection at the bottom would make this much more intuitive.

Hello,

A few years ago, Alteryx was 4 released per year and now it's only 2 per year (in 2023, as of today, only one !!)

The reasons why I would the cadence to be back to quarter release :

-a quarter cadence means waiting less time to profit of the Alteryx new features so more value

-quarter cadence is now an industry standard on data software.

-for partners, the new situation means less customer upgrade opportunities, so less cash but also less contacts with customers.

Best regards,

Simon

When you start using DCM - you may have existing canvasses which use regular old connection strings which you want to migrate to DCM.

Currently (in 2023.1.1.123) - when you select "Use Data Connection Manager" - it shreds the configuration of your input tool which makes it difficult to just convert these from an existing connection to a DCM connection

The only way to then make sure that you don't lose any configuration on the tool then is to use the XML editing functionality of the tools and copy across your old configuration.

Could you please add the capability to keep my current tool configuration, but just change from using a regular old connection string to using DCM?

Many thanks 

Sean

cc: @wesley-siu @_PavelP 

Hi currently if you use the cross tab tool and the names of the new fields should have special characters they end up being replaced in the new headers with underscores "_", and then need to be updated in someway. It would be great if this was all done in the tool. In other words the new headers have the special characters as desired

I would really love to have a tool "Dynamic change type" or "Dynamic re-type" which is used just as "Dynamic Rename".

• "Take Type from First Row of Data": By definition, all columns are of a string type initially. Sets the type of the column according to the string in the first row of data.
  

  Col 1	Col 2	Col 3	Col 4
  Double	Int32	V_String	Date
  123.456	17	Hello	2023-10-30
  3.4e17	123	Bye	2024-01-01

• "Take Type from Right Input Metadata": Changes the types of the left input table to the ones by right input.
• "Take Type from Right Input Rows": Changes the types based on a table with columns "Name" and "New Type".
  

  Name	New Type
  Col 1	Double
  Col 2	Int32
  Col 3	V_String
  Col 4	Date

Is it possible to add a search feature to the Summarize Tool that is similar to the search feature in the Select Tool?  Selecting specific fields to summarize in small datasets is fine, but if I am dealing with a table that has 200 fields searching for a specific field can be cumbersome.  Type in a few key letters to filter the available fields would be helpful.

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.

Hi,

Due to our setup, we need to have the path defined as Environment variables, so they will point to different paths in case a user opens the WF locally or the server is running it.

The issue is that the path of dependency does not accept the windows defined variables:

Thank you!

Please consider implementing a consistent case-sensitive option for all tools and functions.

To compare string values, including case-sensitivity:   This post had a good description of the challenge, but the post has been archived:

   https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/IF-equation-ignoring-case-BUG/m-p/4170...

   For all the time I've used Alteryx, I thought that IF "test" = "TEST" would evaluate to false. Today I realised that isn't the case and I was surprised. I'm very surprised that "equals" performs like it does.

A few existing Ideas request case-sensitivity for individual tools:

   Case insensitive option while joining two data sets
   https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Ideas/Case-insensitive-option-while-joinin...

   Unique tool enhancement - deal with case sensitive data
   https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Ideas/Unique-tool-enhancement-deal-with-ca...

This new Idea requests system-wide consideration for case-sensitivity, for all tools and functions.

Current state:

These tools and functions are case-sensitive:

• Tool: Join
• Tool: Tile
• Function: FindString
• Functions: MD5_ASCII, MD5_UNICODE, MD5_UTF8

These tools and functions are NOT case-sensitive:

• Tool: Unique
• Function: CompareDictionary

These tools and functions can be either case-sensitive or NOT case-sensitive, depending on the options used:

• Function: Contains
• Function: EndsWith
• Function: StartsWith
• Functions: REGEX_Match, REGEX_Replace, REGEX_CountMatches

Current Challenges:

   How do we easily identify Lower Case, Upper Case, Mixed Case?

   How do we easily compare strings for equality, using case sensitivity?

Request:

   Ensure all tools and functions include an option to ignore or consider Case

   Create new functions for IsUpperCase, IsLowerCase, IsMixedCase

   Create a new function for IsEqual, with an option to ignore or consider Case

See attached workflow, which

• uses REGEX_Match to create 3 new fields: IsUpperCase, IsLowerCase, IsMixedCase
• creates a field [Flag: Original value IsEqual, case-sensitive], to compare strings for equality, using case sensitivity

Hi all,

At present, Alteryx does not support DSN-free connections to Snowflake using the Bulk Connector.    This is a critical functionality for any large company that uses Alteryx - and so I'm hoping that this can be changed in the product in an upcoming release.    As a corollary - every DB connection type has to be able to work without DSNs for any medium or large size server instance - so it's worth extending this to check every DB connection type available in Alteryx.

Here are the details:

What is DSN-Free?

In order to be able to run our Alteryx canvasses on a multi-node server - we have to avoid using DSNs - so we generally expand connection strings that look like this:

odbc:DSN=DSNSnowFlakeTest;UID=Username;PWD=__EncPwd1__|||NEWTESTDB.PUBLIC.MYTESTTABLE

to instead have the fully described connection string like this:
odbc:DRIVER={SnowflakeDSIIDriver};UID=Username;pwd=__EncPwd1__;authenticator=Snowflake;WAREHOUSE=compute_wh;SERVER=xnb27844.us-east-1.snowflakecomputing.com;SCHEMA=PUBLIC;DATABASE=NewTestDB;Staging=local;Method=user

For Snowflake BL:

Now - for the Snowflake Bulk Loader the same process does not work and Alteryx gives the classic error below

With DSN:

snowbl:DSN=DSNSnowFlakeTest;UID=Username;pwd=__EncPwd1__;Staging=local;Method=user|||NEWTESTDB.PUBLIC.MYTESTTABLE

Without DSN:

snowbl:driver=SnowflakeDSIIDriver;UID=SeanBAdamsJPMC;pwd=__EncPwd1__;SERVER=xnb27844.us-east-1.snowflakecomputing.com;WAREHOUSE=compute_wh;SCHEMA=PUBLIC;DATABASE=NewTestDB;Staging=local;Method=user|||NEWTESTDB.PUBLIC.MYTESTTABLE

Many thanks

Sean

I know that the container title/label should or can be short, and as much descriptive as possible. Also, adding extra comments inside the box helps to a more detailed explanation on regards what process is run inside the container. Visually, if I collapse the container, the "Short" title given can't be of much help.

Could it be possible to enhance the "caption" for the "Container" title? I mean to allow to type 2, 3 or more lines of text?. This will make the Container title more descriptive and visually will allow to have the containers collapsed but with a reasonable amount of text that describe (as much as possible) what happens inside the container.

At the moment, If I type certain amount of text, the container expands according to the length of the text 

Below is the typical container Title 

Below is the current situation if a person would like to give a bit of more description in the "Container" header (The container expands)

An dream would be to have the workflow with all containers collapsed and with titles that tell you what they do (see image below)

Lets say you have a row of 10 filter tools vertically and there's a select tool coming out of each input for each filter. It can get dizzying to tell the difference. It would be great to be able to select a colour for tools when on the canvas so e.g. in the above I could say " my green selects are the true and my red selects are the false"

In short:
Add an option to cache the metadata for a particular tool so that it doesn't forget when using tool that have dynamic metadata such as batch macros or alteryx metadata engine can't resolve such as python tool.

Longer explanation:

The Problem:

One of the issues I often encounter when making dynamic workflows or ones that require calling external services is that Alteryx often forgets the metadata of what columns to expect. This causes the workflow to forget configuration of downstream tools when a workflow is first opened or when the metadata engine refreshes. There is currently the option to disable the metadata engine from automatically refreshing but this isn't a good option because you miss out on much of the value it brings.

Some of the common tools where I encounter this issue:

• Json parse
• Batch macros
• Python tool
• Regex parsing to rows

Solution:

Instead could we add an option to cache the metadata for a particular tool, this would save the metadata from the last time the workflow ran to within the workflows XML so that it persists when closed and reopened. Then when the metadata engine runs when it gets to this tool instead of resolving the metadata from the tool it instead uses the saved version in the XML. Obviously when it actually runs it would ignore this and any errors would still occur.

This could be an option in navigation pane of each tool. Mockup below:

This would make developing dynamic workflows far easier and resolve issues of configuration being lost when the metadata changes and alteryx forgets the options.

Changing the Macro Input tool in an existing macro is dangerous and can result in unmapped fields or lost connections in workflows using the macro. For example, we have a widely used macro for which we'd like to change the name of an input field, change it's default type from Date to DateTime, make it optional while keeping other fields mandatory. Currently, we cannot find a solution which would not require us to fix each workflow using the macro after changing it. We should be able to change the field names, field types (e.g. String to V_WString, Date to DateTime), select optional fields and do other modifications to Macro Input without having to update each workflow using the macro. The new Macro Input UI could be enhanced with a window similar to that of Select tool's. Technically, the Macro Input fields could have a unique ID by which they would be recognised in workflows, so the field names would just be aliases that could be changed without losing the mapping. In summary, we are restricted to our initial setup of Macro Input and it is very complicated to change it afterwards, especially if the macro is used widely.

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.

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.