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I decided to get real fancy when building a standard macro the other day. I checked the box on my macro input that made the connection optional:Capture2.PNG

 

shocked-will-smith

 

It worked really well. My macro then became more complex, so I changed it to a batch macro. To my great surpise/astonishment/shock, the optional incoming connection is no longer optional:

Capture.PNG

 

The standard macro is working as expected on the left, but the batch macro is producing an error because my optional connection is requiring that something be connected to it.

what-did-you-just-say

 

I've been told that the code to make it optional is not there for batch macros and that this would be a product feature/improvement.

 

Currently when I open and run an app in designer mode im unable to access any other modules while it runs.  It would be nice to be able to work on other modules while an app runs without opening a debug.

Have you noticed that when you save a custom image to a macro it multiplies the file size? Below I will outline why I believe this happens and how it could potentially be fixed.

 

Hypothesis:

When a image is saved in the XML of a macro, it is saved in a single line of XML code that is generally quite long. I believe the problem this causes is that this very long image code extends the length of all other lines to this new max length. This increased line length seems to increase the file size and is multiplicative based on how many lines of XML that have been extended in the macro. For example, I added a 5KB image to a 7KB macro and saving the macro resulted in a 29KB file size. I have also experienced saving a 5KB image to a 300KB macro that yielded a 1.4MB macro. 

 

In the (very zoomed out) image below, you can see the single line that contains the image information for this simple macro.

 

Macro XML Image.png

 

 

Potential Solution:

Images are saved in the Image tool by splitting the image information into multiple lines. I suggest this same methodology be introduced to custom images loaded to macros. The image below shows the XML of the Image tool that has the same image as the macro stored.

 

Image Tool with Stored Image.png

 

 

I mentioned this in the Solutions Center at Inspire 2016, but I wanted to follow up here to make sure it wasn't lost in the mix. 

Dear Alteryx,

Alteryx 9 new Macro configuration module, is great
One thing that could be improved :

For Iterative macros, it's very frustrated to set a Maximum of Iterations manually :
when the number is too high it keeps going unnecessarily
when it's too low, we are missing iterations

Ideally this parameters should be calculated automatically by Alteryx
It would just implie to have the possibility to declare the numeric field that must be used for Iteration ... then Alteryx could calculate before launching the job, the Min/Max to set automatically the iteration band.

Is this idea stupid?

Thanks

Arno

I will try to make this short but the back story is a bit long.

I was recently tasked with scraping a website requiring repeated call to the URL with about 10,000 different queries. Pushing all 10,000 at the Download tool caused intermittent DownloadData to be returned with HTML from what appeared to be a default fallback help page.  Not what I needed.  I suspected the site may have seen all the calls in rapid succession as a DDoS attack or something, so I put a Throttle tool in line to lessen the burden on their server.  It reduced the failed calls, but there was still more than I found acceptable, requiring pulling out the failed queries and repeating the same throttled processing.  Putting time between each record was what I needed.  And then I found this Wait/Pause Between Processing Records  Just what I needed.

 

Now the constructive criticism.  I hope I don't offend anybody.

The macro does the job using a simple ping statement inside a grouped batch macro, pinging until a selected time interval has passed.  It does this repeated pinging for every record.  That can add up to a lot of pings especially if the time interval is rather large and a lot of records are being processed.  Then DDoS popped into my head.  The same issue that led me to find this very solution.

So, I started thinking how could I accomplish this same wait between records and iterative macro seemed plausible, seeing that loops can be used in code to do this very thing.

 

I have attached the macro I came up with.  Feel free to check it out, critique the hell out of it, and/or used it if it will solve any problem you might have.  I only ask that you keep the macro intact and give credit where credit is deserved.

 

Thanks for your time,

 

Dan Kelly

 

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