Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hello!

I am just making a quick suggestion, specifically for the Formula tool within Alteryx.

 

Often when I am working on a larger workflow - I will end up optimising the workflow towards the end. I typically end up removing unnecessary tools, fields, and rethinking my logic.

 

Much of this optimisation, is also merging formula tools where possible. For instance, if I have 3 formulas - its much cleaner (and I would suspect faster) to have these all within one tool. For instance, a scaled down example:

 

to this:

 

This requires a lot of copy and paste - especially if the formulas/column names are long - this can be two copy and pastes, and waiting for tools to load between them, per formula (i do appreciate, this sounds an incredibly small problem to have, but on what I would consider a large workflow, a tool loading can actually take a couple of seconds - and this could burn some time. Additionally, there's always potential problems when it comes to copy/pasting or retyping with errors).

 

My proposed solution to this, is the ability to drag a formula onto another - very similar to dragging a tool onto a connection. This integration would look like:

 

Drag to the first formula:

 

 

 

Release:

 

 

Formula has been appended to the formula tool:

 

 

I think this will help people visually optimise their workflows!

Cheers,
TheOC

 

 

I surprisingly couldn't find this anywhere else as I know it's been discussed in person on many occasions.

 

Basically the Formula tool needs to be smarter in many ways, but this particular post focuses on the Data Type component.

 

The formula tool, should not always default to V_String as the data type when entering data or a formula into the formula tool, it should look at the data type and estimate the most likely option.

 

I know there are times where the logical type might not be consistent in all fields, but the Data Preview and the Function of the formula should be used to determine the most likely option.

 

E.G. If I type a number or a date directly into the formula tool, then Alteryx should be smart enough to change the data type from the standard V_String to Int, Double or date.

 

This is an extension to the ideas posted here:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Tab-from-Select-Column-to-Enter-Expression-H...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Formula-tool-data-type-should-be-prominent/i...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Alteryx-11-formula-tool-default-data-type/id...

We're currently using Regex and text to columns to parse raw HTML as text into the appropriate format when web scraping, when a tool to at least parse tables would be hugely beneficial.

This functionality exists within Qlik so it would be nice to have this replicated in Alteryx.

Obviously, we need to retain the ability to scrape raw HTML, but automatically parsing data using the <td>, <th> and <tr> tags would be nice.

In the following page there is a table showing the states and territories of the US:

With Qlik, you can input the URL and it will return the available tables in tabular format:

 

 

As this functionality exists elsewhere it would be nice to incorporate this into Alteryx.

On the “Multi-Field Formula” tool, the default is to “copy output fields and Add….”  I think the default should NOT copy. I’m using this tool to trim all of the blank spaces, and change the case in text fields. I often forget to uncheck it and end up with all these additional fields at the end. With regard to the tool container, I think the default margin should be small. I build huge workflows, and putting each section in a tool container. I have to go in and change each one to small margins to condense the workspace. Perhaps in the user settings, under document, there could be a default margin option, just as there is a container color option.

It would be helpful if the "Copy Ouput Fields and Add" default was unchecked.

It would be great if we could select default settings for containers, so that when they are added they could be automatically set to narrow margins and gray background (or whatever). (PS I'm going to add another idea regarding idea categories, because "tools" and "designer" aren't available categories, but that seems like the best place for this idea).