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Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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Presently when mapping an Excel file to an input tool the tool only recognizes sheets it does not recognize named tables (ranges) as possible inputs. When using PowerBI to read Excel inputs I can select either sheets or named ranges as input. Alteryx input tool should do the same.

Hi Alteryx Devs - 

 

It would be *really tight* to have a drop down interface tool that would support auto completion based on a odbc connection to a table/column or ajax call.  I recently had a situation wherein we need to give the users the ability to select an address, then run a workflow.  But the truth is, our address data is terrible, and what I really needed was to be able to let the users start typing the address, then give them a list of choices to pick from, they pick the correct (but usually wrongly formatted) address, and then I send that value into the workflow. 

 

I could not find a decent way to give a gallery user a reliable way to pick an address from our list, so eventually wound up having to write an ajax piece to handle the auto completion, capture the user input, then post to a service that would in turn, interact with gallery through the API, get the response, and send it back calling page, and back to the user.  A significant amount of work to put into something that is an exceedingly common web operation of auto completion.  

 

This would make a lot of gallery operations flow so much more naturally.  

 

Thanks for listening! 

brian

Please add a configuration to the RedShift bulk load to EITHER use access keys or an IAM EC2 role for access. 

 

We should not have to specify access keys when we are in an IAM enabled environment.

 

Thanks

I would like to see the same functionalitly that the Output Tool has in the Render tool.  In the Output Tool, you can specify the Excel Worksheet along with the Sheet Name that you want to output too.  Meaning Same Worksheet, different tab:

     C:Output FilesExample_Worksheet.xlsx|Report_1
     C:Output FilesExample_Worksheet.xlsx|Report_2


This functionality is not currently available in the Render Tool and would be very useful and cut out some manual operations on the back end that requires us to copy/paste from one file to another.

I tried using the Section Break technique that was offered as a suggestion, but it did not perform what I needed.

Roughly, in all versions of Alteryx Designer, you can use the Annotations tab and rename a tool.  This is awesome for execution in designer, because you can then easily search for certain tool names, better document your workflow, and see the custom tool name in the Workflow Results.

However, when log files are generated, either via email, the AlteryxGallery settings, or an AlteryxEngineCMD command, each tool is recorded using only its default name of "ToolId Toolnumber", which is not particularly descriptive and makes these log files harder to parse in the case of an error.

 

Having the custom names show in these log files would go a long way towards improving log readability for enterprise systems, and would be an amazing feature add/fix.  For users who prefer that the default format be shown, this could be considered as a request to ADD renames in addition to the existing format.  EG "Input Data 1" that I have renamed to "Load business Excel File" could be shown in the log as:

 

00:00:0.003 - ToolId 1 - Load business Excel File: 1 record was read from File Finished in 00:00:0.004

I love the new Custom Format option with the DateTime tool in Alteryx 11.0, this makes working with dates SO MUCH easier... BUT it would be great if you could update an existing field rather than having to create a new column (e.g. DateTime_Out) and then use a select to put this back to the original Date field.

 

 

Datetime.png

When you use the Visual Query Builder, you can drag and drop tables to arrange them clearly (to show the star or snowflake schema, for instance). 

 

When you close the Visual Query Builder and reopen it, the tables are all left-aligned in a long column, with the joins overlapping each other. Since many of our tables are very wide (i.e., with many columns), this makes it cumbersome to locate the correct table and field.

 

I would like the manual positioning of the tables to be saved in the Visual Query Builder, to

  1. Make the logical arrangement clearer to the developer and later users
  2. Make it easier to locate tables/fields without scrolling downward

This is a feature that our users were very accoustomed to in Hyperion Intelligence, our legacy BI tool, which works similarly to the Visual Query Builder (shown below).

 

Hyperion Intelligence Model

Currently when creating a table in Oracle in Alteryx there is a lot of "magic" that happens under the hood in converting Alteryx data types to Oracle data types.

For example fixed decimal creates NUMBER, String created CHAR and V_String created VARCHAR.

It would be great to have an option to review the Oracle data types in the Output Data Tool when writing to Oracle. This would improve efficiency when using Alteryx to create Oracle tables. 

See picture for example of what would display in output configuration. 

Data type idea.png

I reported this to the support team but was told it was by design and to post here.

 

In-DB Inefficient SQL

I would like to report that the In-DB tools are generating horribly inefficient SQL code for simple operations.  It seems no matter what tools you use every statement is starting with a nested 'Select * From'.

 

Example Simple workflow:

  Support1.jpgSupport2.jpg

 

This is a simple Select and Group by but the SQL Generated is:

 

SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit"

FROM (SELECT * FROM "_SYS_BIC"."shell.app.gsap.FL000_LSC.FL002_CTS.INT.RPT/CA_CTS_RPT_MAIN_001") AS "a"

GROUP BY "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name"

 

This is taking a very long time to execute:

 

Statement 'SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit" FROM ...'

successfully executed in 15.752 seconds  (server processing time: 15.699 seconds)

 

Whereas if I take the same query and remove the nested Select *:

 

SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit"

FROM "_SYS_BIC"."shell.app.gsap.FL000_LSC.FL002_CTS.INT.RPT/CA_CTS_RPT_MAIN_001" AS "a"

GROUP BY "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name"

 

It is very quick:

 

Statement 'SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit" FROM ...'

successfully executed in 1.211 seconds  (server processing time: 1.157 seconds)

 

So Alteryx is generating queries up to x13 slower than they should be thereby defeating the point of using In-DB.  As you can imagine in a workflow where we have multiple Connect In-DB tools this is a really substantial amount of time.  Example used above is from SAP HANA DB has 1.9m rows and ~90 columns but we have much bigger tables/views than this.

 

If you look you will see its same behaviour for all In-DB tools where each tool creates another nested Select with its particular operator.

 

MY SUGGESTION:

So my suggestion is that Alteryx should combine the SQL of the first few tools and avoid using SELECT * completely unless no Select tools have been used.  So it should combine:

- Connect In-DB + Select

- Connect In-DB + Filter

- Connect In-DB + Summarise

 

Preferably it should combine/flatten everything up until the first join or union.  But Select + Filter are a must!

 

Note it seems some DB's can cope OK with un-nesting these big nested queries in the query plans for some Tables but normally not for Views.  But some cannot cope at all and so the In-DB tools cannot even be used to Browse 100 records (due to select *).

When converting data types while In-DB, it would be really helpful if I could change the data type with the "Select In-DB" tool in a similar manner to the "Select" tool. Currently, we are having to use the "Formula In-DB" tool in order to create a "Cast" Statement.

During the design phase, we make some experimentations and create tables with Alteryx.

But, sometimes, after this phase or after a mistake, we need to drop those tables.

 

We know that it's possible to write a drop table statement in Pre-SQL or Post-SQL but it requires SQL skills and it could be done only if you write in a table.

 

It will be great if we could drop a table directly in the Query builder of the Input tool by making a right click on the table in the discovery tree.

 

Extension : It also be great to have the same thing in the HDFS browse.

I would like to suggest 2 small changes to make working with Interface tools easier:

1) Let a user change the name of Question Constants from the workflow tab. For example, I would love the ability to change the names of my list boxes below. Currently, I can click in the name box and write new names in, but it doesn't stick.

 

 Capture.PNG

 

2) Let the user add the value on the Interface tools under the Annotation tab. Currently, I drop an interface tool on, change the name on the annotation tab, and then have to go the the workflow tab to setup a value. It would be easier if the value box was also on the annotation tab:

Untitled.png

Pushing data to Salesforce from Oracle would bemuch easier if we were able to perform an UPSERT (Update if existing, Insert if not existing) function on any unique ID field in Salesforce. Instead of us having to do a filter to find the records that have or don't have an ID and run an Update or Insert based on the filter.

 

I have had a number of requests for Alteryx to provide XML as an output format. It would be great to have configuration settings to allow for just text based output:
<Row ID="18606" Order_Priority="Not Specified" Discount="0.01" Unit_Price="2.88" Shipping_Cost="0.5"/>

As well as well formatted output, like this:
<Property>
    <name>measured_depth</name>
    <dataType>FLOAT32</dataType>
    <numberOfDimensions>1</numberOfDimensions>
    <units>m</units>

    <data>1456.3453</data>
</Property>

One of the most common causes for Admin trauma for our central Alteryx Gallery team - is dealing with drivers that may not be on the server; or a particular worker; or on a designer.

 

What we're looking for, is for the Alteryx team to maintain a packaged set of drivers as a single installer - which we can download at the same location as the Alteryx designer / server versions.

 

This would allow us to have 1 version of all drivers across ALL designer clients; as well as on our workers and servers.

 

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

When building an Alteryx Macro - one of the tough parts is that the input data you put into the Macro Input is used for testing, but you cannot set the type.

 

So for example - I want to test with the value 1, and Alteryx automatically assumes this is a Byte.

However 1 is just a useful test value, but I need this to be an int 64.

 

Can we provide the option to strongly type the macro inputs - this way, we can give advanced users the ability to control the type on Macro Inputs, and not run into this sort of issue with test data implicitly defining the type?

 

Note: this is similar to the idea here:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Set-data-type-in-Text-Input-tool/idc-p/115209...

 

Instead of adding a tool container to the canvas, then moving my input tool into that - it would be nice if I could just click a box for 'Disable' in the input tool properties.  This would speed up things if I'm trying to test inputs one at a time; or need to disable just one specific output while I test another data stream in my workflow.

It would be great to have the below functionality in Alteryx.

A workflow is built in Alteryx and button click in Alteryx can be used to generate SQL code that can be ran on a specific database platform, such as SQL Server to run external editors such as SQL Server Management Studio. Thanks. 

We have a large SAS Programming team that keeps most of thier data sets in a Unix environment. A more robust ODBC connection to this data would greatly enhance our use of Alteryx. The current SAS odbc Driver tends to lock Alteryx up. Creating edits to the connection also tends to lock ateryx up to an unrecoveable point.

90% of the time when dragging in an input tool I need to drag in a select tool to pick only the fields that you want.  Best practice suggests this should be 100% of the time for efficiency.  Embeding this functionality within the input tool itself would save a step.

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