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Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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Featured Ideas

Would like to direclty query Hyperion Cube / Essbase data source directly - please propose functionality in next release or add a user macro to the gallery.  Thanks -cb

Please include IBM DB2 as an in-Database option. Currently, my primary use of Alteryx is for copying DB2 tables into Teradata for use on that server. Copying large tables and particularly joining several tables and copying the results to Teradata is too slow in Alteryx.

Statistics are tools used by a lot of DB to improve speed of queries (Hive, Vertica, etc...). It may be interesting to have an option on the write in db or data stream in to calculate the statistics. (something like a check box for )

 

Example on Hive : analyse {table} comute statistics; analyse {table} compute statistics for columns;

Given Crew Macro Pack increases Alteryx's capability so much, and is used so pervasively, is there a reason to not include Crew Macro Pack in Alteryx Designer or Alteryx Server by default?

 

Can anyone give a reason why Alteryx wouldn't bundle Crew Macro Pack?

 

If not, can we get Crew Macro Pack bundled into Alteryx and have official support for it?

Please improve the Excel XLSX output options in the Output tool, or create a new Excel Output tool, 
or enhance the Render tool to include an Excel output option, with no focus on margins, paper size, or paper orientation

 

The problem with the current Basic Table and Render tools are they are geared towards reporting, with a focus on page size and margins.
Many of us use Excel as simply a general output method, with no consideration for fitting the output on a printed page.

 

The new tool or Render enhancement would handle different formats/different schemas without the need for a batch macro, and would include the options below.

 

The only current option to export different schemas to different Sheets in one Excel file, without regard to paper formatting, is to use a batch macro and include the CReW macro Wait a Second, to allow Excel to properly shut down before a new Sheet is created, to avoid file-write-contention issues.

 

Including the Wait a Second macro increased the completion time for one of my workflows by 50%, as shown in the screehshots below.

 

I have a Powershell script that includes many of the formatting options below, but it would be a great help if a native Output or Reporting tool included these options:

 

Allow options below for specific selected Sheet names, or for All Sheets


AllColumns_MaxWidth: Maximum width for ALL columns in the spreadsheet. Default value = 50. This value can be changed for specific columns by using option Column_SetWidth.

Column_SetWidth: Set selected columns to an exact width. For the selected columns, this value will override the value in AllColumns_MaxWidth.

 

Column_Centered: Set selected columns to have text centered horizontally.

 

Column_WrapText: Set selected columns to Wrap text.

 

AllCells_WrapText: Checkbox: wrap text in every cell in the entire worksheet. Default value = False.

 

AllRows_AutoFit: Checkbox: to set the height for every row to autofit. Default value False.

 

Header_Format: checkbox for Bold, specify header cells background color, Border size: 1pt, 2pt, 3pt, and border color, Enable_Data_Filter: checkbox

 

Header_freeze_top_row: checkbox, or specify A2:B2 to freeze panes

 

Sheet_overflow: checkbox: if the number of Sheet rows exceeds Excel limit, automatically create the next sheet with "(2)" appended

 

Column_format_Currency: Set selected columns to Currency: currency format, with comma separators, and negative numbers colored red.

 

Column_format_TwoDecimals: Set selected columns to Two decimals: two decimals, with comma separators, and negative numbers colored red.
Note: If the same field name is used in Column_Currency and Column_TwoDecimals, the field will be formatted with two decimals, and not formatted as currency.

Column_format_ShortDate: Set selected columns to Short Date: the Excel default for Short Date is "MM/DD/YYYY".

 

File_suggest_read_only: checkbox: Set flag to display this message when a user opens the Excel file: "The author would like you to open 'Analytic List.xlsx' as read-only unless you need to make changes. Open as read-only?
vb code: xlWB.ReadOnlyRecommended = True

 

File_name_include_date_time: checkboxes to add file name Prefix or Suffix with creation Date and/or Time

 

========

Examples:

 

My only current option: use a batch macro, plus a Wait a Second macro, to write different formats/schemas to multiple Sheets in one Excel file:

Excel output enhancement - must now use a Macro and Wait a Second.jpg

Using the Wait a Second macro, to allow Excel to shut down before writing a new Sheet, to avoid write-contention issues, results in a workflow that runs 50% longer:

Excel output enhancement - Wait a Second increased runtime by 50 percent.jpg

 

I propose another wildcard, %ErrorLog%, that would simply output the error codes and narratives instead of having to use the %OutputLog% to see these.  I'd rather not have a 4 MB text email depicting every line of code and action in the module when all I really need to see are the errors.

In the community and in mixed teams - it's very common for people to be caught on the error that "This document was created in a more recent version".   Although there are several workarounds (e.g. this one from @WayneWooldridge  here https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Knowledge-Base/Adjusting-Alteryx-Files-for-Different-Versio...), this seems like it may be an easy problem to solve more permanently.

 

Could we add an option to Alteryx to save the file with the lowest compatible version number?

So - for example - if i'm only using components that shipped with version 10, then please mark the file as version 10.   If I've used a tool that shipped in 11.0.6 then that needs to be the version number.

 

This way - files will be back-compatible as far as is possible by default unless using newer components.

 

Many thanks

Sean

I would like to specify two points on a map and have Alteryx create a spatial object that represents the best route from one point to another given some parameters such as quickest route, or shortest route.

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:

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

 

States - Qlik.PNG

 

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

Hi there,

 

My idea comes when I've built an application, where user select filter from drop-down list. However it contains thousands of records, so it takes lot's of time to find desired record.

In Excel and MS Access when you use filter you can put many letter and filter shows rows that match the input. In Alteryx user can only put first letter, which is huge drawback to my users.

 

This is how it works in Excel:

werwe.jpg

 

Hope you like it!

For the Output tool, File Format of Microsoft Excel (*.xlsx) - the non-Legacy one - it doesn't have the "Delete Data & Append" option that the Legacy ad 97-2003 Excel formats have. 

 

Having the Delete Data & Append for the most recent version of Excel would be very beneficial. Without it, there does not appear to be a way to udpate an existing Excel sheet using an Alteryx workflow while preserving the formatting within the Excel sheet. The option to Overwrite/Drop removes all formatting. 

 

I have this workflow refreshing an Excel sheet daily, and then am emailing it to a distribution at the end of the workflow. Unfortunately, right now I have to use the 97-2003 format to preserve the formatting of the Excel sheet when it is automatically refreshed and emailed each day. 

 

Can you please assess adding this option? Thanks!

To get simple information from a workflow, such as the name, run start date/time and run end date/time is far more complex than it should be. Ideally the log, in separate line items distinctly labelled, would have the workflow path & name, the start date/time, and end date/time and potentially the run time to save having to do a calculation. Also having an overall module status would be of use, i.e. if there was an Error in the run the overall status is Error, if there was a warning the overall status is Warning otherwise Success.

 

Parsing out the workflow name and start date/time is challenge enough, but then trying to parse out the run time, convert that to a time and add it to the start date/time to get the end date/time makes retrieving basic monitoring information far more complex than it should be.

Whenever I add an interface tool, it adds a constant just like the 4 engine constants and any user constants. It would be useful if tools like the formula and filter automatically added question constants to the list for you to use. This would be identical to how user constants behave currently. Here is the before and after for visual effect:

 

BEFORE:

Capture.PNG

 

 

AFTER:

Capture2.PNG

 

Hello,

 

I had a business case requiring a cost effective and quick storage solution for real time online sourced survey data from customers.  A MongoDB instance would fit the need, so I quickly spun up a cluster on Mongo Atlas.  Atlas was launched by MongoDB in 2016 as a database-as-a-service deployed on AWS.  All instances for Atlas require TLS/SSL to connect.  Currently, the Alteryx MongoDB connector does not support TLS/SSL connections and doesn't work against Atlas.  So, I was left with a breakdown in my plan that would require manual intervention before ingesting data to Alteryx (not ideal).

 

Please consider expanding this functionality on all connectors.  I am building Alteryx out in my agency as a data platform that handles sensitive customer information (name, address, email, etc.).  Most tools I use to connect to secure servers today support this type of connection and should be a priority for Alteryx to resolve. 

 

Thanks,

Mike Schock

 

 

 

 

We have Alteryx running in AWS which seems to be a common setup.Our AWS instances are set-up with IAM roles which has been one of the security measures applied in order to finally allow our enterprise company to allow some development in the cloud. IT will not allow the sharing of Access keys to connect to S3.

  • Would like to use the AWS S3 Tools from the connectors palette as the AWS CLI has limited ability to handle/report exceptions or issues with any detail. At the moment, we are limited on what goes into production as we are using CLI for what we can.
  • Ideally, an option would be to add to the S3 Tools allowing the user to select IAM Roles rather than Key Access. Refer the screen attached.

I know this has been posted before, but the posts are fairly old, and I have just confirmed with Support that it is still an issue.  Seems to be a pretty basic request, so I'm putting it out there again under this new heading.


The issue is that if you have data in a field, and you have that data separated by a new line (\n), it will show up fine in a browse tool, or pretty much any other output (database file, Office Document file, etc.). But if you try to use the Table Tool under Reporting, it ignores the line break and strings the data together.


Example:

The field data looks like this in a browse or most other outputs:

Hello, my name is 

Michael Barone

and I love

Alteryx

 

But when I try to pull this field into a Table Tool, it shows up like this:
Hello, my name is Michael Barone and I love Alteyrx

 

Putting this out here again in hopes that it gets lots and lots of stars so it gets put on the road map!!

 

It would be great if we could set the default size of the window presented to the user upon running an Analytic App. Better yet, the option to also have it be dynamically sized (auto-size to the number of input fields required).

Please enhance the input tool to have a feature you could select to test if the file is there and another to allow the workflow to pause for a definable period if the input file is locked by another user, then retry opening.  The pause time-frame would be definable for N seconds and the number of iterations it would cycle through should be definable so you can limit how many attempts to open a file it would try.

 

File presence should be something we could use to control workflow processing.  

 

A use case would be a process that runs periodically and looks to see if a file is there and if so opens and processes it.  But if the file is not there then goes to sleep for a definable period before trying again or simply ends processing of the workflow without attempting to work any downstream tools that might otherwise result in "errors" trying to process a null stream.

 

An extension of this idea and the use case would be to have a separate tool that could evaluate a condition like a null stream or field content or file not found condition and terminate the process without causing an error indicator, or perhaps be configurable so you could cause an error to occur or choose not to cause an error to occur.

 

Using this latter idea we have an enhanced input tool that can pass a value downstream or generate a null data stream to the next tool, then this next tool can evaluate a condition, like a filter tool, which may be a null stream or file not found indicator or other condition and terminate processing per the configuration, either without a failure indicated or with a failure indicated, according to the wishes of the user.  I have had times when a file was not there and I just want the workflow to stop without throwing errors, other times I may want it to error out to cause me to investigate, other scenarios or while processing my data goes through a filter or two and the result is no data passes the last filter and downstream tools still run and generally cause a failure as they have no data to act on and I don't want that, it may be perfectly valid that on a Sunday or holiday no data passes the filters.

 

Having meandered through this I sum up with the ideal being to enhance the input tool to be able to test file presence and pass that info on to another tool that can evaluate that and control the workflow run accordingly, but as a separate tool it could be applied to a wider variety of scenarios and test a broader scope of conditions to decide if to proceed or term the workflow.

 

This functionality would allow the user to select (through a highlight box, or ctrl+click), only the tools in a workflow they would want to run, and the tools that are not selected would be skipped. The idea is similar to the new "add selected tools to a new tool container", but it would run them instead. 

 

I know the conventional wisdom it to either put everything you don't want run into a tool container and disable it, or to just copy/paste the tools you want run into a blank workflow. However, for very large workflows, it is very time consuming to disable a dozen or more containers, only to re-enable them shortly afterwards, especially if those containers have to be created to isolate the tools that need to be run. Overall, this would be a quality of life improvement that could save the user some time, especially with large or cumbersome workflows.

When using the output data tool, it would save me and my cluttered organizational skills a lot of effort if the writing workflow was saved as part of the yxdb metadata. 

I've often had to search to find a workflow which created the yxdb. I tend to use naming conventions to help me,  but it would be easier if the file and or path was easily found. 

cheers,

 

 mark

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