Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

A workflow of one of our Alteryx business users ended with a timeout, and only part of the data was written in the output. This leads to wrong data for the reports. 

The goal should be: 

It is not allowed that output data is only partially written the output. Either the output is written completely or no output will be created. Would it be possible to achieve this?

This behavior ( Either the output is written completely or no output will be created) is already available in Qlikview and expects the same to be available in Alteryx as well. 

Database systems, and seemingly Quickview, have the ability to create "transactions" that will either write all data or no data.  They can do this because the database has full control over the database.  

Alteryx Designer is writing to different file types and doesn't have this ability because it's not in total charge of the files or databases.  For example, if it's updating 1 million records in a database, it's not saving the previous values of the field being updated, so it would have to way to undo those updates if the workflow experienced an error later in its processing.

Alteryx product team should consider this and implement it in the future to solve many problems. 

In Table tool column headings using the table and render tools should offer ability to wrap and justify (horizontal and vertical).  right now you can justify a column and the heading may or may not stack (wrap) based on table size and the width configuration in the table tool.  I wish you could give a it more control like we have in Excel, for example left justified and wrap for a column heading with blanks separating words results in auto stacking the words based on column width, auto or manual width control.

The Explorer tool looks glitchy when you initially drop it on the canvas and I think its because it is trying to access the internet.  We already have temp folders in the Alteryx programs folder and it would be cool if the initial file reference is local- so its FAST.  

Please evaluate the opportunity to export Alteryx workflows as xml based GraphML format in order to be able to import them in yED, the free graph editor. (https://www.yworks.com/products/yed)

Thank you.

Regards,
Cristian

Please evaluate the opportunity to export Alteryx workflows in .dot format, the same file format used by graphviz (http://www.graphviz.org)

Thank you.

Regards,

Cristian

It would be immensely helpful if there can be a way to display the 'Manually Configure Fields' section of Union tool to the App user.

Something on the following lines - User uploads few files and then a window opens up onscreen which allows the user to 'manually configure fields' just like it is visible in the Union tool in a workflow. Its best use case is where we have a template with defined headers and the user just need to upload a new file/files and align the incoming fields correctly with the blank fields of a template.

We waste a lot of time to search a field to join it in join or to deselect it select or to summarize in summarize. This mainly happens when we have long list of fields.

As search bar to find the field on top of any of these tools will be really helpful. 

Specially, for join tool if we can type the field name while joining would really help. 

Thank you,

Sanju

Currently the Filter tool not supporting the multiple variable value check like a = b = c. It would be nice if the filer tool supports multi-variable check in one go.

I've been using the Intelligence Suite to automate building models using assisted modelling, It works great. However If I then output the model to the Python tool I ran into a few issues. The Intelligence Suite relies on the EvalML library so I wanted to use the python tool to use the model created with some of EvalML's other features such as prediction explanations.

What I found was that the intelligence suite for 2021.3.5 uses EvalML version '0.13.2' which is from 2 years ago meaning a lot of the extra features are not available.

It would be great with each new Alteryx intelligence suit the EvalML package also updated. 

I learnt Alteryx for the first time nearly 5 years ago, and I guess I've been spoilt with implicit sorts after tools like joins, where if I want to find the top 10 after joining two datasets, I know that data coming out of the join will be sorted. However with how AMP works this implicit sort cannot be relied upon. The solution to this at the moment is to turn on compatibility mode, however...

1) It's a hidden option in the runtime settings, and it can't be turned on default as it's set only at the workflow level

2) I imagine that compatibility mode runs a bit slower, but I don't need implicit sort after every join, cross-tab etc.

So could the effected tools (Engine Compatibility Mode | Alteryx Help) have a tick box within the tool to allow the user to decide at the tool level instead of the canvas level what behaviour they want, and maybe change the name from compatibility mode to "sort my data"?

This is purely aesthetic but it would be great to have a button to auto format tools positions on the canvas. The idea would be similar to a feature many IDE's come with to auto format code so that the indentation is corrected and duplicate return characters are removed.

We currently have the Align and Distribute capabilities which is great. This could be expanded to the entire workflow so that the canvas could look at which tools connect to which and structure their positioning around that. I think it would be a great clean up feature after finishing a workflow. 

Business problem

Alteryx's block until done tool is a terrific way to sort which records go to which stream first.  However, during the last couple of years my team has experienced several times where there are gaps in functionality.  For example, we output data into a relational database (SQL Server) with foreign key constraints.  In this manner, one output tool must be completed (the dimension tables) before the others (fact tables) to properly load data.  Block until done doesn't always work in these cases, and our team has frequently relied on using chained apps or other clunky workarounds.  This creates unnecessary complexity for a simple problem.

A potential solution

Allow an optional setting in the output tool that waits for another tool in the same workflow to complete first.

Our company requires a password change every 3 months, which wreaks havoc bc i have to manually change each workflows input data connection configuration every time this happens to put in my latest credentials. Not the most efficient process for all the automated workflows I have on the gallery.

Instead, it would be great if alteryx could load in usernames and passwords via a field from the workflow. This way, I could just update the one excel file with two fields for username and password and every workflow referencing it with an input data connection would automatically pass on the new credentials every 3 months, not disturbing any of my autoscheduled workflows.

Collections in GALLERY by default must be sorted alphabetically or by creation data . Currently its displayed randomly and every time I have to do some kind of SORTING to get to what I want 

Thanks 

If an Output Data tool fails, there are frequently other processes within the workflow that depend on the status (success|failure) of the output. I find myself having to build a macro or some other overengineered method to validate the status of the Output Data tool. Instead, please put an output anchor on the tool. Then, if there's an error, no downstream process will run and this will greatly simplify error handling. Thank you.

Current issue with Alteryx Software is that each time an Alteryx file is opened it tries to establish a connection with Database or File. This results in:

1. Lockout situations when Enterprise password is changed
2. No ability to share Alteryx Workflows with Colleagues (when they open it will have author of files credentials resulting in locking out author)
3. Countless phone calls with Enterprise IT to reset password.

Should be a feature/enhancement that we can either toggle on/off whether we want our flows to establish connection with data source/file when we first open the Alteryx file.  This toggle would save countless time and effort from developers when working with secured connections that require credentials.  

I had an issue with the ARIMA tool using the R function auto.arima() which missed the obvious seasonality in my data set, but when I manually adjusted Model Customization > Customize the parameters used for automatic model creation > The seasonal components > Alter the degree of seasonal differencing and selected 1, the outputs were much better. The problem is that while this fixes my singular ARIMA model, I want to be able to run this through Model Factory too as I have hundreds of data sets on which I'd have to make this adjustment since auto.arima() misses the seasonality on most of them and produces useless results. Apparently I'm not alone in having this issue as I was directed to another comment thread where someone had the same problem and desired fix as me.

TL/DR version -- please make is possible to manually adjust the parameters of the ARIMA Model Factory tool, or at the very least add the option to alter the degree of seasonal differencing.

And for supporting information, here is my thread:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Advanced-Analytics/ARIMA-model-missing-seasonality/m-p/87776#M3000

And here is the other thread where a different person had the same issue:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Advanced-Analytics/TS-Forecasting/td-p/28857

Reporting automation capability is absolutely a great feature that puts Alteryx far ahead its competitors.

Unfortunately, Alteryx reporting tools start to become old fashioned in terms of : 

• look & feel
• charts library
• charts configuration

It would be great if Alteryx could redesigned its reporting tools in order to allow the generation of smashing, flashy, modern visualizations mixing nice charts and maps.

Many thanks !

Hello,

I discussed with Alteryx support via email and they informed to post on here for a possible enhancement to Alteryx.

The issue I'm facing is that in raw data coming from SAP, the raw column names have carriage returns in them.

In Alteryx, in the display window, it will just show the first line before the carriage return and not the rest of the text, even though the text is all in one cell in Excel.

In Alteryx, I also tried exporting the file and it will just show the first line before the carriage return and not the rest of the text, even though the text is all in one cell in Excel.

However, when using any tools, the full column names are displayed. 

An enhancement would be for the display window and export tool to have the full column names displayed.