Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!
The Product Idea boards have gotten an update to better integrate them within our Product team's idea cycle! However this update does have a few unique behaviors, if you have any questions about them check out our FAQ.

Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Share your Designer Desktop product ideas - we're listening!
Submitting an Idea?

Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!

Submission Guidelines

Featured Ideas

The idea is to have a Run option, where the workflow runs everything up to the selected tool (Like the Cache functionality does).

You select the tool, hit Run Up and the workflows executes everything "before" the selected tool.

 

That'll make developing much easier, specially when dealing with big workflows and constant changing data.

Aguisande_0-1649437823125.png

 

 

It would be nice if we can arrange some tools on the canvas neatly by one click and having them distributed evenly (horizontally/vertically).

 

See this picture which worth thousand words.

 

Dsitribute Tools Horizontally/Vertically.jpg

Can you put a check box on the container title bar to make it easier to enable/disable containers in the process window? And can you make the minimize/maximize option for a conatiner a separate option from enable/disable?

It would be nice to be able to append to a YXDB instead of having to read in the whole thing, union the new records, and then re-create it. 

Hello,

 

We use the pre-sql statement of the input to set some parameters of connections. Sadly, we cannot do that in a in-db workflow. This would be a total game-changing feature for us.

 

Best Regards,

 

Simon

Please add ablity to globally, within a module, forget all missing fields.

To allow users to pull data from Power BI, eg. datasets and usage data, to allow it to be manipulated in Alteryx. 

Hey all,

 

The join tool currently does not allow case-insensitive joins, but the find/replace tool does.    Additionally- even if both sides are identical, the join tool will not join "Sean's house" to "Sean's house" because of the non-letter character in the middle.    Finally - if one side is a string(2), and the other is a vString(200) - even if you have a single identical character on both sides you get uncertain outcomes unless you force the type

 

Please could you consider amending the join tool to include 3 new options or capabilities:

- Case insensitive join

- Allow full Unicode character set in join

- Full match across text types (irrespective of string size) - this would allow a string(2) value to match to a string(100) value as long as the string(100) value only has the same 2 characters in it as the string(2) value

 

That would remove a load of work from every text-join that's being done on every canvas we do.

 

Thank you 

Sean

 

 

Idea: Allow the user to set the data type including character field width in the Text Input tool.

 

The Text Input tool currently auto-senses the correct type and width of the field in a Text Input tool. However, this sometimes restricts the usage of the data downline.

 

Examples:

1 - I often run into the situation where I've copied some data from a browse tool and then pasted that as an input to a new workflow. Then I'll turn that workflow into a macro. But then I run into an issue where the data that comes into the macro is larger than the original width in the Text Input tool. This causes problems.

 

2 - The tool senses that a field containing zip codes should be numeric and then converts the data. This corrupts the data and makes me insert a Select/Formula tool combo to pad the zeros to the left.

The SQL Editor window could have a better presentation of the SQL code; two issues observed

  • First, that it's simply plain text without even a fixed-width font, much less syntax highlighting
  • Second, if you type in some manually formatted SQL code (e.g. with line feeds and indentation), then click on the "Visual Query Builder" button, then click back to the "SQL Editor" button, all the formatting is lost as it is converted to one run-on line of code, which is very difficult to read.

I understand that going between the Visual Query Builder and the SQL Editor is bound to have some issues; nonetheless the "idea" is to allow a user friendly display in the SQL Editor window:

My "implementation ideas" are based on a couple minutes with google, so hopefully this is a very feasible request; my user base is very likely to spend more time in the SQL editor than not, so this would be a valuable UX addition.  Thanks!

 

A very useful and common function
https://www.w3schools.com/sql/func_sqlserver_coalesce.asp

Return the first non-null value in a list:

COALESCE(NULL, NULL, NULL, 'W3Schools.com', NULL, 'Example.com')
returns 'W3Schools.com'

It exits in SQL, Qlik Sense, etc...

Best regards,

Simon

Currently if I have a connection between two tools as per the example below:

cgoodman3_0-1674567563258.png

I can drag and drop a new tool on the connection between these tools to add it in:

cgoodman3_1-1674567618537.png

 

And designer updates the connections nicely, however if I select multiple tools and try and collectively drop them inbetween, on a connection then it won't allow me to do this, and will move the connection out of the way so it doesn't cause an overlap.

cgoodman3_2-1674567779868.png

Therefore as a QoL improvement it would be great if there was a multi-drop option on connections between tools.

 

 

Tools within a workflow needs to be able to run in parallel whereever applicable.

 

For example: Extracting 10 million rows from one source, 12 million rows from a different source to perform blending.

currently the order of execution is the order in which tools are dragged into the canvas. Hence Source1 first, Source2 second and then the JOIN.

 

Here Source1 & Source2 are completely independent, hence can be run in parallel. Thus saving the workflow execution time.

 

Execution time is quite crucial when you have tight data loading window.

 

Hopefully alteryx considers this in the next release!

It would be wonderful for Alteryx to be able to connect to and query OData feeds natively, rather than using a 3rd-party driver or custom macro.   

 

OData querying is supported by quite a few familiar products, including Excel and PowerBISSIS/SSRS, FME SafeTableau, and many others. And the protocol is used to publish feeds from Microsoft Dynamics and Sharepoint, as well as many of the 10,000 publically available government datasets with API's (esp. those hosted by Socrata)   

 

I didn't see it as in the Idea section, but questions and workarounds have been discussed in the community a few times (11/15, 3/18, 4/18), and suggestions seem to be just to buy the $400-600 ODBC driver from CDATA (or ZappySys), or I could use a VBA script in Excel trigger a refresh, or create my own Alteryx connector macro (great series btw, though most was beyond my understanding!) 

   

While not opposed paying, kludging, or learning to program, they're just one more thing to build/buy, install, maintain, and break at the most inconvenient time 🙂

 

Thanks,
Chadd

 

OData Overview:

OData (Open Data Protocol) is an ISO/IEC approvedOASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful APIs. OData helps you focus on your business logic while building RESTful APIs without having to worry about the various approaches to define request and response headers, status codes, HTTP methods, URL conventions, media types, payload formats, query options, etc. OData also provides guidance for tracking changes, defining functions/actions for reusable procedures, and sending asynchronous/batch requests.  OData RESTful APIs are easy to consume. The OData metadata, a machine-readable description of the data model of the APIs, enables the creation of powerful generic client proxies and tools.

More info at at http://odata.org

After using the Text to Columns tool, I generally find myself using a Select tool to get rid of the original field that I split up. Could an option be added in the config to automatically delete this field once it is split to columns?

Currently Alteryx does not support writing to SharePoint document libraries.

However there are success sometimes but not at other times.

Please see attachment where we ran into an issue.

See this link for additional information.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/Connect-to-and-Publish-Back-to-SharePoint-Online/m-p/4...

 

We need official support for reading and writing to SharePoint document libraries.

It's an important Output target, and will becoming more so, as Alteryx enhances its reporting capabilities.

 

Currently - if someone has accidentally kept an excel file open on their desktop, Alteryx will fail to load this flow.

 

However, it would make more sense to open this file without read-lock as a dirty-read (equivalent of "Read Uncommtted").

This may require some interaction with Microsoft but would be worth pursuing because it prevents / eliminates an entire category of needless canvas errors.

From Wikipedia :

In a database, a view is the result set of a stored query on the data, which the database users can query just as they would in a persistent database collection object. This pre-established query command is kept in the database dictionary. Unlike ordinary base tables in a relational database, a view does not form part of the physical schema: as a result set, it is a virtual table computed or collated dynamically from data in the database when access to that view is requested. Changes applied to the data in a relevant underlying table are reflected in the data shown in subsequent invocations of the view. In some NoSQL databases, views are the only way to query data.

Views can provide advantages over tables:

    Views can represent a subset of the data contained in a table. Consequently, a view can limit the degree of exposure of the underlying tables to the outer world: a given user may have permission to query the view, while denied access to the rest of the base table.
    Views can join and simplify multiple tables into a single virtual table.
    Views can act as aggregated tables, where the database engine aggregates data (sum, average, etc.) and presents the calculated results as part of the data.
    Views can hide the complexity of data. For example, a view could appear as Sales2000 or Sales2001, transparently partitioning the actual underlying table.
    Views take very little space to store; the database contains only the definition of a view, not a copy of all the data that it presents.
    Depending on the SQL engine used, views can provide extra security.

I would like to create a view instead of a table.

Hello all,

As of today, Alteryx proposes the Intelligence Suite with amazing tools never seen in a data tool, even OCR, image analysis etc.. https://www.alteryx.com/fr/products/intelligence-suite



But... these wonderful tools are part of a paid add-on. And this is what is problematic :

-Alteryx is already an expensive tool. With a huge value but honestly expensive.

-The tools in Intelligence Suite are not common in data tools because you won't use often. And paying for tools you use once or twice in a month is not easy to justify.

So, I suggest to incorpore Intelligence Suite in the core product. The Alteryx users benefit is evident so let's see the Alteryx benefits : 
-more user satisfaction
-a simpler catalog
-adding a lot of value to Designer, with the ability to communicate widely on the topic.

-almost no cost : most costumers won't buy the Intelligence Suite anyway.

Best regards,

Simon

We've had several requests from clients for the ability to import password protected Excel spreadsheets into Alteryx.  Within Alteryx, it would be good to specify the password and inport the file without the need to create an unprotected copy for use in Alteryx.

Thanks

Top Liked Authors