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

Concatenate Distinct values in 'Summarize' tool

We have 'CountDistinct' and 'Concatenate' options within Summarize tool. 

But 'Concatenate' displays all the instances of value for a Grouped field, this might include lot of duplicates.

It would be great to have an option like 'ConcatDistinct'.

 

For example - 

Concat.PNG

 

Group by 'Branch' and 'ConcatDistinct' Customer should result as Figure 1 instead of Figure 2 - 

Figure 1-

Concat1.PNG

 

Figure 2-

Concat2.PNG

 

While this is achievable in different ways currently with a set of tools, but it gets tedious when number of fields is large from which distinct values are to be captured. 

 

Thank you,

Rohan.

18 Comments
_richardr
10 - Fireball

When using the Summarize Tool please provide a grouping action that does a unique string concatenation. Example below. 

 

Input table

Category String
A Dog
A Cat
B Mouse
B Rat
C Fish
C Fish
C Fish
C Fish
A Dog
A Dog

 

Typical Concatenation output grouping on 'Category'

Category Concat_String
A Dog,Cat,Dog,Dog
B Mouse,Rat
C Fish,Fish,Fish,Fish

 

Desired output with Unique String Concatenation

Category Uniq_Concat_String
A Cat,Dog
B Mouse,Rat
C Fish

 

I realize that this can be done with two inline Summarize tools but getting this done in one tool will streamline a workflow.

BenG
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)
Status changed to: Under Review

 The Summarize tool is one that is very powerful but often harder to understand by new users within the product.  We would like to overhaul the tool and reduce the common use cases where two summarizes are necessary as well as provide options for exploring the data without using multiple parallel Summarize tools.  We will consider this request as we begin to look at simplifying the tool.

 

Thanks,
Ben

AKlaur
6 - Meteoroid

  could you provide  the workflow that would achieve this distinct Concatenation? I'm wondering how you did it.

 

 

rohan_tibarewala
9 - Comet

Is there a way to attach the workflow here?

I don't see an option to attach any file.

KylieF
Alteryx Community Team
Alteryx Community Team
Status changed to: Not Planned

Thank you for posting to the Alteryx Community! Your idea is interesting to us, but we have determined that we are unable to place this idea on our road map for the product due to several factors. However, should we be able to return to your idea in the future we will update the status back to Under Review.

Kumar7003
5 - Atom

This is very essential requirement as we start using Alteryx extensively. Will be great if this can be incorporated in the tool instead of users struggling with many workarounds.

MRAVI1
5 - Atom

If the above summarize proposal is implemented, it will be of great help as adding double summary also will not solve the problem all the times. And when it comes to working on data with several columns it becomes a big challenge.

Anshul_Jain
5 - Atom

To achieve the desired result u have to summarise twice for removing the duplicate values with same details like A - Dog 

 

Attaching the workflowCapture.JPG

 

for ur reference  

patrick_digan
17 - Castor
17 - Castor

Concatenate distinct would be a nice add

MJ
8 - Asteroid

@AKlaur I normally do 2 summarize tools to get a distinct list.

 

Would be nice to optionally include a count after each value in ().

Something like:

Branch:  Distinct Customer List

A: Tom (3), Jack

B: Jack (2)