Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Give us the ability to connect a control parameter to an interface tool so that I can change interface elements based on previously entered data when chaining analytic apps together.

This would enable us to:

- have dynamic text for a radio button/checkbox.

- have dynamic text for a dropdown box prompt or a listbox prompt.

- pre-populate a text box based on inputs from a previous selection

- change the min/max and default values on numeric up down input

- default base map, zoom level, reference layer, draw properties

- select the default selected date on a date box as well as changing the prompt for a date box

- change the default file types for a file browse tool

"Enable Performance Profiling" a great feature for investigating which tools within the workflow are taking up most of the time.This is ok to use during the development time.

It would be ideal to have this feature extended for the following use cases as well:

• Workflows scheduled via the scheduler on the server
• Macros & apps performance profiling when executed from both workstation as well as the scheduler/gallery

Regards,

Sandeep.

Never noticed this, because I always use the custom filter option, not the basic.  But I had a user come to me asking why his app wasn't updating his filter properly.

He configured the filter tool thusly (dummy data):

And here is the what the action tool looks like when you connect it to the filter tool:

So he simply highlighted the "Bob" line and picked to update "Bob".

However, since he used a basic filter, and not a custom one, this is how he should've configured the action tool:

I realize that "well, it's spelled out for you - there's an expression section & a simple section in the action tool".  But for beginners or even non-beginners, it might not be obvious.

It would be nice if when you connect the action too, it only displayed the appropriate option (either custom or simple, but not both).

Hi,

Would it be possible to add additional sections to the 'Summarise Tool' such as one for dates so that you might be able to group by Year, Month, Quarter, Week or a combination of all these. There are other extensions that could also be considered such as group with nulls or without that would make this tool far more usable and not dependent on data manipulation prior to it; you might offer to have all nulls grouped and called something else for readability and this shouldn't be very hard at all to implement.

Kind regards,

Peter 

My users love having the ability to pick objects from a reference file in the Map tool in the Interface palette.  However, usually they need to pick objects that are interspersed amongst others.  The Control + Left Click works great, until they pick an incorrect object.  The only option is to clear the selection and start over.

Please add something as simple as Control + Left Click on a selected object will deselect it.

Best,

David

In a future release, I'd love to see the whole concept of browsing for and installing new macros/apps brought into Designer itself.  It's always great finding new macros, but the expereince is inconsistent- sometimes you have to run an installer file, sometimes run a package, sometimes just put the file in a directory and add a 'watched macro' directory to your preferences.

I'd like to see a cleaner expereince where you can choose to 'Add Tools', browse the gallery, check the thing i want, and click the tools group I want to put it under, then have Alteryx take care of the rest.  There would also be the need for a 'Manage tools' screen where could could uncheck and remove them later if you no longer need them.

For inspiration, check out the way MS handles 'Adding Apps' via their catalog to build out your Sharepoint 2013+ site

When running an app (not in the Gallery), the status bar appears to complete for each tool, then start over for the next tool.  It'd be great if while it was doing that, the tool name that it was running displayed.  Now, I know for most processes this will be instantaneous and your eye won't even catch it.  But if we have, for example, several join/sort tools with lots of data going through them, it would be nice to know which one it's on.

I love that Alteryx came out with the visual layout tool. It's making some of the reporting I need to do much easier. Now for the challenges. I need this tool to allow me to either use a custom background or allow the overlapping of elements with the layout tool. Overlapping other elements would be the ideal way of doing this. But either will work.

Alteryx can be used to collect manual data input by chaining Analytic Apps together to create a dynamic application.

A specific example is collecting TRUE or FALSE values, from the user, for every record that was generated by a prior workflow. Technically this can be done by populating a List Box with the output from the first Analytic App. (the first picture below shows a dynamically populated list box.)

Alteryx should provide an interface tool that accepts a table of data and allows this table to be edited. Certian columns could be marked as "editable" or "locked" depending on whether edits are allowed for that row.

Here is an example of the existing list tool that can be used to collect TRUE or FALSE values.

Here is the proposed "Table Input Tool" with text input boxes to input more complex data for each row.

Also note how multiple columns would be allowed instead of just NAME and VALUE.

If this is already possible please let me know.

Alteryx Forever!

thanks, Evan

Disabled Containers throw errors if it contains any interface tools. It should not throw any error as the user is intentionally disabling the container.  

Currently when I open and run an app in designer mode im unable to access any other modules while it runs.  It would be nice to be able to work on other modules while an app runs without opening a debug.

We have a large number of apps which are used by a substantial number of end users. One frequent end user complaint is that forms do not persist, i.e. the settings need to be reselected each time the form is run.  We've heard that this is an Alteryx issue.   Are there any solutions or work-arounds? It is a huge ease of use issue.   It has occurred to me that we may need to dramatically simplify the forms (they have many controls) but I would like to have a solution that is correct in terms of complying with modern Web UI standards.  I remember pushing to make forms persistent twenty years ago.

I know that many Alteryx users have been looking for a way to output results from the Alteryx Gallery to either specified cells in an Excel workbook, or a "raw data" worksheet. 

So here are a few options that don't always work:

1. Use a Run Command to duplicate an Excel template - WRONG - Unrestricted Alteryx workflows is rare.

2. Access a template in shared folder - organization's aren't all perfect, yet

Therefore, I'd like to suggest to be able to save specific files in a folder that can be included in the Alteryx package uploaded to the Gallery that the workflow can reference just to output towards. 

Thoughts? I do love the Reporting tools, so this isn't a necessity - but it would help the process of delivering Alteryx output to legacy Excel users / reviewers / managers /etc.

Hi

I want to make a suggestion for the Debug Log information shown when running an Alteryx App in Debug mode to be saved as an output when just purely running an Alteryx App. I believe this would help a great deal for audit purposes to be able to read the log again to see what did the user select for the interface tools.

Please see an example below of what I am suggesting as an output for the logging of Alteryx App:

<Value name="Contract Identifier Field - User">PolicyCode</Value>
<Value name="Contract Start Date Field - User">PolicyCreateDate</Value>
<Value name="Contract End Date Field - User">EndDate</Value>
<Value name="Model Code Field - User">ShortModel</Value>
<Value name="Full Model Code Field - User">ModelName</Value>
<Value name="Term/Monthly Field - User">PolicyType</Value>
<Value name="Contract Duration Field - User">ContractDuration</Value>
<Value name="Use Calculated Duration - User CheckBox">True</Value>
<Value name="Fuel Type Field - User">ModelName</Value>
<Value name="Underwriter Code Field - User"/>
<Value name="Commission Type Field - User"/>
<Value name="Mileage Limit Field - User"/>
<Value name="Premium Amount Field - User">PremiumExclAmount</Value>
<Value name="Current Remaining Fund Field - User">Fund</Value>

This would really help with audit purposes as once an Alteryx app is run, one can not see what was the responses to the interface questions did the user select, making it difficult if another user wanted to replicate the Alteryx App run

Right now, I have to do a little voodoo to get a user to select a sheet within an excel doc to use as a source.  My use case is that I have an excel file provided by other users in which the relevant data could be in one of many excel sheets, and there isn't a good programmatic way to determine the right sheet.  Thus, I want to prompt my user to select the sheet when running an analytic app.

I have to start with a file browse option to prompt the user for the excel:

From here, the prompt will only ask for a file:

At no point will it prompt for the sheet it wants within the file.  And the action options don't give you the ability to change the sheet (it reads it from the file input after the pipe):

To solve this, I have to create a app that only prompts for the excel sheet and then set it to output the sheet names.  From there, I do a little formula magic to split it into key-value pairs with the value being the entire file path pipe concatenated with the sheet name, save it to a file, then read the file in a second workflow which presents the sheet names in drop downs.  It looks something like this:

This all seems unnecessarily complex given Alteryx seems to have already figured this out in designer:

My idea:  Use the same file selector in the "Input Data" tool for the File Browser when setting the File value from an Action.  It would save me from having a separate workflow just to prompt a user for an excel sheet.

Thanks!

The Text Box tool has a tickbox allowing a multi line "answer" to be supplied for the question.

But it does not allow you to easily setup the question as multi line i.e. with carriage returns

Please allow the ability to enter multi line text for the Question of the Text Box Tool.

At the moment, I force carriage returns to happen, by entering a bunch of space characters in the "Enter the text or question to be displayed" box of of the "Text Box" tool. This is obviously not ideal.

Example of desired layout for App question:

example showing how entering a bunch of spaces can be used to force a carriage return:

Hi,

When creating an app, in the "Interface Designer", the Label doesn't allow "&", and most likely other special characters. So if I have an app explaining say telcom brands, AT&T shows as ATT. Since it's an app on the Gallery with a large audience, it would be helpful for it to display in the interface like the user inputs it. Is this something that can be updated? Thanks!

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.

It would be awesome if I could re-display the users selections to them before I continue with the remainder of the workflow in an analytic app. That way, I could collect all of the UI inputs, do my validation on the values provided and then re-display the selections/options/text to the user so they can confirm that they are correct and they wish to continue, or they can stop the processing and make changes via the already-open UI without having to re-enter everything from scratch.

Then, when someone selects something that's potentially harmful or very time consuming, I can confirm their selections and alert them to potential issues.