Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas
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I love the new Custom Format option with the DateTime tool in Alteryx 11.0, this makes working with dates SO MUCH easier... BUT it would be great if you could update an existing field rather than having to create a new column (e.g. DateTime_Out) and then use a select to put this back to the original Date field.
I've been dealing with JSON since day one, and to be honest it isn't the best experience I've had.
Converting a hierarchical schema into a tabular one is't a straight forward process, but doing that everyday the old way is time and processing consuming.
What I'm proposing is a tool that can read JSON as input, then display a structural skeleton for the user, or the user can provide such skeleton for the tool, say let's say we have the following input:
{"menu": [{
"id": "File",
"popup": {
"menuitem": [
{"value": "New", "action": "CreateNewDoc", "icons": ["SAVE", "FLOPPY"]},
{"value": "Open", "action": "OpenDoc"},
{"value": "Close", "action": "CloseDoc", "conditions": [11,8,4]}
]
}
},
{
"id": "Edit",
"popup": {
"menuitem": [
{"value": "Cut", "action": "TextCut", icons: ["CUT", "SCISSORS"]},
{"value": "Copy", "action": "OpenDoc"},
{"value": "Paste", "action": "CloseDoc", "conditions": [5,17]}
]
}
}
],
"error": false
}
now to parse this into a table of menuitems we need to use:
- JSON Parse: convert JSON into one long key:value table
- TextToColumns: split key into multiple columns
- Filter: make sure we only get one level from the tree
- CrossTab: Convert it back into a column based key values.
All of this will give us the most primitive table we can have as:
| 2 | 5 | action | conditions | icons | value |
| 0 | 0 | CreateNewDoc | SAVE,FLOPPY | New | |
| 0 | 1 | OpenDoc | Open | ||
| 0 | 2 | CloseDoc | 11,8,4 | Close | |
| 1 | 0 | TextCut | CUT,SCISSORS | Cut | |
| 1 | 1 | OpenDoc | Copy | ||
| 1 | 2 | CloseDoc | 5,17 | Paste |
and now if we want to have the parent menu id along side with the menuitems, we will do that again as:
- Filter: for parent values only
- CrossTab: for parent values into a table
- Join: to join Parents with Sub items and add the Parent.Id
Now all of this is done with Concatenating of child items, as cross tab will allow us to only do Concat/First/Last for items with the same grouping values.
And now if we want to process children, count them, or extract their data into another table, we have to add more Filters, more CrossTab and more Joining to get parent IDs for future linking.
So what's I'm proposing?
I'm thinking of a Tool with an interface that give me the ability to choose:
- Target Branch: which is the main table to be extracted from the branches, in this case it would be menu->popup->menuitem.
- Parent Values: what values to be appended from parents of the previous table, just like menu->Id and others if exist.
- Children Data types: selecting the proper and expected data type for children instead of using strings or the existing different columns way.
- Children Arrays Process: what to do with children branches? either stopping their process and return them as is (Stringify), exclude or do other process like count.
the tool may extract the structure or let the user input such config as the following:
Or Input the Structure as a YAML formatted config or any other way.
This will allow the user to have a quick native tool that does what he wants as it should, and user can use it as much as he want for children and nested values. you just Stringify and repeat and only parse what you need every time.
I hope you consider this for me to replace tens of macros and tools into single tools such so.
Thanks for your help and time and all the best!
Quick and (hopefully) simple one here. Many times when I use the Text To Columns tool, there is still leading whitespace from comma separated lists with spaces. It would save from the minor inconvenience of putting a Data Cleansing tool after each of these tools to include an Advanced Option to trim whitespace from the results. I tried some workarounds using the empty fields and including spaces in the delimiters box, but this results in unwanted behavior.
If Alteryx encounters an error in a RegEx tool - it throws an error:
RegEx (9) The field "Field1_Matched" is not contained in the record.
This is a somewhat confusing and misleading error message because the input data and the regex configuration have no "Field1" at all, so the error message does not assist with resolving the issue.
Could you please re-look at the error messaging on the RegExt tool to see if we can make RegEx errors easier to resolve by giving a self-descriptive error message?
Example below:
Here I was trying to tokenize by using the . to represent any character - however Alteryx is struggling with this.
Hello
My problem: I've used the download-tool to download a 40mb XML. Parsing the DonwloadData-field containing this XML results in about 6600 records. The XML-Parse Tool passes the orginal DownloadData field to each record, resulting in quite a bit of memory usage:
Suggestion: An option in the XML-parse Tool to not pass the parsed field in its output.
Marco
How about turning this;
SELECT *
FROM Employee
ORDER BY First_name ASC
into this automatically
and a more complex one
SELECT Orders.OrderID, Customers.CustomerName, Orders.OrderDate FROM Orders INNER JOIN Customers ON Orders.CustomerID=Customers.CustomerID;
into this
basically it's a parser;
1) First check if it's a MS SQL, PL/SQL or T/SQL
2) Then figure out join relationships
3) Convert each subset SQL into function nodes
4) Convert function nodes to Alteryx yxmd (xml)
Creates the following for the first workflow
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<AlteryxDocument yxmdVer="10.5">
<Nodes>
<Node ToolID="1">
<GuiSettings Plugin="AlteryxBasePluginsGui.AlteryxSelect.AlteryxSelect">
<Position x="174" y="90" />
</GuiSettings>
<Properties>
<Configuration>
<OrderChanged value="False" />
<SelectFields>
<SelectField field="*Unknown" selected="True" />
</SelectFields>
</Configuration>
<Annotation DisplayMode="0">
<Name />
<DefaultAnnotationText />
<Left value="False" />
</Annotation>
</Properties>
<EngineSettings EngineDll="AlteryxBasePluginsEngine.dll" EngineDllEntryPoint="AlteryxSelect" />
</Node>
<Node ToolID="2">
<GuiSettings Plugin="AlteryxBasePluginsGui.Sort.Sort">
<Position x="246" y="90" />
</GuiSettings>
<Properties>
<Configuration>
<SortInfo locale="0">
<Field field="FIRST_NAME" order="Ascending" />
</SortInfo>
</Configuration>
<Annotation DisplayMode="0">
<Name />
<DefaultAnnotationText>FIRST_NAME - Ascending</DefaultAnnotationText>
<Left value="False" />
</Annotation>
</Properties>
<EngineSettings EngineDll="AlteryxBasePluginsEngine.dll" EngineDllEntryPoint="AlteryxSort" />
</Node>
<Node ToolID="4">
<GuiSettings Plugin="AlteryxBasePluginsGui.TextInput.TextInput">
<Position x="90" y="90" />
</GuiSettings>
<Properties>
<Configuration>
<NumRows value="0" />
<Fields>
<Field name="FIRST_NAME" />
</Fields>
<Data />
</Configuration>
<Annotation DisplayMode="0">
<Name />
<DefaultAnnotationText />
<Left value="False" />
</Annotation>
</Properties>
<EngineSettings EngineDll="AlteryxBasePluginsEngine.dll" EngineDllEntryPoint="AlteryxTextInput" />
</Node>
<Node ToolID="13">
<GuiSettings Plugin="AlteryxBasePluginsGui.BrowseV2.BrowseV2">
<Position x="330" y="90" />
</GuiSettings>
<Properties>
<Configuration>
<Layout>
<View1>
<Hints>
<Table />
</Hints>
</View1>
</Layout>
</Configuration>
<Annotation DisplayMode="0">
<Name />
<DefaultAnnotationText />
<Left value="False" />
</Annotation>
</Properties>
<EngineSettings EngineDll="AlteryxBasePluginsEngine.dll" EngineDllEntryPoint="AlteryxBrowseV2" />
</Node>
</Nodes>
<Connections>
<Connection>
<Origin ToolID="1" Connection="Output" />
<Destination ToolID="2" Connection="Input" />
</Connection>
<Connection>
<Origin ToolID="2" Connection="Output" />
<Destination ToolID="13" Connection="Input" />
</Connection>
<Connection>
<Origin ToolID="4" Connection="Output" />
<Destination ToolID="1" Connection="Input" />
</Connection>
</Connections>
<Properties>
<Memory default="True" />
<GlobalRecordLimit value="0" />
<TempFiles default="True" />
<Annotation on="True" includeToolName="False" />
<ConvErrorLimit value="10" />
<ConvErrorLimit_Stop value="False" />
<CancelOnError value="False" />
<DisableBrowse value="False" />
<EnablePerformanceProfiling value="False" />
<DisableAllOutput value="False" />
<ShowAllMacroMessages value="False" />
<ShowConnectionStatusIsOn value="True" />
<ShowConnectionStatusOnlyWhenRunning value="True" />
<ZoomLevel value="0" />
<LayoutType>Horizontal</LayoutType>
<MetaInfo>
<NameIsFileName value="True" />
<Name>New Workflow1</Name>
<Description />
<RootToolName />
<ToolVersion />
<ToolInDb value="False" />
<CategoryName />
<SearchTags />
<Author />
<Company />
<Copyright />
<DescriptionLink actual="" displayed="" />
</MetaInfo>
<Events>
<Enabled value="True" />
</Events>
</Properties>
</AlteryxDocument>and for the second example with joins...
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<AlteryxDocument yxmdVer="10.5">
<Nodes>
<Node ToolID="1">
<GuiSettings Plugin="AlteryxBasePluginsGui.AlteryxSelect.AlteryxSelect">
<Position x="126" y="54" />
</GuiSettings>
<Properties>
<Configuration>
<OrderChanged value="False" />
<SelectFields>
<SelectField field="*Unknown" selected="True" />
</SelectFields>
</Configuration>
<Annotation DisplayMode="0">
<Name />
<DefaultAnnotationText />
<Left value="False" />
</Annotation>
</Properties>
<EngineSettings EngineDll="AlteryxBasePluginsEngine.dll" EngineDllEntryPoint="AlteryxSelect" />
</Node>
<Node ToolID="2">
<GuiSettings Plugin="AlteryxBasePluginsGui.TextInput.TextInput">
<Position x="54" y="54" />
</GuiSettings>
<Properties>
<Configuration>
<NumRows value="0" />
<Fields>
<Field name="CustomerID" />
<Field name="OrderID" />
<Field name="CustomerName" />
<Field name="OrderDate" />
</Fields>
<Data />
</Configuration>
<Annotation DisplayMode="0">
<Name />
<DefaultAnnotationText />
<Left value="False" />
</Annotation>
</Properties>
<EngineSettings EngineDll="AlteryxBasePluginsEngine.dll" EngineDllEntryPoint="AlteryxTextInput" />
</Node>
<Node ToolID="3">
<GuiSettings Plugin="AlteryxBasePluginsGui.AlteryxSelect.AlteryxSelect">
<Position x="126" y="198" />
</GuiSettings>
<Properties>
<Configuration>
<OrderChanged value="False" />
<SelectFields>
<SelectField field="*Unknown" selected="True" />
</SelectFields>
</Configuration>
<Annotation DisplayMode="0">
<Name />
<DefaultAnnotationText />
<Left value="False" />
</Annotation>
</Properties>
<EngineSettings EngineDll="AlteryxBasePluginsEngine.dll" EngineDllEntryPoint="AlteryxSelect" />
</Node>
<Node ToolID="4">
<GuiSettings Plugin="AlteryxBasePluginsGui.TextInput.TextInput">
<Position x="54" y="198" />
</GuiSettings>
<Properties>
<Configuration>
<NumRows value="0" />
<Fields>
<Field name="CustomerID" />
</Fields>
<Data />
</Configuration>
<Annotation DisplayMode="0">
<Name />
<DefaultAnnotationText />
<Left value="False" />
</Annotation>
</Properties>
<EngineSettings EngineDll="AlteryxBasePluginsEngine.dll" EngineDllEntryPoint="AlteryxTextInput" />
</Node>
<Node ToolID="5">
<GuiSettings Plugin="AlteryxBasePluginsGui.Join.Join">
<Position x="222" y="126" />
</GuiSettings>
<Properties>
<Configuration joinByRecordPos="False">
<JoinInfo connection="Left">
<Field field="CustomerID" />
</JoinInfo>
<JoinInfo connection="Right">
<Field field="CustomerID" />
</JoinInfo>
<SelectConfiguration>
<Configuration outputConnection="Join">
<OrderChanged value="False" />
<SelectFields>
<SelectField field="Right_CustomerID" selected="True" rename="Right_CustomerID" />
<SelectField field="*Unknown" selected="True" />
</SelectFields>
</Configuration>
</SelectConfiguration>
</Configuration>
<Annotation DisplayMode="0">
<Name />
<DefaultAnnotationText />
<Left value="False" />
</Annotation>
</Properties>
<EngineSettings EngineDll="AlteryxBasePluginsEngine.dll" EngineDllEntryPoint="AlteryxJoin" />
</Node>
<Node ToolID="6">
<GuiSettings Plugin="AlteryxBasePluginsGui.BrowseV2.BrowseV2">
<Position x="294" y="126" />
</GuiSettings>
<Properties>
<Configuration>
<Layout>
<View1>
<Hints>
<Table />
</Hints>
</View1>
</Layout>
</Configuration>
<Annotation DisplayMode="0">
<Name />
<DefaultAnnotationText />
<Left value="False" />
</Annotation>
</Properties>
<EngineSettings EngineDll="AlteryxBasePluginsEngine.dll" EngineDllEntryPoint="AlteryxBrowseV2" />
</Node>
</Nodes>
<Connections>
<Connection>
<Origin ToolID="1" Connection="Output" />
<Destination ToolID="5" Connection="Left" />
</Connection>
<Connection>
<Origin ToolID="3" Connection="Output" />
<Destination ToolID="5" Connection="Right" />
</Connection>
<Connection>
<Origin ToolID="2" Connection="Output" />
<Destination ToolID="1" Connection="Input" />
</Connection>
<Connection>
<Origin ToolID="4" Connection="Output" />
<Destination ToolID="3" Connection="Input" />
</Connection>
<Connection>
<Origin ToolID="5" Connection="Join" />
<Destination ToolID="6" Connection="Input" />
</Connection>
</Connections>
<Properties>
<Memory default="True" />
<GlobalRecordLimit value="0" />
<TempFiles default="True" />
<Annotation on="True" includeToolName="False" />
<ConvErrorLimit value="10" />
<ConvErrorLimit_Stop value="False" />
<CancelOnError value="False" />
<DisableBrowse value="False" />
<EnablePerformanceProfiling value="False" />
<DisableAllOutput value="False" />
<ShowAllMacroMessages value="False" />
<ShowConnectionStatusIsOn value="True" />
<ShowConnectionStatusOnlyWhenRunning value="True" />
<ZoomLevel value="0" />
<LayoutType>Horizontal</LayoutType>
<MetaInfo>
<NameIsFileName value="True" />
<Name>New Workflow1</Name>
<Description />
<RootToolName />
<ToolVersion />
<ToolInDb value="False" />
<CategoryName />
<SearchTags />
<Author />
<Company />
<Copyright />
<DescriptionLink actual="" displayed="" />
</MetaInfo>
<Events>
<Enabled value="True" />
</Events>
</Properties>
</AlteryxDocument>
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