Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas
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We're currently using Regex and text to columns to parse raw HTML as text into the appropriate format when web scraping, when a tool to at least parse tables would be hugely beneficial.
This functionality exists within Qlik so it would be nice to have this replicated in Alteryx.
Obviously, we need to retain the ability to scrape raw HTML, but automatically parsing data using the <td>, <th> and <tr> tags would be nice.
In the following page there is a table showing the states and territories of the US:
As this functionality exists elsewhere it would be nice to incorporate this into Alteryx.
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.
The expression editor in the RegEx tool is only a single line, which makes it really hard to edit long regular expressions. See attached photo comparing the expression editor in the RegEx tool compared to the formula tool for the same expression. Please make the RegEx editor box either wrap to multiple lines, have a pop-out expression editor, or something so we can see long expressions.
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.
It would be absolutely marvellous if the ability to use a field as the replace value could be incorporated into the Regex tool. Currently the "Replacement Text" field is a hardcoded text value, and so to make that dynamic you have to wrap the tool in a batch and feed in the value as a Control Parameter. If we could just select a field to use as the replacement value, that would be spiffy.
M.
When entering a number of column names in the RegEx parse mode - please can you allow either Enter or down-arrow to move down to the next cell (standard windows convention)?
Currently Enter just exists the edit mode; and down-arrow does nothing.
cc: @Hollingsworth
SOOOOoooooo many times it'd be great to just dictate the character length/count (fixed width) for the parse (just like you can in excel), instead of being constrained by a delimiter or being obligated to go create (potentially complex) REGEX. Ideally you could go into the column and insert the <break> (multiple times if needed) after the given character where you'd like the parse to occur. Anything past the last <break> would all be included in the final parse section/field.
You could also do it a little less visual and just identify/type the character count you want for each column. If you really want to enhance this idea, you could also include the ability to name the fields and prescribe the data type. Those would just be gravy on the meat of the idea however, which is, provide the ability to parse by fixed length fields.
In Japan, the prople usually use the date format "yyyy/mm/dd". But there is no preset in Date tool. So I usually use custom setting, but it is the waste of time.
So please add yyyy/mm/dd format to the preset in Date tool configuration for Japanese people.
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!
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