Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

At the moment containers either expand and overlap other tools, or you have to leave space for them (defeating the original purpose of using them). Is there a way we can have the containers expansion shift the workflow so the others tools shift down / right to account for this expanision?

It would be useful to have the WorkflowName captured as one of the default Engine constants. The WorkflowDirectory is included so why not the WorkflowName as well?

 

I often have to use configuration files to pass in values to workflows meaning the workflow name needs to be manually entered into the workflow, either as a text input or User Constant, which feels like an unnecessary step as Alteryx must know the name of the workflow once it has been saved.

When creating a workflow I generally open a "TEMPLATE" first and then immediately save it to the "NEW WORKFLOW NAME".  My template includes all my preferences that aren't set naturally within the user settings and won't get RESET by them either.  It has a comment box and containers as well as logos and copyrights.  It would be nice to have ready access to this feature.  Maybe others have standards that they want applied to all users and their workflows too.

 

Thanks,

 

Mark

Many users will probably follow best practice style guides with Alteryx to use comment boxes under tools to describe in detail what is happening with these tools - such as this one shared by @BenMoss.

 

However a limitation of this is the comment boxes do not move with the tools, so if you have a well documented workflow but then need to add a new tool, you need to adjust all the spacing and re-align the tools, which with a large workflow can be time consuming. 

 

 

Therefore the improvement would be to have an ability to lock comment boxes to individual tools (similar to a group function in Office).

 

To get simple information from a workflow, such as the name, run start date/time and run end date/time is far more complex than it should be. Ideally the log, in separate line items distinctly labelled, would have the workflow path & name, the start date/time, and end date/time and potentially the run time to save having to do a calculation. Also having an overall module status would be of use, i.e. if there was an Error in the run the overall status is Error, if there was a warning the overall status is Warning otherwise Success.

 

Parsing out the workflow name and start date/time is challenge enough, but then trying to parse out the run time, convert that to a time and add it to the start date/time to get the end date/time makes retrieving basic monitoring information far more complex than it should be.

Dear Alteryx GUI Gang,

 

I'll create a container and then customize the colours, margins, transparency, border and then want consistency for other containers.  It would be nice to have a format painter function (brush) to apply the format of one container to another.  This of course could be extended to other tools like comments.  There might be a desire to apply this to more tools too, but the comments and containers would be my focus as they are almost always custom configured.

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

Similar to how the Tool Container Defaults can be set on the Document tab of User Settings, it would be nice to be able to set the Comment box defaults here as well. I find that I change the Colour & Size every time I add a comment, and would appreciate if this could just be set as a default.

It would be extremely useful to quickly find which of my many workflows feed other workflows or reports.

 

A quick and easy way to do this would be to export the dependencies of a list of workflows in a spreadsheet format. That way users could create their own mapping by linking outputs of one workflow, to inputs of another.

 

Looking at the simple example below, the Customers workflow would feed the Market workflow.

 

Workflow	Dependency	Type
Customers	SQL Table 1	Input
Customers	SQL Table 2	Input
Customers	Excel File 1	Input
Customers	Excel File 2	Input
Customers	Excel File 3	Output
Market	Excel File 3	Input
Market	SQL Table 3	Output

 

It would be CRAZY AWESOME if we could get a report like this for all scheduled workflows in the scheduler. 

Make the Container Caption Font Size Adjustable

 

I find it helpful to see the entire workflow at once.  It would be very helpful for the container size font to be adjustable.  For example, I am documenting a workflow with many containers and tools.  The containers represent segments of my workflow.  When I am looking at or printing the entire workflow, the container heading is too small to be read.  If the font size were adjustable, it could be increased to be readable and still fit easily into the length of the container.  

 

Thanks to zuojing80 and tcroberts for their comments on 9/10/2018.

I love that Alteryx lends itself to good workflow documentation, but I'd really like to be able to add a bit of basic formatting within my comment boxes. I tend to have one large (read: verbose) box at the top/beginning of the workflow describing the purpose of the workflow and quirks of the datasource to watch out for, and it would be easier to read these if I had some simple options like Bold, Italic, Underline, numbered list, bullet list. You know, the sorts of things you can do in basic HTML email? Those. I want them!

Taking inspiration how you work with Jupyter notebooks and use the notebook to show your workings,  wouldn't it be great if you could document your workflows directly on the canvas more in a notebook style.

I think this essentially can be summarised down into two features:

1) Markdown functionality in the comment tool

2) Ability to import results from IRG and  / or browse tool directly into the canvas.

 

I have mocked up a version of what this could look like in the screenshot below.

 

Overall I think it would improve the experience of documenting workflows as you can show your workings in-line while building the workflow. Plus it solves the debate around team vertical vs team horizontal as you build using both! 

 

In order to make the interface tools more accessable - please could you add explicit documentation to the help-text that explains how the data is returned to the canvas?

 

For example - the text input tool is documented here: https://help.alteryx.com/2019.3/QuestionTextBox.htm

What is missing from this is whether the multi-line version will provide the data to the canvas as a semi-colon delimited; comma delimited; newline delimited etc?

 

Would be very valuable if the documentation could explicitly define how the output of checkboxes; multiline textboxes; tree views etc are passed to the action tool.

 

Hello all,

When using in-database, all you have in select or formula are the Alteryx field types (V_String, etc..).

However, since you're mostly writing in database, in the end, there is a conversion of Alteryx field types to real SQL field types (like varchar). But how is it done ? As of today, it's a total black box. Some documentation would be appreciated.

Best regards,

Simon

When viewing results of a workflow that has Errors, could we add External error resolution data if the user clicks on the error message?  Like browse everywhere it could lookup the error in help and in community posts.  

cheers,

 

 mark

When you drag a comment box into a workflow it should sit underneath all other data tools by default.

 

Currently, the order of tools is set by the order of placement (that is, tools placed in the workflow first are placed below subsequently placed tools).

 

I was just responding to a post about the Make Columns tool, and I noticed that there is not an example workflow for this tool built into Designer. It is also missing from the Transform category, so I never think of it.

 

 

 

 

@peyton-louden @binuacs @Luke_C 

 

Having the ability to call-out via ARROWS/SYMBOLS (gold star) would be nice without requiring the user to create images and call them to the canvas.  This makes the workflow even more readable.

 

Watermarks (e.g. DRAFT, AMP, Do NOT AMP, FINAL) would be useful on the canvas as well.  

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

 

We are using Alteryx designer to bulk upload to Snowflake database. We also use Alteryx Connect to pick up metadata from Snowflake. It would be awesome if the designer can add table and field description and snowflake loader can pick up the description automatically. 

 

As of now, the metadata loader doesnt pick up metadata content in real time. This feature will motivate our analysts to document which will improve Connect adoption in our department. 

As an enterprise customer, we need to know that Alteryx products are kept secure.

 

Please post vulnerabilities and fixes, and provide a way for me to subscribe to these alerts.