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Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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Exactly as the subject says: It would be incredibly useful to be able to change the colour, and possibly the line thickness of the connectors between tools.

We have workflows with huge amounts of stuff going on, as I'm sure many people do.

Being able to colour code the connections between tools would help us to trace things from place to place when stepping through the workflow.

A simple, very simple idea that can save a few clicks for everyone and that costs less than 1 hour of development :

Just display all the tool categories on a fresh install. There is not need at all to display only a few and that's the first thing I have to do on every fresh install.

  • User Experience Design

Often we run into two pretty common situations:

  • You want to move a Select, Formula, or Filter to a different point in your workflow
  • You want to remove a tool entirely, without affecting the workflow in any other way.

In both cases, I would prefer that I can set the default behaviour of ctrl-x or delete like the way 'Delete and connect around' behaves.

 

Thanks,

Ruud

For people recently met with RegEx, you are lucky if the expression is short and understandable or "human readable".

But there are extreme cases too where it's really a pain to solve the puzzle.

 

if you'd like to catch e-mail addresses from masses of unstructured data this will work;

 

/^([a-z0-9_\.-]+)@([\da-z\.-]+)\.([a-z\.]{2,6})$/

 

and here is the elaboration;

when colorful it's fun but barely readable still... Here is a Regexper version

 

image.png

 

This visualizer I came across at https://regexper.com/ is awesome.

 

  1. Can you please integrate this into Designer for ease of reading and understanding existing RegEx...
  2. Can it be possible to develop an interactive tool to prepare;
    • The graphical representation of our regular expression first
    • And then writing it in the same old fashion...

Please support the idea if you like...

 

My use case is simple. I place an explorer tool on the canvas pointed to a local htm file. During the workflow run, I update the htm file and want to update the canvas to display the results.

Cheers,
Mark

Hi there,

Apologies if Alteryx already does this - but I'd be curious to see if it would be possible to automatically add items to your favourites bar based on usage.

 

To test this, I've been doing a lot of macro work over the last few days, and given the frequency of using the Macro input and Macro output, I'd expect that they would have elected themselves onto my favourites list.

 

 

Again, apologies if the designer already does this

Sean

 

  • User Experience Design

In the designer - when you attempt to open a canvas from your company server - you're given a search screen to find your canvas.

 

This search sometimes does partial string match and sometimes not - this inconsistency is confusing (full worked up solution in the screenshots below).

For example - if you search for the word "full" it will bring back "main - full download" but will not bring back "main - checkFullDownload".

 

Please can you change this search process to work on any substring of the canvas name - that is the intuitive behavior that users would expect.

 

Thank you.

 

I should be able to find this one if I use the word "Full" right?I should be able to find this one if I use the word "Full" right?Nope - Full only returns canvasses where Full is at the beginning of the name; or after some whitespaceNope - Full only returns canvasses where Full is at the beginning of the name; or after some whitespaceIt would be better if this worked with any substringIt would be better if this worked with any substring

Feature: If an instance of Alteryx is already running then on double clicking a *.yxmd file in Windows Explorer it should open in a New Tab of existing instance instead of launching another instance of Alteryx.

 

Issue: Each new instance of Alteryx puts load on the system memory due to an additional AlteryxGui.exe process.

 

Workaround: Currently we can drag & drop the *.yxmd file from Windows Explorer onto the running Alteryx instance to open in a new tab of the current instance but the same behaviour on double clicking the *.yxmd would be highly appreciated. 

I'm just submitting @neilgallen's idea from here. The labels in the results window are still white, which is no longer visible. You can barely see that they're indeed still there when you hover over them.

 

Capture.PNG

  • User Experience Design

Hey all,

We have a policy (similar to the best practices guide published recently by the Copenhagen user group - thank you @danielbrun2) that Alteryx canvasses should run without warnings.

 

However - some of the warnings are tremendously painful to track down. For example - a union that brings together 20 or 30 input streams which gives you a warning saying "not all fields contain field X".

 

Can we change this to multiple warnings saying "Input X does not contain field X" so that we click straight through to the offending warning?

Additionally - when there's a conversion error - we then have to run the flow again with filters and diagnostics to find the offending row. Can we have a way that alteryx automatically sidelines an example row so that you can solve it in one pass?

 

If we look at all the warnings with the intention of "how do we make this something that can be solved right now, without having to run complex diagnostics, so that the very next run is 100% clean" that would be a big help.

 

Thank you Sean

 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Inspire-2017-Buzz/24-Best-Practices-for-Moving-from-Ad-Hoc-Analysis...

 

I have a dual monitor setup. My canvas lives on the left monitor, and I combine tool config and results on the right monitor. I've noticed that it's incredibly difficult to resize the config vs results window size. This is because you have to hover over EXACTLY the right part of the divider until the resize icon appears, as below:

 

resizeAlteryx.PNG

 

The difficulty arises because the target zone, over which the cursor changes from an arrow to the resize tool, is only 1 pixel wide. If you have a high resolution screen, or a slightly fiddly mouse, it's almost impossible to successfully hover over the correct place. Please consider increasing the width of the hover zone to facilitate window resizing. I hope I've explained this adequately, please let me know if I need to amend. Thanks!

  • User Experience Design

With complex ETL jobs, we often have a very similar ETL process that needs to be run for multiple different tables (with different surrogate and natural key column IDs)

While you can do a bulk-replace by opening this up in notepad (in XML format) - it would be better if the user could do a find/replace for all instances of a table-name or a columnID from the designer UI (a deep find/replace into all the tools).

 

This can also be used when a field is renamed in the beginning of the flow, so that we can update this for the remainder of the flow without having to do this by trial/error.

 

 

Alteryx Designer should automatically save my modules on a regular basis so that if I have a failure of some sort, my hard work will not be lost.

I think it would be extremely beneficial to have the customization option to rearrange tools within their panels in the tool palette.

This would allow the user to group frequently used tools in their desired order, which would make navigation of these tools easier.

As an example, having the ability to place Data Input as the first tool in the palette would make a lot of sense to me, as its usually where I start building a new workflow.

Hi Alteryx Designer Dev Team,

 

There are times where you want to create a variation of a particular pipeline and the data transformations in the beginning of the pipeline are similar but need slightly different configurations. To save time, can we have a right-click context option for each tool to be able to copy/paste or duplicate tool with existing configuration. This saves time by only having to change a few options in the duplicated tool. This is common for tools like, input, output, joins, groupings and reporting tools. An example where this functionality is handy in reporting: you may have a particular way that you always do your charts and instead of configuring the chart options from scratch each time, you copy paste the chart tool with current configuration and then you only have to make minor changes such as the data connections. 

 

Thank you

I'll admit it, I'm a coder, a keyboard guy, a sublime text typing junkie; but I love Alteryx.  Currently if I open a new workflow and start typing what happens? nothing... Wa wa.  Now lets imagine I'm already pretty familiar with Alteryx and I'm 5 moves ahead of my click and drag. 

 

Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could click a whitespace and start typing?  Typing would bring up a context menu search with tools found by the search (similar to the "search all tools" in the upper left corner, but next to the cursor, and vertical).  I could continue typing until one tool was left or select a tool using my cursor keys. Hitting 'Enter' would insert the tool where I had originally clicked and open another tool search window, selecting the next tool would automagically connect the two and on down the line (if multiple leg outputs exist for the tool the context menu would appear allowing me to select the leg I want it to connect to, hitting Enter would again bring up the tool search...

 

Now get this, go back to just after my first search... if instead of Enter I hit the "Tab" key, boom, it would take me to the configuration panel and allow me to fill in/tab through the configuration.  Hit enter again and I'm off to the races with another tool search.

 

All you click and draggers don't lose any functionality, and we keyboarders can swiftly race through development with ease.  How about that?  (the standard syntax check/path validation would need to be paused to keep development quick until I clicked again on the workflow which would execute the Rapid development mode.)

To avoid some errors occurring during upgrade or even installation, it would be great  to add an option in the installer to go with a fresh installation (remove any previous Alteryx Designer).

 

If selected, option would:

- Warn users that everything Alteryx related is going to be deleted

- Generate a log of what is going to be removed

- Rename folders and registry keys listed there: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer/Complete-Uninstall-of-Alteryx-Designer/ta-p/402897

(rename instead of delete to avoid "bad surprises")

 

A similar option could exist when one would like to uninstall Alteryx Designer.

 

This would remove the frustration of having to rely on a "white knight" when something happens in the middle of an upgrade or an installation.

 

Thanks,

 

PaulN 

Please add option to right-click a module tab to rename the yxmd file.  This would be easy to do, for you, and quite handy.

ifyoucouldnotdothat.jpg

 

That has bugged me for years.

  • User Experience Design

When opening a saved workflow in Designer, the python tool does and jupyter notebook do not load, and instead displays a "404: Not Found" error.  This is resolved by refreshing the meta-data (or running the workflow).  But the message is confusing and would ideally be handled differently. 

 

klonergan_0-1574203456148.png

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