Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!
The Product Idea boards have gotten an update to better integrate them within our Product team's idea cycle! However this update does have a few unique behaviors, if you have any questions about them check out our FAQ.

Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Share your Designer Desktop product ideas - we're listening!
Submitting an Idea?

Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!

Submission Guidelines

Featured Ideas

Often when copying and pasting a flow the lines of the old flow behave oddly. Here is a simple example: the lines going to the bottom most Browse tool take an extra loop. If the flow is more complex, there result might be quite curious circles.

 

Alteryx.png

The reasons seems to be that Alteryx tries to fit the lines nicely to accommodate the pasted items. However, this functionality should be disabled when pasting items to the canvas. Mostly this is a small nuisance, but adjusting items and the lines back might take a small time and break the workflow.

Implement a process to have looping in the workflow without resorting to Macros.   Although macros do, generally, solve the issue, I find them confusing and non-intuitive.  

 

I would suggest looping through the use of two new tools:   A StartLoop and EndLoop tool.  

 

The start loop would have two (or more) input anchors.  One anchor would be for the initial input and the other(s) for additional iterative inputs.  The start loop would hold all iterative inputs until the original inputs have passed the gate and then resubmit them in order returned to the start loop.  

 

The end loop would have three output anchors.   One anchor would be for data exiting the loop upon reaching the exit condition.  Another loop would be for the iterative (return) data.   Note that transformations can be performed on the data BEFORE it re-enters the loop.  The third would be an "overloop" exit anchor.   This would be for any data that failed to meet the exit condition within the (configurable) maximum iteration expression.   The data from the overloop anchor could be dealt with as required by the business rules for the unsatisfied data after being output from the EndLoop tool 

 

The primary configurations would be on the EndLoop tool, where you would indicate the exit condition and the maximum iteration expression.  The tool would also create an iteration counter field.  As part of the configuration you could have a check box to "retain iteration count field on exit".   If checked, the field would be maintained.   If not checked, the field would be dropped for the data as it exits the loop.

 

This would making looping a bit more intuitive and it would be graphically self-documenting as well.   Worth a mention at least. 

Once you get the hang of it, Alteryx is great at producing reports. Unfortunately, each item has its own XML parameters, like font size, colors, table defaults, etc. As it stands now, if I want to make a change across the course of a complex, multi-page report, I have to update the settings in each table and chart.

 

I'd love it if I could have a 'Styles' module that I could set, then copy and paste and insert after each table. From that point, I suppose you could make parameters out of style options and build them into a bigger module. For now, though, some kind of reusable style would be invaluable.

Assisted modeling is a great idea but right now it's a bit unflexible.

IMHO the greatest strength is the semi-automated transform tool, which would extremely helpful on its own.

 

What would be great is the possibility of using the features without having to go through the assisted modeling wizard but as single tools with minimal configuration, so that it could be used as an automated system for quickly choosing variables.

This way we could have a pretty much perfect rapid prototyping tool for machine learning tasks, leaving more freedom in modeling and enabling less skilled analysts in easily finding on which variables they should focus.

 

What do you think?

It would be great to have variations of the Output Data Tool that are file format specific.  The current tool looks the same no matter the file format.  This can be confusing when your workflow outputs to 2 or more file formats.  You can add a label, but they take up space.  A visual cue would provide a quick and simple means to identify the format of the output tool.   A solution might be an icon for each specific file format, or just different color variations of the current icon that a user could assign.  

It would make it a lot easier to create and manage a work stream if you added the standard ability to maximize and minimize the workflow canvas and configuration and results windows.

We are seeing a trend where database teams are using certificate authentication with process ids instead of passwords.  It would be extremely beneficial if Alteryx supported this type of authentication so that users can utilize the benefits of process ids instead of their individual ids which require password changes every 45 days.  The database team that is currently switching to this type of authentication is the Mainframe DB2 team but it would be great if Alteryx enabled this for all database platforms.

I often have to process strings as number, i.e. read a number from a csv as a string and then have to convert to number.  I would like to be able to use the data cleanse component and say treat as number format and then select the format, e.g. fixed decimal.  I would then expect the cleanse component to strip out any characters that would prevent the string from converting to the number format, i.e. strip out the commas but leave the full stops.

I love using the YXI installer for distributing custom macros; I have even used to install an entire palette of macros.  However, when installing to a new, user-defined palette, I still need to instruct users to copy custom_palette.png into C:\Program Files\Alteryx\bin\RuntimeData\icons\categories.

 

It would be nifty keen if we could add custom_palette,png into the config.xml file and have the YXI installer place the file into the \icons\categories directory.

 

I imagine that some checks would need to be added, to ensure we weren't overwriting icons for the built in palettes.

 

Hello Alteryx Team,

 

It would be great to have the possibility to output joined and unjoined records in the 'Join Multiple' tool into 2 separate output achors. Another possibility would be to have a switch in the tool's configuration to 'Only output records that did not join'.

 

The idea behind this is that sometimes you need to work only with the 'problematic' records that are not present in all of the inputs and it would be great to have an easy way how to get to them. I am aware that this can be done with a Filter tool after the Join Multiple but it would be nice to have this feature directly in the tool.

 

Thank you very much for considering this idea.

 

Regards,

Jan Laznicka

Hello,

 

How about a simple button on Multi- Row tool, to simply reverse the order of the loop. 

 

Instead of going upside-down, reversing to downside up, if the user wants to?

 

This will avoid (as attached) to including sorting tools before and after the Multi-Row formula.

 

This could really save work time when testing hypothesis.

 

TGoncalves_0-1591539078546.png

 

TGoncalves_1-1591539201162.png

 

 

Community issues already happened:

 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/How-to-fill-rows-in-the-reverse-direct...

 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Multi-Row-Formula-to-quot-copy-up-quot...

 

 

Kind Regards,

 

Tanai

Hi,

 

i recently started working on Alteryx and would like to ask if its possible to have preview of data when using In database tools working with db tables.

I have to invest more time on seeing the result using browse tools which again slows bit the performance on queries just to see the results.Also each step you have to add browse tool.

 

I have worked heavily on powerbi and see this as prime need as in PBI you can work on the visible data itself and figure it out right away how the transformations are working.if preview feature with cache options are given i guess that would be a big booster for Alteryx users.

 

Thanks,

Brij

Currently, the map input for an application defaults either to a global view of the United States or to a fixed boundary. Usng a chained application, it would be an extremely useful option to be able to specifiy spatial objects (points, lines, polygons) in the first application and then allow the second application to zoom in appropriately to those spatial objects. This could be done by either specifying a custom zoom level and using those spatial objects as a center through a reference layer, or by allowing the zoom's boundary to contain all the spatial objects (similar to the map reporting tools).

The Connected Tools submenu of a tool configuration is useful for navigating rapidly. One can double-click an Incoming or Outgoing line and jump to that connected tool. It gets tricky when a tool has multiple in/out anchors, like Append or Join. In those cases, it isn't possible to tell which tools are connected to which anchors. In the case of a Join tool, please change Incoming: to Incoming L: and Incoming R: and do the same for Outgoing. Please do this for all tools with multiple in/out anchors. Thank you.

Let's say I have an Input tool and a Browse tool connected in my workflow (Picture 1). I drag and drop another tool between them, it's fine (Picture 2).

Now I have a Select (or any other tool) connected to the Input tool but not to the Browse (Picture 3). So now my input tool has two output connections.

I want to add a tool, let's say a Filter tool after the Input but to both connections. If I drag and drop the Filter tool where connections are together just after the output anchor of the Input tool it insert the tool only within one of the connection (Picture 4).

 

The idea (and you might have guess by now) is to automatically add the new tool to all output connections  when it is dropped near the output anchor of the a tool present in the canvas.

A client contacted us recently asking if there was a way to view the log file of a scheduled process during runtime.  The use case is so that if there is a runaway process, they will be able to identify at what point the process gets hung up.  

Currently, when a scheduled job is running (and logging is enabled), the log file is locked for use.  

Thanks!

We encountered an issue with clob data.  Looks like alteryx is very slow performing while loading clob data to Oracle database. We need to figure a better way to handle the clob data.

Dear Alteryx,

Alteryx 9 new Macro configuration module, is great
One thing that could be improved :

For Iterative macros, it's very frustrated to set a Maximum of Iterations manually :
when the number is too high it keeps going unnecessarily
when it's too low, we are missing iterations

Ideally this parameters should be calculated automatically by Alteryx
It would just implie to have the possibility to declare the numeric field that must be used for Iteration ... then Alteryx could calculate before launching the job, the Min/Max to set automatically the iteration band.

Is this idea stupid?

Thanks

Arno

Hi,

It would be great if we can get the collection name by using some engine variables in the workflow. By doing so, we can use collections extensively for client specific categorizations. If we create collection for each client and if we are able to get the collection name from which collection this workflow got executed, then we will be able to track the executed workflow is performed against that respective client. This will solve the db connection establishments, i.e. based on the collection name (i.e. client name) we can build the respective client db connection the same workflow.

As per title, add option to not write 0 records to output file i.e. don't create file with just headers, if 0 records end up streaming to the output tool

 

 

Top Liked Authors