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Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

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I'm Left handed and use my mouse in my left hand.  As such I use the following right-hand keyboard operations in the programs like Excel etc; CTRL-INS (Copy), Shift-INS (Paste), and Shift-DEL (Cut).

 

In Alteryx Designer these don't work for me in the Workflow window (but do in say the meta Info window) - is there a setting so I can enable them for the Workflow Window, or can the feature be added.

I've come across multiple requests for help that relate to dates.  Having to know that "2016-05-04" is the only way to get May 4th, 2016 into a date field is sometimes a challenge for new users.  When they begin to use date functions and now have to learn adding and trimming etcetera the complication factor increases.  Then we date time format and have to do all of this in English (my one and only language), makes me think that there is room for improvements.

I am aware of the work arounds using Macros or the R tool but it would be nice to simply be able to input the password somewhere in standard Input data tool to have the file read in. Same goes with outputting a file with PW protection.

 

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. 

Pardon the length of this post, but I have been working with Alteryx since version 2.0 (11 years) and have been accumulating a wish list ever since.  Some of these suggestions have been made in the past but have yet to be embraced.  This is the first post for the first 'idea' but, as I said, this is a wish list that has grown since I was first introduced to Alteryx. More posts will follow.

 

I will break this into sections to hopefully make the suggestions easier to categorize and digest.

 

Application interface - Since I was introduce to Alteryx, the application interface (what is presented to users) has remained rather stagnant and, with the rumored push to adopt HTML as a replacement for pcxml, could benefit from the following additional settings. I suggest these based on the fact that dot Net classes for interface controls are readily available in Windows which allow for manipulation of each of the controls attributes.

 

1. The ability to set 'style' attributes for each of the interface tools in the application interface (font-family, font-style, font-size, font-weight, color, etc. This could be presented to the developer as an additional (perhaps optional button) in the Configuration panel for each interface tool as below:CSS_Tool.PNG

These settings would be specific to the type of interface tool and to how the individual tool would layout and/or be styled relative to the application interface window. One layout option, applicable to most interface tools, would be where the label would be relative to the object itself (top, bottom, left, right). The CSS could be stored in and interpreted from the XML of the yxwz file referencing the ToolID of the Node in a section of the XML hierarchy called <CSS> or something standard.  An option to alter the default CSS could be displayed with a radio button control so that if not selected, the tool would fallback to the default system CSS of the tool.  This default could also be set in System settings so that a consistent interface could be defined across the enterprise.

 

2. Moving to the actual window that displays when the application is opened, a lot of the same concepts could be applied to the Interface Designer pane.CSS_Interface.png

Attributes that could be set could include position on screen when opened, width and height of the window, and all the attributes of a dot Net form.  The same radio button strategy used for individual interface tools could be employed to use or not use system defaults.

 

3. In the UI, it would be nice if there was additional flexibility in how the interface tools could be laid out.  Along with the relative position of labels for each control, being able to layout controls horizontally as well as vertically would allow for a more organized interface.Layout_Interface.PNG

 The Radio buttons would work as normal with the Text Box controls inside each Radio button and only displaying when the button is selected.

 

I realize a lot of the current development in Alteryx is focused on the new Alteryx Connect and being able to attach to more data files and services. But, if there is still also a concerted effort to move from what could be considered a legacy proprietary mark up language, pcxml, to a more robust and universally accepted mark up, html and css, then, in my humble opinion, expanding the options for developers to design more user friendly and customizable applications to a standard 'style' across the enterprise, both on the desktop and in the gallery, is a worthy endeavor.

 

Thanks for your attention.  More to follow.

 

Dan

Would like to see a connector (similar to existing AWS S3 connectors) for Google Cloud storage.  I need to download data from the Developer Play console, and they provide a mechanism for accessing the csv data files directly:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6135870

 

If we had a Input data connector to browse and select CSV files from Google Cloud (either specifically or dynamically), that would make it much easier than running it via a Python script

I am bringing this over from this post.

 

It would be really cool to have a workflow that you could configure to your server that we could schedule to pull down the new Cass updates and install them. Since they have to be reinstalled every two months, it would help to manage that.

 

I think that the data updates are set up with an FTP site, Cass could be done essentially the same way. Download it there and then use the command module to run the install? I may be over simplifying the process but it seems like this is something that Alteryx could tackle.

Sometimes when creating a workflow, or a chained application I create fields or parameters in a formula tool and need to be able to quickly copy and paste the entire formula output column into another formula tool across a different part of the workflow / entirely different workflow.

 

This most often happens when standardizing fields across different data streams. We have the ability to save expressions, but if you save too many that can quickly get messy. We also have the ability to copy and paste a formula within a formula output column...so why not extended the functionality slightly to copy/paste the entire formula output column?

 

In this proposed enhancement a user could right click on the 3 lines at the top left of the formula section and copy/cut a formula output column between formula tools:

 

gautiergodard_0-1681526182386.png

 

In user settings you can define a "Logging Directory" and if you do the system will send the Output Log (Results view messages) to a file in that folder.  The name generated is Alteryx_Log_ + an apparent sequential number, example: Alteryx_Log_1519833221_1.

This makes it impossible to identify which flow it is associated with and which instance of execution simply by looking at the name, you have to parse the content to see the flow name and start/end timestamps.  For trouble shooting we want to be able to look at the list of file names and quickly see which file, of possibly hundreds of files, we need to look at to see what went wrong.

 

MDX Queries such as SSAS Cubes, SAP InfoCubes or Hyperion Essbase would be greatly appreciated. Tableau has these connectors, and being partners with Tableau you can leverage the work they have done in this space.

Right now - if a tool generates an error - there is nothing productive that you can do with the error rows, these are just sent to the error log and depending on your settings the entire canvas will fail.

 

Could we change this in the Designer to work more like SSIS - where almost every tool has an error output, so that you can send the good rows one way, and the error rows the other way, and then continue processing?    The error rows can be sent to an error table or workflow or data-quality service; and the good rows can be sent onwards.   Because you have access to the error rows, you can also do run stats of "successful rows vs. unsuccessful"

 

This would make a big difference in the velocity of developing a canvas or prepping data.

 

Can take some screenshots if that helps?

As a user, I would like to have the ability to define the default table formatting settings for font, border, font size, font style etc within the table tool so that I do not have to redefine each time I create a table.

 

I understand I could copy the table after doing it once and use for subsequent tables created, however it would nice to do this once and utilize this as the default for future workflows.

 

These settings could be defined in a report focused section of User Settings, or defined within the tool.  For example, if in the tool, features could include a box to (make current settings default, revert back to factory default, etc.)  Another beneficial feature would be to create "presets" that could be selected from a drop down that would automatically update the customized settings to match a previously defined combination of formatting specifications.

 

This could be extended further to formatting rules related to columns and tables as well, saving the time spent on setting up rules previously utilized.

(originally raised as discussion : https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/Input-Data-Tool-Record-Limit-control/td-p/58718)

 

Hi all,

 

When using a record limit on a database query - the actual query being executed on the server depends very much on the connection type (Native SQL; OleDB; and ODBC).    However, for all 3 of these, it seems that the record limit is being enacted on the client side, not on the server.   What I mean by this is that when I take the exact queries that are being run by Alteryx on the server (by looking at a SQL Profile trace on the server), and run these in a query window, you can see that the row-limit is not occurring in SQL, but in Alteryx.

(to test this, I ran several queries with and without the record limit; profiled them using SQL profiler; and the profile trace was identical either way)

 

Aside from putting "Select top(100) from..." in all the queries that that we create,  or using in-DB queries for every simple query - could we instead have an option to force the row limitation down to the server on a regular InputData tool, so that we can take advantage of the server's ability to optimize?

 

Thank you

Sean

 

When Alteryx Designers are installed, I'd like to be able to disable the option for Designers within my organisation to 'Save to Alteryx Gallery' (The public Alteryx Gallery) - It causes confusion amongst users who are trying to interact with our internal Alteryx Server environments.

 

Thanks,

 

Ciaran

Hi, I have searched through the community, and I wasn't able to find a duplicate for this idea. If in fact there is, I apologize and please point me to that post. I think that it would be a good idea to have date options in the summarize tool that would allow for grouping at higher levels of the date. I often have a date field that is specific to the day (i.e. 2018-01-01), and I just want to group by the year or month. Currently in order to do this, I have to create a formula before the summarize tool that formats the date according to how I want to group it, and then I am able to group off that field in the summarize tool. It would be nice if in the summarize tool, I could select the date field, and then have the option to group it at year, month, week, etc. 

Perhaps a little niche but it's something I come across quite a lot so thought I'd throw this out there as a quick QoL suggestion!

 

Currently when developing apps and such, we often just show results to end users via a Browse tool. However, when this output is a large table of data or a map for example, the initial results window doesn't scale out and we can often only see a tiny edge. To add to this, if we do want to resize the initial results window, we have to manually drag this as there is no maximise option like in other interfaces. Below is a quick example of what I mean.

 

App runs and produces this output:

 

DataNath_0-1681335841361.png

 

The actual data/results within:

 

DataNath_1-1681335875174.png

 

To get this second image, I have had to manually click and drag the outer edges of the Browse window, due to the lack of a maximise button. I'm aware that we can click to pop this out to a new window that does have a maximise option, but this feels like an unnecessary additional step.

 

So the idea here is fairly simple. Either a) increase the default size of the results window, and/or b) add a maximise button to Browse outputs.

 

Cheers,

Nathan

Hi,

 

I didn't find this mentioned before, but apologies if it has. I and a few clients have found that the Download tool 'Query String/Body' is quite difficult to use from a UX perspective. If you have a long query (or anything over 3 short rows in fact), it's almost impossible to navigate to the part you want with ease, as you're required to highlight and move the cursor manually or use up and down arrows, still only ever seeing a few lines of the query. 

 

My suggestion(s) would be to:

1: include a scroll bar as a minimum

and ideally in addition, either:

2a: give the box itself more real estate (fixed) in the Payload tab, or

2b: allow the user to resize this box in the tool config (probably more complicated?) 

 

Specific problem below, including my (terrible!) drawings on it:

 

downloadtool.PNG

 

 

I appreciate there are other methods, including taking the query from a field etc., but for many users - particularly newer ones - it's preferred to copy a query into this String/Body and edit as needed, but right now this is an almost unmanageable approach.

 

Thanks,

 

Andy 

it would be better to add a drop down menu or a search bar in the Select, Join, and Summary tool instead of keeping scroll down when i have many fields 100 and above in a dataset

 

Idea removed, regex will do the job. 

Hi Team,

 

Download tool is not updated their encryption policy. This stool still support SHA-1 but as per the organization requirements they want higher encryption mechanism. As in my case we are using SFTP connection and we want to download the data but my SFTP server using SHA-2 encryption due to which we not able to configure the workflow. 

Please upgrade the Download tool for better experience in alteryx.

 

Regards,

Kaustubh 

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