Tool Mastery

With the release of 2018.3 comes the long-awaited and highly anticipated Python Tool! This article is a general introduction to using the tool.

This article is part of the Tool Mastery Series, a compilation of Knowledge Base contributions to introduce diverse working examples for Designer Tools. Here we’ll delve into uses of the Block Until Done Tool on our way to mastering the Alteryx Designer:

The Field Info Tool is another one of the gems hidden in the Developer Tool Category – however don’t be intimidated, this is a tool for all of us! The purpose of the Field Info Tool is to give you the information about the fields in your data in a way that you can use down-stream as part of your workflow. There are no settings to configure, so just drop it on your canvas and you’re good to go!

Have you ever wanted to restrict the fields that flow through your workflow based on their data type? What about only allowing fields that begin with the same word or are in a specific position? The Dynamic Select tool is just what you’re looking for!

The Dynamic Replace Tool is an under-utilized tool in the Developer Toolset that is very powerful. It allows for dynamic formulas or conditions to be used in your workflow. It was first introduced in Alteryx 6.1. It’s one of the few tools that is currently multi-threaded which makes is fast.

If you haven’t used the Run Command Tool just yet, that’s great. It means that whatever your analyses required, we had it covered with basic Designer functionality. But in spite of how great the Designer is, it just can’t do everything. There is a utility on your computer that can do just about anything, however, and it’s the command line. The Run Command Tool pairs the two into a dynamic tag-team duo that can wrestle all the computation you could need into one, integrated, Designer workflow:

The Dynamic Rename Tool is part of the developer category of tools. It allows the user to quickly rename any or all fields within an input stream by employing the use of different methods.\n  \n The user has the option to rename only certain fields, all fields, or even dynamic/unknown fields at runtime (e.g. after a Cross Tab Tool). The option for renaming fields are: 

Binary Large OBject (BLOB) data types are often used to store images, audio, and other multimedia files/objects in a single, standardized, format for simplified database management - making them a frequent filetype in the Alteryx Designer. Fortunately, with the Blob Convert Tool, along with the Blob Input and Blob Output Developer Tools, working with BLOB objects is no more difficult than the file types they represent!