What's New in Designer

The Control Container tool is a brand new tool available via the Developer tool category in Designer. Control Containers give you the ability to build more dynamic and complex processes with better orchestration, logging, and conditional execution.

Here are just some of the capabilities of Control Containers:

We’ve added several new formula functions:

You can use these anywhere functions are available.

You can now specify additional precision for your DateTime and Time data types. This allows for higher precision than seconds. For example, milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, and so on.

The Force SQL WChar Support option is now available via the Output Data tool for Oracle OCI connections. This option lets you force all char fields to output to WString to handle multibyte characters.

We’ve made an update to help prevent unexpected data truncation in the Render tool. You’ll now encounter an error message when you try to output to PDF and the page size is too small to accommodate the data in your dataset.

To improve the workflow creation process, we've made updates to ensure that changes to the case of a field/column name will propagate to downstream tools without the need for manual reconfiguration. This update doesn’t apply to tools that are macros and doesn’t affect tools that use a pop-out configuration dialog (for example, the Insight and Interactive Chart tools).

Note that this change doesn't affect the Engine, nor does it affect how a workflow executes. Field names have always been case-insensitive from an Engine perspective unless otherwise specified.

Alteryx Designer now lets you select a Dark Mode option as your Designer theme! Preview Dark Mode via the Customization tab of Designer's User Settings.

Alteryx now supports the Denodo platform connection. You can use standard workflow processing as well as In-Database workflow processing tools to read and write your data. For more information, go to Denodo.

The 2023.1 release brings Okta authentication support, single sign-on (SSO), for SAP HANA. You can now authenticate to SAP HANA Cloud with Okta accounts.

You can now connect DCM to your AWS Secrets Manager instance and then fetch authentication data from AWS Secrets Manager for your workflow. For information on how to configure AWS Secrets Manager, go to AWS Secrets Manager Configuration.

DCM is now set as Enabled and Default in System Settings and Enabled in User Settings. Also, SDK is set to Allow and the DCM check box is checked on a tool level.

If you upgrade from versions after 21.4, your DCM settings reflect the setup from your previous installation.

Alteryx now supports the MS Access 2016 Runtime and the MS Access 365 Runtime for reading ACCDB.

In the S3 Download and S3 Upload tools, you can now select the Assume Role option as a new authentication method to fully leverage roles in your AWS IAM.

For a period of two years from the date of release of Alteryx version 2021.2 (the "Extended Support Period"), Alteryx was providing customer technical support for 32-bit connections. If you currently use 32-bit connections, you will get an error message and you will no longer be able to use those connections. Go to End of Support for 32-Bit Database Connections FAQs for more details.

Use the Text Classification tool to build a custom model that classifies text. Label your text data with categories to train a model and then classify new text with the Predict tool.

Added an image enhancement step to the Image Processing tool. Enhance increases image resolution of your scanned documents. Use Enhance to improve the results of your computer vision tasks.

Auto to automatically align your scanned documents in your OCR workflows.

Added an Apply First Page of Annotations in Image Template to All Pages checkbox to the PDF to Text and Image to Text tools. Use this checkbox to apply the first page of annotations from the Image Template tool to all pages in batch processing.

As of the 2022.3 release, Alteryx Designer, Server, and the R Predictive tools use new installer technology. The updated installer detects your operating system language and installs Alteryx products in that language (if applicable). Go to Download and Install a Product for important upgrade and downgrade considerations and review updated command-line options.

You can now perform a search in Designer tools that use the Select functionality. The search returns only the fields that match your search criteria—it searches the Field, Rename, and Description columns. You can then quickly select or deselect all the returned fields to perform actions on them, edit their data types, rename them, and more. We've also added a check box to let you quickly select and deselect all visible fields. Available in the Select, Join, Join Multiple, Append Fields, Select In-DB, Find Nearest, and Spatial Match tools.

We’ve added enhancements to the Formula tool. Each expression now contains an Expression ID number to assist with documenting and troubleshooting your expressions. Additionally, you can now quickly expand and collapse all expressions in the Formula tool via the expand all/collapse all toggle.

You can now cache tools that have multiple output anchors (maximum of 5 anchors). This feature extends the caching functionality to over 50 additional tools. Please note that some tools (including those with more than 5 output anchors and In-DB tools) might still not be cacheable.

You can now quickly disable a single Output Data tool while you develop your workflow or troubleshoot an issue. Use the Disable Tool check box in the tool’s configuration window. While disabled, the Output Data tool is shaded on the canvas to help visually indicate its disabled status.

We’ve added support for Japanese to the Fuzzy Match tool. You can now apply predefined match styles, that account for Japanese orthography, to Japanese addresses, names, or text.

We’ve made updates to the user interface of the Designer Results grid to improve accessibility via screen readers and other assistive technology. Buttons and controls that were previously only visible under certain conditions are now always visible, though inactive if not applicable.

We've made improvements to the Compare Workflows feature. When you compare 2 workflows with container tools, if their enabled and disabled states are different, the Compare Workflows functionality identifies them as different.

We’ve rebuilt and updated the Start Here experience when you launch Designer. Start Here now launches in its own window rather than a tab on the Designer canvas. We’ll update the content periodically to highlight new features and updates in Designer. If you close the window, you can reopen it via Help > Sample Workflows > Start Here.

There are now 166 fully supported tools and 11 partially supported tools. The partially supported tools fall back to the original Engine for some unsupported functionality.

All Reporting and R tools are now AMP enabled (except the Insights Reporting tool).

There are 7 more AMP-only Connectors, with several more planned over the next few months, and even more planned for 2023*, 1 new Engines Parity tool, 13 Reporting tools, and 65 R tools for a total of 86 newly supported AMP tools, including the R tool in the Developer category.

*These Connector tools are available as AMP only, and won't work with the original Engine: Azure Data Lake File Input, Azure Data Lake File Output, Microsoft Power BI Output, OneDrive Input, OneDrive Output, SharePoint Input, and SharePoint Output.

Added support for networking via proxy to AMP. Added support for SFTP over HTTP proxy to both engines. Added the ability to bypass proxy for both engines. You can now specify the Proxy Protocol Type (support for HTTP and SOCKS5h) in User Settings and System Settings. If you don’t specify the protocol, the default is HTTP.

Engines Parity Utility is an easy way to compare the original Engine to AMP. It allows you to run both engines in parallel, evaluate the results, and make a decision about which workflow you can confidently convert to AMP. You can run Parity Utility via the command line with AlteryxEngineCmd.exe or run it via Designer using the Gallery Macro download. For more information, go to Parity Utility.

As an admin with a non-FIPS Designer version, you are now able to specify a list of problematic hosts in a flat file for which peer validation will be skipped. If users encounter issues with certificate authorization, it does not need to stop the users from work.

The Behavior Analysis tools in Alteryx Designer have been deprecated. These tools will continue to work with US Business Insights Data Packages 2021 Q4 and earlier versions.

The External Vault feature allows you to connect DCM with your Vault of choice. You can use External Vaults in DCM to fetch credentials from your Vault and securely use them in your workflow. For more information, go to DCM External Vaults.

Bulk loading to Google BigQuery is now available in the Output tool. It is supported with Oauth authentication using DCM. We use Google Cloud Storage for data staging.

Google BigQuery is now supported for the In-Database tools. It is supported with Oauth authentication using DCM and includes bulk loading for streaming in data.

You can now authenticate to Microsoft Exchange Online with OAuth authentication via DCM and obtain a token pair that allows you to send emails from your Exchange Online account. For more information, go to Email Tool.

You can now access and manage your Snowflake data with OAuth authentication via DCM. For more information, go to Snowflake Azure AD Authentication.

You can now access and manage (read/write/bulk write) your Databricks data via the private (single-tenant) and the public (multi-tenant) applications with OAuth authentication via DCM. For more information, go to Databricks Azure OAuth Authentication.

We’ve deprecated these connectors:

For more information, go to Data Sources.

The Mapbox logo and attribute text now appear at the bottom of the basemaps.

We have removed the configuration for sending usage data in the Designer User Settings. To read more about our philosophy on usage data, go to Improving Our Products with Usage Data and the Alteryx Privacy Policy.

Extract text encoded as characters directly from your PDF files with >99% accuracy. Add OCR to extract images for additional coverage. In most cases, you’ll see an increase in accuracy, speed, and completeness compared to the Image to Text tool.

Classify text into categories of your choice without the need for training data.

Extract a summary of your text based on the TextRank methodology. You can specify the length of the summary by number of sentences.

Added the ability to edit annotation bounding boxes in the Image Template tool. We enabled this functionality with mini-tate, a new open-source React library from Alteryx.

Added a Shift step to the Image Processing tool. Shift automatically shifts documents into alignment based on a user-defined anchor. Use the Image Template tool to define the anchor with an annotation. Shift can improve OCR results for images that shifted during the scanning process.

Added Evaluation Metrics and Model Report output anchors to the Image Recognition tool. Metrics include information on the precision, recall, and accuracy of each classification label. The report output includes loss and accuracy plots for each epoch. Use these plots to visualize if the tool sufficiently trained the model.

AMP is now the default Engine for any new workflows you create. However, you can still choose the engine for your workflows via the workflow-level setting. Go to the Workflow - Configuration pane in Designer and select the Runtime tab. Next, enable or disable the Use AMP Engine check box to make your engine selection.

Please note that when you launch the 22.1 version of Designer, you’ll be greeted with a pop-up to notify you that AMP is the default for new workflows. You can then select to not show the message again if you choose.

Alteryx Multi-threaded Processing (AMP) is a new architecture of Alteryx Engine, designed to work with larger volumes of data at a higher velocity. To learn more about the AMP Engine, as well as the differences between the original engine and AMP, visit these resources:

AMP Engine supports Standard, Iterative, and Batch Macros. In addition, over 85 tools have been converted to run with AMP. Tools that haven’t been converted will automatically use the original Engine.

For Input and Output data, there is now a 32,000 upper limit of fields per record for both the original Engine and AMP.

The grouping framework on AMP Engine has been changed to behave similarly to the original Engine. This affects the Summarize, Join, and Join Multiple tools.

We’ve updated the Designer UI to better align with other Alteryx products. As part of the refresh, you’ll notice new fonts, colors, and icons—all part of a more modern look and feel.

One notable change is that when you run your workflow, you’ll no longer see the text "(Running)" in your workflow tab. Instead, you'll see a spinning/loading icon in the tab, beside the title of your workflow.

The Auto Insights Uploader tool is now a default tool in Alteryx Designer. You can access Auto Insights Uploader via the In/Out tool category.Auto Insights Uploader Tool

The DCM Connection tool is a new tool within the Interface tools family. With the DCM Connection tool, you can display a prompt in an app or macro, and allow the user to pick a Connection from their DCM storage.

There is new functionality that supports Delta tables on Databricks. You can use interactive or SQL Endpoint clusters on AWS and Azure. Bulk loading is supported with data staging in AWS S3 or Azure ADLS.

We have replaced any references to "Gallery" inside of Designer to instead reference "Server" and thus align with recent terminology updates to the Alteryx Server product.

The Part-of-Speech Tagger tool allows you to determine a given word's part of speech. You can analyze specific parts of speech and refine outcomes for other Text Mining tools. For example, you can create word clouds of only verbs or topic models with just nouns.

The Barcode tool extracts information stored in QR codes and barcodes. The tool can also generate QR codes and barcodes. You can extract underlying information in QR codes and barcodes to automate business processes. For example, some companies use QR codes to determine whether documents are relevant to certain departments, then organize documents by Finance, HR, Marketing, etc. accordingly.

We added an OCR Optimization feature to the Image Processing tool for scanned PDFs. Use the OCR Optimization step to pre-process noisy, scanned PDFs (for example, scanned documents that contain non-white or textured backgrounds and watermarks) for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This additional step can greatly improve the Key-Value Pair tool results.

The Key-Value Pair tool links 2 data elements, a key, which defines the data set, and its value, which belongs to the dataset. For example:

Introduced performance improvements to the Image Input and Image to Text tools that can make your workflows run even faster! You might notice significant improvements (up to a 40% speed increase) when you parse larger documents such as multi-page PDFs.

We have streamlined the activation process with Alteryx License Server so you can focus on the available products by removing license keys from view.

We have added an option to update the trusted storage with the information on the License Server. We have also added an option to return the current configuration including licensing mode, email address, and License Server URL, if applicable.