What's New in Designer

We've made updates to the workflow template experience. You can now add metadata to your templates, including a thumbnail image, owner, and description. You can view templates via a grid view or list view via the Templates window, and you can change the default location where your templates are saved. Go to Templates for more information.

We've redesigned the Designer User Settings. The redesign simplifies the user experience via a modernized UI and more intuitive tab groupings. Go to User Settings to explore the updates.

You can now choose to enable and disable specific expressions in the Formula tool and have more flexibility in the way you build, test, troubleshoot, and execute your workflows. Additionally, you can dynamically interact with the disable expression toggle via the Action tool when you design Analytic Apps. For example, build an app where you use a checkbox to dynamically determine whether a formula expression is executed.

We've added several new formula functions:

You can find these anywhere functions are available.

These tools are now converted for full AMP support:

For a list of tools supported with AMP, go to Tool Use with AMP.

We've refreshed the user interface for the Select tool (including other tools that use the Select functionality). This includes the implementation of Dark Mode for the Select component. Additionally, we've made updates for tool UI consistency to the Sample, Sort, and Unique tools.

We’ve extended the support for DCM tags resolution in the payload for POST requests inside the Download tool. Also, there’s added support for Base64 encoding of header and payload values (or selected parts of it) inside the Download tool.

The Make Columns tool has officially graduated to the Transform tool category in Designer (previously Laboratory tool category). We have also added a One Tool Example for Make Columns.

We enhanced the logic of the Email tool with AMP. Now it works the same as with the original Engine, where the Email tool is the final tool to execute (assuming all prior tools have been executed). You can rely on other validations in the workflow to finish before an email is sent. This prevents cases where a run appears to be successful (based on receiving an email) even if it incurred errors that should have prevented the email from being sent.

A single malformed email address in the 'to' email list of the Email tool should not prevent emails from being sent to valid addresses. When there is an invalid email address, it's logged as an error message and the process moves on to the next valid email address.

Expect Equal is a new AMP-native Developer tool. Use this tool to test if two data streams are identical and see errors if not. Go to Expect Equal for more information.

As an alternative to downloading via Alteryx Marketplace, you can now download and install Alteryx-supported add-ons directly via the Add-Ons menu in Alteryx Designer. You can search the Add-Ons window based on the add-on name and description, view the add-on's version number, and access the Alteryx Marketplace to explore all the offerings.

Additional Designer components are now Dark Mode compatible, including more tool configuration components. In addition, many macro and Analytic App interface components are now Dark Mode compatible. Go to Dark Mode to learn more.

We've updated the Start Here experience (when you first open Designer). Start Here content is now hosted online from Community which allows for more frequent updates to communicate new and exciting features.

We've updated the offline help experience in Designer. The offline help files now use the same look and feel as the online help (help.alteryx.com). When you access help in Designer offline, you now land on the offline help home page where you can search for Designer help content.

You can now view Engine logs while a job is running, which is especially helpful for long-running workflows. Previously, logs were locked for reading, could not be accessed while the workflow was running, and would be deleted if the workflow was canceled (loss of valuable information about the workflow run process). This was particularly challenging in Server environments where long run times can affect the stability of the environment.

With this change, you can now read Engine logs while the workflow is running (on both Designer and Server). Depending on how you view the logs (in which file viewer), you may be prompted to update or reload the page to see updates if additional log information comes through while you have the file open. For more information about Engine logs and their uses, go to the Knowledge Center.

We’ve improved Swap file management under the default temp directory. Swap files are now written inside a subdirectory of the session temp directory and have been renamed to Swap* (from e2Temp).

A new and improved Excel reader is now available. XLSX files now read in faster, with flawless Designer functionality when you select a range on the Excel sheet, and the ranges load consistently when data is sparse.

A new feature has been added to the Input tool for JSON data, called "Read Data in Structured form." This feature is available with AMP only and allows data to be read in a tabular format, where the first-level keys serve as field names, and values within those fields are grouped accordingly. This lets you group values and utilize manipulations typically used for tabular data. For more information, go to Reading JSON.

The Parquet file format is now natively supported by Alteryx (AMP engine only).

Designer now supports Trino connections. For more information, go to Trino.

Designer now supports Dremio connections. For more information, go to Dremio.

Designer now supports Databricks Volumes connections. For more information, go to Databricks Volumes.

Some of your favorite AWS-hosted and served data sources now support AWS IAM for authentication in Designer:

You can utilize the DCM configuration to fetch secrets used in DCM credentials at runtime from a vault by providing a custom script or executable that would handle authentication and secret retrieval. Forming such a vault is possible through Designer and Server.

Generic External Vault allows you to configure a generic vault that can retrieve secrets from any vault with a programmatic interface using basic authentication.

For more information, go to DCM Generic External Vault.

You can now use key-file (JWT) authentication for Snowflake in Alteryx Designer with DCM. Select your Snowflake connection and find key-pair authentication from the list of available data sources.

The proxy parameter has been added to the Snowflake DCM schema. You are now able to establish a connection to Snowflake using the DCM connection with Proxy. Make sure not to include proxy credentials in the parameter as the value of this parameter is not encrypted and might be misused for malicious purposes.

It's now easier than ever to authenticate service accounts with Google BigQuery using DCM. Go to Google BigQuery for more information.

There is a new authentication method for HashiCorp Vault. Designer can now use mTLS (“mutual TLS”, also known as “TLS Client Authentication”) to obtain DCM secrets from Vault.

With the upgrade to Python 3.10, some functionality of the Machine Learning tools has changed…

Updated the spaCy language models for the Text Mining tools. This update might change the output for workflows that use these Text Mining tools...

Updated the NLTK toolkit for the Sentiment Analysis tool. This update might change the output for workflows that use the Sentiment Analysis tool.

For Designer 2024.1, you must install the 2024.1 version of the ML Predict and Send tools. Previous versions of the tools aren't supported. Note that the 2024.1 version includes the Python 3.10 update and won't work with previous versions of Designer.