Thursday 30 January 2020

Then Is Not Now


I'm in the U.K. and visiting the Leeds Alteryx User Group.  Just prior to my journey I had generated an idea for Alteryx to improve the generate rows tool:  Please Read & Give Likes.  At the same time I suggested that if you: 1) click on a tool that is on your canvas & 2) go to the pallet and double-click a tool, that the tool will be inserted onto the canvas after the previous tool and that your cursor is moved to the configuration window Please Read & Give Likes.  But now I'm in Manchester and what have I done for CReW?

With a little help from my friends, I decided to tackle joining to date ranges (Tool Mastery: How to Join on Date Ranges).  The question comes up frequently in the community.  What I did was simplify the GENERATE ROWS tool and make it create date or datetime intervals between two end date or datetime points.

If you need to have a record for every day in 2020, you could feed it a start of 2020-01-01 and 2020-12-31 and get 366 output records.  Note:  I just tested and updated the macro.  If you set the TYPE of the output field as datetime and try this, you'll only get 365 records.  Thankfully, I caught this.

So if you want a simple way to generate date records, please look to the Alteryx Gallery for the new macro.  A link is provided below:


Cheers,

Mark

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