Dropdowns are an effective way to give users options whilst conserving space. They are a convenient and user-friendly filter, but considerations should be made when configuring dropdowns in Alteryx apps. In this guide, I’ll demonstrate and explain best practices for configuring dropdown tools. Here is a screenshot of the workflow so you can see that this won’t be an extensive process.
Why not manually configure dropdown lists?
Dropdown tools can be configured manually as shown by the left image. However, there are a few reasons why this is simply wrong:
- If there are many options it will take a long time to write them all (Olympic sports, world countries, names, etc.)
- Options can easily be misspelt, leading to a loss of functionality. I bet you didn’t notice all 4 errors in the sports list? Would you even know if Jeu de paume was spelt correctly?
- Manually written dropdowns are static and can’t self-update when new options become available in the data (e.g., sports are added to the Olympic overtime).
With this in mind, the following steps will show how to configure a dynamic dropdown list.
Step 1
Bring on a Filter tool to your workflow. Inside this tool’s configuration, select the field you want to filter, select Equals, and provide a temporary value as a placeholder. I’ll set “Aquatics” as my placeholder.
Step 2
Bring on a Summarize tool as shown, grouping by the category in your filter two times. It is necessary to group twice for the next steps to work.
Step 3
From the Summarize tool, bring on a Cross Tab tool. Configure the Cross Tab tool as shown:
Notice that each sport gets a column but the column title contains underscores where spaces or forward slashes used to be.
Step 4
To get all the options in a usable format for a Drop Down tool, connect a Dynamic Rename tool to the Cross Tab tool. In the configuration for the Dynamic Rename tool, select “Take Field Names from First Row of Data”.
Step 5
Bring on a Drop Down tool and connect the Question (Q) output anchor to the Filter tool’s lightning anchor. An Update Value tool will automatically show between the Drop Down tool and the Filter tool.
Step 6
Connect the Dynamic Rename tool’s output anchor to the Drop Down tool’s Question (Q) input anchor.
Step 7
In the Drop Down tool’s configuration window, enter a user-friendly name for the section “Enter the text or question to be displayed:”.
Step 8
In the Update Value tool expand Simple, then expand Operands, and select Operand – value=“[place holder value in filter]”
Step 9
Connect a Browse tool to the true anchor of your filter tool. Open interface designer from the view tab, go to properties, tick “On Success – Show Results to User”, and select the browse tool. This will allow you to test your app (specifically, your drop down).
Step 10
Click the wand icon next to run and test out your drop-down. Click Finish to view the results from the Browse tool.
There you have it. Dynamic dropdowns in Alteryx apps, only requiring a few tools. I hope this has been helpful. For more tutorials, please check out my page. Happy designing!
