Appending fields to data sources

Building custom catalogs or dictionaries is something that we are forced to do sometimes for several reasons. In this recipe, we’ll be taking three lists or attributes – T-shirt brands, sizes, and colors – to create all possible combinations between them to build our dictionary.

Alteryx offers a very simple way to do this with minimal effort and great power through the Append Fields tool, which, for those who are tech-savvy, forces a cross-join operation between datasets. For those who are not, a cross-join operation (or Cartesian product) is the process where for each record in one dataset you add all of the records from another dataset.

We used this method in Chapter 7, Recipe 4, Appending data calculations, to add summarized values to a dataset. Now, we’ll be using it to build our T-shirts catalog.

Getting ready

We prepared a test set for you to try this recipe. Download it here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing...