I am just jumping on the forum to express my concerns about column expression nodes that are entering “legacy” status now. This essentially assumes that it will be deprecated soon if my understanding is correct.
I am really worried about this, because our company has some major workflows that run hundreds if not thousands of column expressions. What will be able to replace this versatile node? I love to use it and have tried to change to java snippets, sting manipulation, and math formula. None of them work for me.
It’s part of KNIME’s design philosophy to main backwards compatibility whenever possible - we definitely don’t want to break any workflows that are out there running seamlessly in production! So even though the older nodes are marked “legacy”, they will still work going forward.
Having said that, the newer node you may want to check out is the Expression node. It’s gotten quite a lot of development attention lately and boasts some great features!
I’m with @Chanro. I know you’re pushing the new Expression nodes, but I’ve got a lot invested in the Column Expressions node and would like it to be available forever even without further development.
As far as I know, there are no plans to remove the Column Expressions node - that would definitely go against our track record with development. The idea has always been that you could open up workflows created in MUCH older versions of KNIME many years in the future, and they would still work.
I agree with @ScottF that the new node is quite useful with some of the new features. I have also had success with using AI tools like Copilot to take logic from one node and translate it easily to new node syntax (to help learn how it works differently).
With that being said, I can understand the amount of work required to retool a very complex workflow with a lot of these legacy nodes included.
Thank you Scott, I really appreciate the feedback. It is good to know the node will not be deprecated, since we have so much invested into it.
In my opinion Column Expression is so powerful given its ability to handle so many data types. The versatility is unmatched. However, I will have a look at expressions and see how it works. Perhaps I can start to implement it in newer work. To translate my old workflows will be next to impossible. Literally years worth of development has gone into them.