As I dive deeper into using Knime converting over my Alteryx workflows… I would like to suggest some UI enhancements mostly around Node Monitor. My mindset is that of the person that is fairly but not intimately familiar with the dataset (like marketing data that has come from many sources and isn’t always clean). So as I build a workflow getting hints from the interface is very helpful in spotting errors.
The screenshot below shows both interfaces:
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As you build and troubleshoot a complex workflow it’s really handy to see the config of each node you click on as you may have many of the same… double-clicking every time is a pain and as the window resizes it obscures other windows as you try to troubleshoot… Would love to see a dockable window with config settings… I would like use that in place of the Description window (once I’ve gotten used to config settings)… or I might keep both. Want to see both data and config at once.
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Please make no data (i.e. Null) more obvious and different from the ascii character ?.. See in alteryx it’s grey text word [null]… which is easy to differentiate from ascii ?
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Being able to see the data at the same time as configuring the node is really important so you avoid typos or errors. In alteryx you can select one of the incoming data tables or one of the output tables… with the icon on the side that dynamically populate based on the node
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Again to avoid typos etc, you can double-click on the data and a window opens that allows you to select all or part of the text of that cell to copy and past into the config area or another app. You can also click on the column header to sort or filter the data… again this help you keep the data in mind as you configure your node to avoid errors and help with troubleshooting if errors are found. There are also visual indicators if you have nulls or blanks in your data (which can be really hard to see). If the column has any nulls there will be some red in the bar under the column name. If any of the data has leading or trailing blanks there will be a red triangle in the corner of the cell of the offending data.
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Meta data can be displayed to let you know what type of data the columns have been set to… this has saved me many time where I can’t figure out why a node fails… it was because of the data type.
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Handy for pulling data out for investigation externally you can copy os save the data right from this node monitor
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This is more about RegEx split node… would be nice to be able to rename the output field(s) in the node. The alteryx RegEx tool allows you to define multiple groups of values and output to multiple fields and you can choose replace the value into the same column. This doesn’t seem possible in the knime node.
