So, I'm new to knime. That is to say this may be a newbie question.
I'm finding building a data cleanup work flow challanging because I want to be looking at the output from one node while I'm editing the next. Particularly in the rule based nodes or string manipulation node. Is there any way to do this other than closing the modial node editor window and moving to the previous node and opening the modial data view window?
The XML xPath nodes provide some of this kind of access, with it's XML snipits that you can see the input to the node and use this to edit the current node. However many nodes don't seem to provide an easy way to look at the input of a node at the same time you are editing the next node.
Is there something I'm missig? For example a view that shows data from a node. That can be used with the properties view of the next node. Or a non modial node editor where I can bring up to diffrent Node Dialogboxes. One with the output of one node, the other the input of the next. Or something else. If this is not possible do folks have tricks like always saving node output to a file and keeping a text document open to look at this data, or something else.
So any productivity tips in this area would be very helpful.
Cool idea and probably part of the nextgen tools, for now you'll probably have to live with the abstract way of thinking with some trial and error. I agree with your idea in particular when it comes to regex, though there are some good online sites for regex debugging, e.g regexr.
What I ended up doing is writing the results to a CSV file.
Then changing over into MS Excel. (1 Keystrok) In MS Excel I created a connection on the Data Tab to the CSV file. Then I clicked "refresh all" on the data tab. (1 click). Data loaded in Excel. This allowed me to more quickly refresh Excel without having to redefine the delimiters etc.
I then took the next step to setup a pivot table to make it easy to see where my labels were inconsistantly labled.
When you select the data port view of the previous node (right-click, last item on the menu), it should open a new window, not a modal dialog box. So when you are editing your filter in the modal configuration dialog, you can just alt-tab (in Windows, other OS might be different) to the data window. With some clever window positioning, you can edit the dialog while still seeing the data window at the same time, if that's what you want, but for me a quick Alt-TAB is more than sufficient.
What is also cool in Knime is that you do not have to close these data view windows. If the data changes, they will automatically reflect these changes. For this to work, you do have to execute the nodes leading up to the data view window.
'Live' results of a given node while staying in the edit window is something different of course. For some nodes this would make sense (like the XPath one), others less so. I for one would love to have a Java snippet debug mode, that would allow me to step through the snippet code...
I figured this out. You have to show the data and then open the model configuration node. On the Mac the keystroke in <Command> ` (Thats the Back quote above the Tab Key.)
I have not yet tried the auto refresh.
The next challange for me is that I can not copy and paste from the data window into the Model configuration node.