I was working on a project and ran into a bit of a hurdle i was hoping someone would be able to help me with. I have a large workflow that searches through a database to pull entities of interest, these entities have a batch ID associated with them like xyz-001. Some of these which have multiple batches have been archived over time so if you wanted to search for zzz-003 but accidentally provided zzz-001 I implemented a fuzzy search which removes the batch ID and searches for just the name.
Now my issue i run into is I have a Table View (HTML) node where the user can select which search results they’d like to keep from the fuzzy search and I was hoping to have this node automatically open upon execution since some of my users are not versed in KNIME I am trying to make it as user friendly as possible. I searched through the forum and saw a suggestion that maybe it could be done with some java but my skills are a bit rudimentary and I am not sure what i would do to call upon the node to auto open the interactive view.
There isn’t a way to change the default setting, but I do have a cool trick that you can use as a workaround for dropping in pre-configured nodes with settings intact. Essentially you copy a node that has the settings that you want as “default”, then paste it as text to store it. When that text is pasted back into KNIME it will place the node with its configuration settings intact.
While this is not super user friendly as a manual copy / save to a file / paste into KNIME process, it can be an amazing tool when you incorporate a macro controller to store and paste the text. I personally use Elgato StreamDecks for this. Each button is a mini LCD screen that holds the image of the node with a short description, and things can be organized into multi-level folders inside button shortcuts.
Thanks so much! I’ll have to give it a try, even though its not a super easy workaround I dont foresee myself doing this for too many nodes as long as my end user gets a more convenient experience out of it
You can also just go the traditional route of warping the node into a component and setting the preferred default settings via Flow Variable, but it can be time consuming to re-create all of the settings options as config or widget inputs.
Yeah my issue is that within the interactive view i want to have the default setting as all the rows selected, and i dont seem to see a setting for that in the flow variable ports of the node. Currently looking into its source code to see if i can write something to trigger it to open or auto select everything so that the end user just has to unhighlight what they want removed
For anyone else curious, I was able to actually reset the column selection by choosing every row and closing it with the “Apply settings as new default” so now every time it runs itll auto highlight every row available.
Still working on that auto open for the interactive view but thats 1 out of the 2 solutions!
Edit: jk it only worked as default for a data table of the same size, new tables or changing dimensions negates the default setting i applied. Back to the drawing board
That seems to do the job for me, thanks! Still working on that auto open upon execution but that takes care of half of my problem, really appreciate it
The original request would probably require platform level changes. I like to put annotations on my workflows to help users with things like this in the mean time. You could include a message telling them to execute the node using the keyboard shortcut Shift F10 / point them toward execute nodes and open first view icon up top.
Yeah the nice thing is that the main users of this program at this point in time are very limited to a small team of people who are reasonably savvy with the program already from just months of me providing them other workflows in the past. Just trying to think with enough foresight for those users who would maybe join or are less experienced but thats a nice to have not a must have at this stage