I'm starting to come along nicely with KNIME and I'm building some more sophisticated workflows. As a result, I find myself in a situation where I have a workflow with a number of nodes present, some of which require unique customization. The structure of the workflow is not altered, but the specific configuration parameters must change betweeen uses.
For example, let's say I have a workflow that reads in two SD files, a database and a query compound. Once read and cleaned up, I want to find those compounds in the dataset that have a Tanimoto similarity to the query greater than 0.8. To make it more interesting, I only want the top 100. This is all very achievable, but the next time I use it I have 2 different SD files (a new database and a new query), I may want my Tanimoto cutoff to be 0.85 this time, and I only want the top 50. This will require that I change 4 different node configurations.
For my usage, this is not a particularly difficult problem, but if I now distribute this KNIME project to others in my group, I have to make certain they understand the idiosyncracies of these parameter/configuration settings buried within a potentially complex workflow. Is there a way to save this workflow as a MetaNode such that I can have the user specify values for various parameters that then get passed along to internal nodes as variables?
The new version of the workflow manager we are working on right now will allow you to do just that - you can then pass local variables along a workflow to be used by subsequent nodes. So a meta node could specify a few settings (such as - in your example - filenames and cut off thresholds) which are used by various nodes within the meta node itself.
Right now I don't see an easy way to do this. The batch executor allows you to selectively change a few settings of nodes in your workflow but those can't be used as part of a new workflow. You could force it by calling KNIME to run another workflow in the external tool node via the batch executor but that's not really a very nice (or convenient) way to solve this problem.
We'll be talking about the new workflow manager a bit at our upcoming workshop, btw ;-)
I would definitely encourage just such an option for specifying and passing variables. Will the new workflow manager be available in the upcoming November release of 1.3? (hope hope hope)
Regarding the workshop, what are the details there? Is this an online workshop? I would LOVE to participate.
I would definitely encourage just such an option for specifying and passing variables. Will the new workflow manager be available in the upcoming November release of 1.3? (hope hope hope)
Sorry, but we won't be able to move that fast. It will be part of release 2.0 which will come out in early 2008.
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Regarding the workshop, what are the details there? Is this an online workshop? I would LOVE to participate.
We will have some online demos available in a bit but the workshop I was talking about is a real, face-2-face old-fashioned thing: knime.org/events.