I happen to notice a super annoying problem that has the potential of causing lots of problems for users in:
If an extension is unavailable, i.e. after updating from 5.2 to 5.3 in regards to Palladian or presumably during Community Hacking Days the Vernalis nodes, connections can get severed.
Whilst nodes are placed again upon the extension get installed, they can loose their connection configuration like the Vernalis node ports change from data to flow variable.
In order to prevent potential bricking an entire workflow, I’d like to propose to introduce:
A warning about missing nodes upon save
A warning about severe4d / not established connections upon save
the option in all save warning dialogues to save a copy instead
I agree this is a problem. I suspect something like this was the cause of a forum problem (and confusion) here:
See my later response on that thread to that comment…
This was occurring before 5.3, where the user downloaded a Workflow containing a component that utilised the Continental Nodes. From what I can work out, they had subsequently installed the missing extension but the Workflow was irreparably broken when they saved it. This then made it appear that the component itself was the cause of the error, which it wasn’t (KNIME had broken it). They had to redownload the Workflow but had this been their only copy that would potentially have been a bigger problem.
I would expect missing nodes to remain as connected “placeholders” awaiting the extension and then work once the extension was installed, but this doesn’t appear to be the case.
It is working to some degree but I suppose specific information like the nodes port config is getting lost defaulting to the initial state once the node / extension gets installed.
Though, it is the first time it’s happening for me despite having participated in the 5.2 community hacking days too. Maybe something about the “execution sequence” is different this time (for me).
