Will KNIME prevent you from making a circular (wasteful) workflow?

KNIME Analytics Platform
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This is more of a “what if” type question than anything as it wouldn’t serve a useful purpose (that I can think of anyways). I recently tried to use some of the OpenMS modules to see if I could create a workflow that ran forever without doing any useful work. It seems that there might not be a way to do this though, as any time I tried to reconnect the output of the last node back to something earlier in the workflow it wouldn’t allow it.

Is this something that is specifically designed into KNIME?

FWIW, I was using the file conversion node in OpenMS, which can easily do file conversions like mzML -> mzXML -> mzData -> mzML (or any other direction of those four formats).

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The only way to get data from a node to be used back as an input upstream of that node is a recursive loop. I’m sure if you try hard enough you can get the settings on the loop end to be infinite!

Steve

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Thank you! I figured making an infinite loop using a loop tool would be straightforward and almost certainly possible. I was wondering if I could actually build a circular loop where nodes came back to themselves and kept doing useless work. Again, more of an exercise in whether or not I could do it. It seems the answer is no (and probably for good reasons).

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