updates 5/6

It's been a short, but busy week - Monday was Queen's Birthday holiday. Not only lots of data mining related work, but also lots of changes happening to ADAMS. The changes mainly improved usability in the Flow editor.

Fixes

  • MetaPartitionedMultiFilter now handles duplicate regular expressions, e.g., when filtering the same subset of attributes with several different filters

Changes

  • The notification area in the flow editor (eg displaying errors) now offers a "Jump to" menu item from its right-click popup menu. It lists all the actor names that were listed in the message, allowing you to quickly get to an actor that generated the error.

  • adams-spreadsheet: the LookUpAdd transformer now accepts spreadsheets as well for updating the look up table, not just pairs of objects

  • CopyFile/MoveFile now support the option for multiple attempts, in case the I/O operation fails (useful on Windows with its file locking)

  • adams-spreadsheet: the LookUpAdd transformer now accepts spreadsheets as well for updating the look up table, not just pairs of objects

Additions

  • Control charts are now available through "Chart" functionality of the spreadsheet viewer tool (adams-spreadsheet module).

Breakpoints

The breakpoint/debugging support in the flow has been reworked extensively, in order to make it much more user-friendly and efficient. This was possible by combining and extending the functionality of the "Debug" flow execution listener, which offered similar functionality to the "Breakpoint" control actor. However, setting it up was a bit tedious.

The new Breakpoint actors no longer have a GUI at all, they simply configure the "Debug" flow execution listener in a complete automatic fashion. By moving the control panel from the Breakpoint actor into the Debug listener, the added benefit is now that you only have a single window for all your breakpoints. Large flows with multiple breakpoints quickly became hard to debug, with many breakpoints simply called "Breakpoint" (uhm.. which one was this again?). Furthermore, the actor that is currently suspended, it now highlighted in the flow, so you can see where you are at. A new functionality is that you can now step through a flow, one actor at a time. This allows you to quickly check how variables/storage change, without having to stop the flow and add a new breakpoint at another location.

Breakpoints can be added/removed/modified/disabled/enabled at runtime very easily, using the new "Breakpoints" tab in the control panel (see attachment breakpoints_controlpanel.png).

The line-wrap bug in the token inspection panel has finally been fixed. When right-clicking in the object tree, you can now either copy the string representation to the clipboard or export it to various file formats. At the moment, spreadsheets, images and Weka datasets are supported apart from plain text.

Another minor, but significant modification: I added a "Run (debug)" menu item to the flow editor, which allows you to step through a flow, actor by actor, without having to have any Breakpoint control actors present.

../../images/breakpoints_flow.thumbnail.png ../../images/breakpoints_controlpanel.thumbnail.png

That's all for this week!