Thanks for the update John - great to hear improvements are on the way.
At the risk of repeating some of the other comments, here is a 'wishlist' I shared with our Customer Success Manager last year.
1. Access to all pipelines
While I do have the option to 'switch to another user' when viewing pipelines, it seems details in the activity log are not visible when viewing as another user, making it impossible to investigate problems. Is this a known issue? Are there any plans to make it easier to view all pipelines, regardless of who created them?
2. Basic editing controls
Is there a plan to add save, undo/redo to the editor or to enable view/edit modes? It's too easy to accidentally change a pipeline.
3. Adding comments
The pipeline editor would be much improved if we could add comments. It's impossible to understand what a pipeline is doing without accessing each step because the editor only shows the step name (On New Event, Search Records, Update Record etc.).
4. Copying applications/creating a sandbox
Is there any plan to replicate pipelines when an application is copied? Doing this manually adds a significant overhead to our use of pipelines. We have contemplated building our own utility to automate this process, but would rather not have to do this.
5. Modifying pipelines
It seems to be very difficult to move and insert steps in existing pipelines and impossible to change the trigger step. Changing pipelines by exporting the YAML, editing and importing as a new pipeline is not a great solution and we usually end up starting again from scratch.
6. Notifications of errors
Are there any plans to provide notifications when pipelines generate errors?
7. Pipeline performance
Ideally we would use pipelines to provide some back-end functionality that would integrate with the front-end – i.e. user action on screen triggers a pipeline and the results are reflected back on screen – but I appreciate this cannot be guaranteed, and that with the current performance we're implementing workarounds to prevent users being confused and frustrated that their actions take time – often several minutes - to be reflected in the application.
I know there have been steps taken to increase the resources dedicated to processing pipelines, but is there a longer-term road map in place to improve performance of pipelines?
8. Analysing pipeline performance
Are there any plans to provide tools to enable us to analyse pipeline usage and performance and perhaps to prioritise some pipelines over others?
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Jeremy Anson
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Original Message:
Sent: 03-29-2022 18:21
From: John Karas
Subject: Pipeline GUI Issues
Hi Community members - Thanks for the feedback here, we appreciate the frustration you're voicing and really want to improve your experience. For those of you who I don't know yet, my name is John Karas and I'm a Group Product Manager here at Quickbase. I lead our a team of Product Managers that are driving Quickbase's integration & automation product strategy. One of the critical pieces to this is our Pipelines capabilities.
Paul, Joel, Mike, Austin, and Mark, you've really shed some light on issues that we are eager to address for you and the rest of our community on the Pipelines front. We have a sleek new look & feel coming to the "Pipelines GUI" (we call it "Pipelines Builder", the area where you create and edit your Pipeline details) and we'll be unveiling more at Empower 2022 on this. I strongly believe this will help in your GUI performance pains / loading aspects. Another thing I felt here was a better desire for Error Handling / Messages. This is something we have on our radar, and we will be bring some benefits into the new Pipelines Builder. However, I think there is more work we can do on the error handling / messaging front as well beyond the areas we've got active development occurring on. I also felt pain here around not being able to re-order / insert / move steps. This new Pipelines Builder is designed to enable this exact functionality. The feedback on field-name changes, step & error reporting, and additional experience improvements are all valid and my team is indeed looking at how we can tackle them.
Your feedback helps us continuously prioritize & reprioritze what things we build & deliver to make our customers jobs & lives easier. As with anything in software (or in life), we know there are bright spots and there are areas that need more attention. We hope you'll continue using this powerful platform as we continue to use your feedback to make it more delightful. I hope to see many of your Empower, and would be happy to spend some more time together catching up & hearing more of your thoughts.
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John Karas
Original Message:
Sent: 03-25-2022 08:59
From: Paul Peterson
Subject: Pipeline GUI Issues
I am wondering if anyone else is encountering troubles creating pipelines using the GUI. I spent most of the day yesterday attempting to create a very simple pipeline that is triggered by a date change and updates that change in another table. I had a similar Automation that took less than 5 minutes to create.
The overall layout of the pipeline:
Step A - Triggered when the date changes
Step B - change a field in the same table that will be used in the search (as I'm typing this a thought occurred, is the prev option available in the advanced query? for {{fid.XEX.a.$prev.field_name}}? I know the syntax is probably wrong, but will that work conceptually)
Step C - Prepare Bulk Record Upsert - All three fields needed for the upsert are defined
Step D - Search for changed records (even though in most cases the search will only return 1 record)
In Do Loop:
Step E - Add a Bulk Upsert Row
Step F - Update Record in Step A to clear the search flag
Loop Complete
Step G - Commit Upsert
The problems I encountered were:
A) Each time I something to a step (trigger field, fields for future use, table, etc.) I get a spinning circle of dots for at least a minute and cannot edit anything while waiting for the precious change to update.
B) Table, fields, or other required data IS entered and showing in the step but I still get the yellow caution when the step is minimized stating that the step is missing required fields. Most of the time this will go away if I refresh the schema (IF this works, I have to refresh the Schema several times). Other times the caution will only go away after refreshing the browser window.
C) The BIGGEST issue, I am not able to add the fields to the Add a Bulk Upsert Row. They are defined in Step C - Prepare Bulk Record Upsert. When I add the step to Add a Bulk Upsert Row I get two error messages. The first, and most annoying one, just says "Oops, something went wrong." That has to be the most frustrating and useless error message I have ever seen. When I refresh the schema I get, "Internal error while refreshing schemas. Please contact support if you need help" This message is just as useless. I have contacted support and after waiting an entire day the issue is no closer to resolution.
Thank you for your patience if you made it this far into my rant.
Is anyone else experiencing the same issues? If so, how did you resolve them?
@Evan Martinez - Are there any plans to improve the error message in the pipeline GUI? My experience with them in this case and other instances has been unpleasant. Are there any plans to make the error messages less vague and ambiguous? I know error handling can get complicated, but what purpose does "Oops, something went wrong" serve? Also, are there plans to improve the performance of the pipeline GUI. I was extremely excited when pipelines were introduced, but have become much less of a fan after trying to creating them.
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Paul Peterson
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