Forum Discussion

JeremyAnson's avatar
JeremyAnson
Qrew Cadet
4 years ago

Pipeline functionality/limitations

Apologies for the wide-ranging nature of this post, but having used pipelines for a while I wanted to check that I had understood some of the limitations relating to the pipelines editor, error logging and performance. Any feedback on the below would be much appreciated.

1. Is there any likelihood that save/undo/redo options will be made available in the pipeline editor? I know I can export the YAML and re-import again if I break an operational pipeline or decide to abandon a modification, but it makes maintaining multiple pipelines a challenge.

2. Is there any way to add comments via the pipeline UI or via YAML and have them appear in the UI? With multiple nested steps in a pipeline it takes time to determine what's going on (I have to open each step to see the table/fields), and being able to add comments to explain the purpose of each step would be very helpful.

3. Is there any way to change a pipeline trigger or reliably insert steps? I've found it impossible to change a trigger and difficult to change the order of steps - I can sometimes move a step above the preceding step, but don't seem to be able to do more than that. It makes editing pipelines very challenging.

4. Are there situations where a pipeline trigger would fail to fire? If users trigger more than 1 or 2 instances of a pipeline a minute some of the triggers fail to fire and apparently generate no error. 

5. Is there any way to set up notifications for pipeline errors? I can't see anywhere to do this.

6. Is there a reason why pipelines would generally run more slowly than automations? I have used automations to provide something like real-time back-end processing - e.g. user saves a record and one or more automations create or update other records before (or soon after) the screen reloads - but equivalent pipelines appear to run more slowly, impacting on the user experience. 


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Jeremy Anson
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  • I certainly don't have the answers to all of your questions, but I can give you info on some:

    1. Version control is something that many - MANY - users have been asking for. My understanding is that this is something that is on the roadmap, but I have no information about any kind of timeline for that feature
    2. No. Again, something MANY users have asked for, but no further info on this.
    3. No. See #2
    4. Yes, but I don't have the specifics of this. Pretty sure it requires many more than 1-2 triggers per minute.
    5. No. See #3 & #2
    6. These are wildly different technologies, built by different teams, at different times, with different intentions for their products. Quickbase is working to improve the response time on Pipelines, but my understanding is that this will be an incremental increase over time (just not sure how much time).
    ​​​

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    Blake Harrison
    bharrison@datablender.io
    DataBlender - Quickbase Solution Provider
    Atlanta GA
    404.800.1702 / http://datablender.io/
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    • JeremyAnson's avatar
      JeremyAnson
      Qrew Cadet
      Thanks Blake, that's very helpful. Since posting the original message I've voted in the https://quickbase.uservoice.com/ for a number of existing requests relating to pipelines - if I could have added more than 3 votes to some of them I would have! I appreciate that progress has been made in improving pipelines and hope that we'll see further improvements soon.

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      Jeremy Anson
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