Disable/Enable transformers & Duplicate transformer parts with their nodes

[Rickvzanden]

Disable function
It would be awesome if we could shut off certain parts in a entity transformer for debugging purposes during testing. A simple enabled/disabled slider should do the trick.

For example an paint edited screenshot below:

Copy function
It would be great to be able to duplicate parts within a entity transformer on different levels so you can easy replicate repetitive transformers which need a slight differentiation.
When duplicating it should copy all inner nodes within the transformer and their values as well.

[Ruben]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the feedback. Regarding a ‘Disable transformer’ function, I would recommend you use breakpoints for testing and debugging purposes. You can find an article about this here:

Datapoints (breakpoints) in transformer for debugging

You can easily debug your transformers by setting ‘datapoints’. These datapoints are comparable with traditional breakpoints, the difference is however that with a datapoint enabled the configuration will keep running instead of ‘breaking’ where it has been set. How To activate the datapoints you only need to click the grey dot next to the transformer. The dot will now turn red and is primed. You can prime multiple datapoints at the same time, as previously mentioned the process won’t stop a…

Is this something that would solve your problem?

Secondly, there isn’t a ‘copy’ function within the transformer’s configurations itself at the moment. I would recommend keeping a high granularity in your transformers and duplicating them by clicking on the following option:

[Rickvzanden]

Hi Ruben,

Thank you for your reply.
First of all I would like to state these feature requests would be “nice to have” and not so necessary “must have”. Just something that would be quality of life things for us.
We just hope these things are something Alumio would consider and if not so be it =)

On topic: Breakpoints are certainly useful and we use them often but they only work when the whole flow processes correctly. If for example your entity tranfsformer would fail with an exception there is no breakpoint data. Turning on/off parts could help identify the point where the transformer breaks.

Regarding the copy function I get what you mean on that point by keeping the transformers as small as possible to be able to re-use them in others. But the hassle of moving an part within a transformer (which could have several nested items, and those having several more) to a new one can be quite tedious in some situations.
Maybe instead of a copy function something like exporting a part of the transformer (with nodes included) to a new entity transformer could be something as a solution as well.

[Ruben]

Hello again Rick,

That indeed sounds like some features that would enhance the user experience for Alumio in the end. Let me make a feature request for this with our engineering team. I will get back to you if/when it is added to our product roadmap.