Stage Left Panel Tabs¶

The vertical tabs on the left side of the stage contain additional information on the current flow. The options defined in these tabs heavily affect the behavior of your flow by controlling its parametrization, its order or system response to error or warnings.

Full understanding about these flow configurations allows you to fully grasp the business logic implemented in the flow itself. During flow construction, moreover, you are going to inspect and use information contained in this tab very often to control task options or to prioritize some operations. Having this information immediately available on the stage together with the flow itself speed up its construction and its configuration.

Each available tab describes a single aspect of the flow:

Summary
Variables
Priorities
Alerts
Events
Documentation

Summary Tab¶

In the Summary tab, you can find an overall description about which tasks make up your flow. From the list of tasks in this panel, you can immediately understand the composition of your flow, and the number of tasks in it. It also allows you to navigate your flow, as from this panel you can directly highlight tasks and perform operations on them without searching for these tasks on the main canvas.

This list can be ordered by:

Category (the default)
Name

The order can be changed by interacting with the Order by drop-down menu located at the bottom of the Summary tab.

Note

The order doesn’t simply affect the task list visualization, but some operations change according to the selected order. In particular, the Option Manager is available only when the Category order is selected, while task sorting list enhancement is available only when the Name order is selected.

In the Category order, tasks are organized in categories and each category can be expanded to show the names of every single task. The number to the right of each category name informs the user about how many tasks of this type are present on the main canvas.

In the Name order, tasks are displayed in a single list in alphabetic order (set by default as ascending). The icon to the left of each task informs the user about the task category of each entry.

Tip

The total number of tasks in the current flow is displayed to the right of the Summary tab title.

In both order modes, when you click on a single task name, the corresponding task on the canvas is then selected. If the task is not already in the current canvas view, then the mini-map tool moves, and the visualization focuses on the previously selected task displaying it at the center of the canvas.

By double-clicking a single task name, you enter the editing mode, which allows you to modify the task name directly from the Summary list. The Summary list allows Ctrl+click and Shift+click shortcuts to select multiple tasks or range of tasks in a single operation.

By right-clicking any entry of the list, a dedicated context menu appears, and it contains a list of stage operations on tasks. In particular, the context menu contains the following entries:

Edit Priority: changes the priority of the selected tasks.
Open: opens the selected task directly from the summary list.
Rename: renames the selected task.
Delete: deletes the selected tasks.

On the upper right side of the Summary tab, there are two buttons. The pencil icon located to the left changes its effects according to the selected view order:

When the Category order is selected, you can open the Option Manager to change parametrization options for different tasks in a single operation. For more information, see page: Discovering the Option Manager.
When the Name order is selected, you can change the current ordering. Only alphabetic order is available, and it can either follow ascending or descending order. When right-clicking on this button, you change the ascending/descending order for the current list.

The magnifier icon is the Search functionality which allows the user to filter/reduce the list to a sub-list of defined tasks.

Variables Tab¶

In the Variables tab, users can find a comprehensive read-only view about variables available in the current flow. This variable list can be useful to find the correct variable name to be used in option parametrization reducing the possibilities of typos and mistakes which are difficult to identify during computation tests.

For a complete description of variables, please refer to the page: Rulex Platform Variables.

In the Variables tab, variables are divided into: Code and Vault and each list can be expanded or compressed by clicking on the corresponding header.

Exactly like in the Summary tab, also in the upper right side of the Variables tab, two buttons allow the user to switch from the read-only mode to edit-mode:

The pencil icon: opens the Variable Manager, explained in details here, which allows the user to modify the variables locally present on the flow itself.
The magnifier icon: allows the user to search and filter the variables list to visualize only desired information.

Note

The list of variables in the Variables tab always displays the values used in a flow for defined variables. This means the values inherited from the environment are automatically computed to always show the updated situation.

The background of variables is different for local variables and for variables inherited from the environment. The white background indicates local variables defined in the flow itself, while the green one indicates values inherited from environment variables.

Priorities Tab¶

A task priority states the computation order of the various task in the flow. Not all the tasks of the flow are directly connected one to each other. In this case a task priority can impose the relative order for disconnected branches.

In this panel you can have a complete overview about all the priorities defined for your flow and completely reconstruct the expected computation order.

Priority value 0 is the default priority of any new dragged task. A priority greater than 0 states a task which is normally computed before the rest of the flow, a priority lower than 0 defines a task computed at the end of the rest of the computation.

Alerts Tab¶

In many situations, it is important during a flow computation to warn or communicate to the user information about what it is going on. This is the prerogatives of flow alerts.

The Alerts panel contains the list of all the alerts associated to our flow. An alert is constituted by a trigger computation moment, called Event type, which in case of occurrence produces an automatic email communication to a predefined list of recipients. The content of the alert email depends on the configurable alert level, which could be:

Information
Warning
Error

A different background in the alert panel list (white for information, yellow for warning, and red for error) immediately conveys to the user the severity type of the alert.

Trigger computation events for a flow alert are:

Task started: triggered at the beginning of the computation of a selected task or list of tasks.
Task ended: triggered at the end of the computation of a selected task or list of tasks
Error raised: triggered when any error occurs in the flow computation.
Task duration: triggered if the computation time of a selected task or list of tasks overcomes a dedicated threshold.
Task rows: triggered if the number of rows of the output dataset meets some decided conditions (greater/lower than or equal to a particular number).

On the upper right-side of the Alerts panel, you can find two buttons to interact with the whole alerts list:

The plus icon: enables the user to add a new alert.
The disable icon: disables all the alerts for all the subsequent computations.

Once the plus icon is pressed the Add alert window is shown to add a new alert to the list. The whole procedure is described in detail in the Configuring an Alert page.

Directly from the Alerts panel, you can interact with the list of alerts to:

Delete alert: by clicking the cross-shaped icon located at the right of each line, you can delete a single existing alert.
Disable alert: by clicking this icon located at the right of each line, you can disable a single existing alert.

These operations are also available through context menu by right-click any point of the alert line.

To modify an existing alert you simply need to double-click on any point of the line, the Alert panel is shown to start editing.

Events Tab¶

In Rulex Factory terminology, events are Macro code linked to a particular flow. Execution of these events can be manually triggered by the user directly from the Events tab or automatically scheduled using the Plan Schedule panel (in desktop version) or the CLI/API system.

The Events tab contains a list of all the Macro code associated to the current flow.

Note

Differently from Macro Resources in Macro code contained within an event the flow name and the environment path as well as the resource type entry could be omitted since they always implicitly refer to the considered flow.

To define a new event, a Macro code is needed. The Macro code can be directly inserted by writing the macro name in the Add macro window, opened by clicking the plus button located in the upper right-side of the Events panel, or recorded using the Record Macro code procedure.

Further information about the Add macro window can be found in the associated section.

Once an event is created the following operations are available directly from the Events table:

Delete event: by clicking the cross-shaped icon located to the right of each line, you can delete the selected event.
Run event: by clicking on the icon located to the right of each line, the event can be executed.

As explained in Macro Resources page, an event can derive its Macro code directly from a saved Macro Resources. In this way once the event is executed, it will execute the code saved at environment level in the macro rather a self-contained code. To highlight this difference, in the Type column of the Events panel, the value saved is shown when the code is derived from a Macro Resources and the value custom is shown otherwise.

Documentation Tab¶

The Documentation tab contains the documentation about the flow that the developer wants to convey on the logic implemented in the current solution. This panel displays in a single place the list of all the tasks present in the flow to allow the user to read/modify their internal documentation without the need to open the corresponding task. This same panel also allows you to define a general flow documentation explaining the logic contained in the flow itself in a general introduction.

By default, the list of tasks appears in the Documentation panel organized by Category, exactly like in the Summary and Priorities tabs. The order can be changed using the Order by drop-down menu present in the bottom side of the panel. Available options are:

Category
Name

By double-clicking on a single task line, the user can open the Documentation Editor to modify and customize the documentation of that particular entry.

By right-clicking on the same entry, a context menu appears allowing the user to:

Edit documentation: it opens the Documentation Editor. It can also be opened by double-clicking the corresponding task line.
Autofill: it autofills the entry with the auto-documentation procedure. More information about Rulex Factory auto-documentation can be found in the Autofilling a task section.
Delete: it erases all the corresponding content, resulting in an empty documentation for the selected task.

The Ctrl+click or Shift+click commands allow you to select more than one line at a time and apply the operations of the context menu to the whole list of selected tasks, rather than applying the changes to a single entry.

As for all the other left panel tabs, in the upper right-side of the Documentation panel, a set of buttons manages the most commonly used operations for the flow documentation:

The pencil icon: opens the Documentation Editor to allow the user editing the flow documentation.
The export icon: exports the whole documentation as a PDF file. Further information about documentation exporting procedure is available in the Exporting the documentation section.
The magnifier icon: allows the user to search and filter the task list to visualize only the desired documentation.