Factory Toolbar#

Located at the top of the screen, the toolbar displays all the essential buttons for managing the most important operations of the Factory component.

To help users navigate through all these different operations, they are divided into 5 different classes, each corresponding to 5 different sections of the toolbar:

  • Explore Resources: it contains the access to the Explorer

  • General operations: it contains all general operations for the management of the corresponding component or primary resource. These operations can be found in almost all components of Rulex Platform.

  • Computation modes: it contains the most important operations of Rulex Factory, flow and tasks computation options, in all its different forms.

  • Flow operation shortcuts: it contains all operations that can only be performed with a selected and opened flow.

  • User settings and manual search: it contains in all the components the user configuration settings and the direct access to Rulex Infopoint documentation server.

The Explorer is fully covered in the Exploring Rulex Platform page; in the next sections we are going to focus on the other 4 classes of operations.

General operations#

The general section includes operations related to the whole Rulex Platform components or to the core characteristics of the primary resource managed in the corresponding component.

This section contains the following buttons:

  • pic1 The Full Screen button turns the software’s view to full screen view.

  • pic2 The Undo button rolls back the last operation performed by reaching the last computation. Please note that it doesn’t cancel the last computation.

  • pic3 The Redo button cancels the previous undo operation.

Operations of undo/redo are only available with a flow selected and opened. They are applied to all operations performed on the flow stage, in particular to:

  • Addition/deletion of tasks

  • Addition/deletion of links

  • Dragging of tasks and links

  • Renaming of tasks

  • Addition/Editing/deletion of widgets

Attention

Even if the operation is redone, all data and the computational statuses of the tasks affected are reset and not restored. As an example, if you delete a task and then click the Undo button, the task will be restored with all its connections and options, but it will be in Ready status without any data inside.

Computation modes#

Execution of flow and tasks is the core feature of Rulex Factory. For this reason, Rulex Factory provides you with different computation modes for tasks and flows.

This section of the toolbar contains the following Compute buttons:

  • pic4 The Compute Selected button computes only the selected task(s).

  • pic5 The Compute Onwards button computes all the tasks downstream of the selected task(s).

  • pic6 The Compute Up to button computes all the tasks upstream of the selected task(s).

  • pic7 The Compute Flow button computes the whole flow.

  • pic8 The Compute In-memory button computes all the tasks in the flow, without saving its data and results in the database. Normally, when you compute a flow, all of its intermediate steps are saved in the database, and this operation takes time. Computing a flow with in In-Memory mode consequently speeds up the entire computation operation. Please view the Hint box below to know more on this computation’s mode constraints.

  • pic9 The Compute In-memory (save sources data) button computes all the tasks in the flow, saving the output of the import tasks in the database at the end. This may be useful if you want to check raw data.

Warning

The first three entries of this list require a task selection active on the main canvas. If none of the tasks is selected a computation error is returned.

All computation operations, except for Compute In-memory, will lock the current flow; making it impossible for any other user to open the same flow for the rest of the computation time.

Hint

Recommendations on the Compute In-memory computation option

  • the flow must have already been tested and debugged as you cannot evaluate intermediate steps of the flow via a Data Manager task.

  • one or more export tasks should be added at the end of the flow to collect and view the results.

Before computing in any of the listed options, remember to save the changes you made to any task option, otherwise a pop-up will appear asking whether, you want to save the changes made to the task/s. Another pop-up appears if you are trying to compute a task with computed child task, warning you that an implicitly soft reset will be made on all the child tasks.

Flow operation shortcuts#

All the operations described in this section are only available with a flow opened and selected. Most of the buttons are shortcuts to similar operations in the flow context menu, and are applied to the current flow.

This toolbar section contains:

  • pic10 The Export button, which allows you to export the current flow. For more information, see section: Exporting Flows.

  • pic11 The Execution parameters button, which allows you to set the flow execution parameters. For more information, see section: Flow execution parameters.

  • pic12 The Search button, which allows you to search tasks, variables, options or history within the flow. For more information, see page: Searching in Flows.

  • pic13 The Add versioning button, which allows you to add the flow to the git versioning system. For more information, see page: Versioning operations.

  • pic14 The Plan schedule button, which provides access to the scheduler. For more information, see page: Scheduling Flow Execution.

  • pic15 The Record Macro button, which allows you to record a macro code. For a complete description about this procedure along with its subsequent use, please see page: Recording Macro code.

  • pic16 The Performance Analyzer button, which provides access to the Performance Analyzer. For more information, see the subsection below Performance Analyzer.

  • pic17 The Flow Review Tool button, providing access to the Flow Review Tool, which checks your flow against a provided set of rules, it is supposed to fulfill. For more information, see page: The Flow Review Tool.

Performance Analyzer

When a flow is computed in Rulex, it may be useful to understand how much time was required by each individual task in the flow to load, run and store data.

The Performance Analyzer task allows you to easily understand the time distribution of a flow computation, divided by task and task type.

Note

The total time overviews (Total execution time, Total load time, Total run time, Total store time) refer to the whole flow, and not just the tasks included in the graph. Due to Rulex Platform parallel task computation the sum of all the computation times of the single tasks does not correspond to the total flow computation time.

By default, the 10 highest task computation times are displayed in the horizontal bar plot as shown in the image below.

The Performance Analyzer

A single task computation can be divided in three different phases:

  • Load: when the task imports its input data from the parent tasks.

  • Run: when the task atomic operation is effectively performed.

  • Store: for not-in-memory computation this is the phase where output data are saved back in Rulex Platform working area.

Each of these phase options can be checked or unchecked to be inserted/erased in the final Performance Analyzer plot. The number of bars in the plot can be increased through a dedicated configuration via the Number of tasks box in the top left corner of the Performance Analyzer panel. Here is the order used for the bars:

  • Total execution time (default in the Order by drop-down list)

  • Load time

  • Run time

  • Store time