Best way to group datamanager blocks

indranildatta · January 25, 2011 6:51AM

Hi guys,

I need some ideas on how to efficiently organise blocks on the DataManager canvas. I am working with a lot off sources which need quite a few operations and then I am appending them together into the Omniscope blue block. Could you please share some best practices about how to logically organise the blocks so that it can be easily maintained?

Many thanks for your participation.

Cheers!

chris · January 25, 2011 7:15AM

Hi,

Thanks for the question.

There are a number of ways you can organise your DataManager workspace to manage a large number of blocks.

The first way is to use the 'Tools>Layout blocks' command. This will automatically lay out all of the blocks in the workspace in a uniform manner.

By default when you are dragging blocks around the workspace they snap to pre-defined grid positions. The grid settings can be adjusted by selecting 'Tools>snap to grid'. You can adjust the size of the grid and whether the grid is displayed. If you decide to show the grid you should probably turn off the background pattern. This can be done by selecting 'Tools>Background>Show background pattern'.

You can use the 'Tools>Zoom' option to zoom out of the workspace, making it easier to see all of the blocks. The zoom option is also available in the Navigator. The navigator also provides an overview of your entire workspace and allows you to quickly move to any part of the workspace. To show the navigator, click on the 'Navigator' button in the view toolbar.

If you have a large number of blocks connected to a single operation block you can combine all of the blocks into a single group block. To see an example of how you might use this, try connecting two 'Demo data' blocks to an append block and connect the append block to a scramble block. Now click the tools button in the scramble block and choose 'Group upstream'. All 4 blocks will be combined into a single block. If you expand that block you can see the constituents of the block. To ungroup simply click on the block tools button and choose 'Ungroup'.

You can also create separate workflows in separate IOK files and import each of these into a 'master' DataManager workflow. This might be useful if you have a workflow which is constructed of several smaller complex tasks that you want to be able to manage separately.

Please let us know if you have any questions or if anyone has any other ideas or tips for improving the way that you can manage and organise blocks in a DataManager workflow.

Regards

Chris

Welcome!

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