Since the introduction of caching and the tools on bookmarks to "Run Just Contained" and "Between Selected" I find myself almost writing 'multiple workbenches in one' and only working with them interactively.
Which has made me think it would be neat to have a way to actually Run them in a traditional FME sense.
Original Idea
I've only thought about this a little bit, but maybe it's a mix of:
- a property that we can set on the bookmark to state its 'Run-able'
- a section in bookmarks where we can order run-able bookmarks
- Show a hierarchy of linked bookmarks that would run after one another
- Include an option to set bookmarks to run between to handle forking in a data flow.
- A step that allows disabling bookmarks to prevent running un-wanted upstream sections when running between
- From the traditional Run prompt, add an option that allows you to set specific bookmark(s?) to run or 'All'
Example
- "Bookmark One" runs some transformers to generate an AOI to a database
- "Bookmark Two" reads this AOI to download and generate more data saved locally
- linked "Bookmark Processing" runs some initial processing that generates results and errors that require manual tweaks on the downloaded data
- "Bookmark Three" reads the downloaded in "Bookmark Two"
- Linked "bookmark Processing" runs again against the corrected data, generates results and errors ...
Evolved idea
As I've typed this out I'm thinking maybe rather than run-able bookmarks we create "named run-instances", which has a similar concept where bookmarks are ordered within each instance but de-couples the bookmarks themselves.
Now you could create a separate tab view for each named instance which shows just that data flow and links between bookmarks that don't have feature-flows connecting them etc..
'Named run-instances" is a much better idea and I've changed my draft title from "Run a workspace by bookmark"
ps I've now ended up thinking about this more than just a little and I left this as a stream of conscious because I think there's value in understanding how people get to ideas (and I didn't want to rewrite everything!)
