cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Choose Language Hide Translation Bar
Wonderful Ways of Workflows: A Deep Dive into JMP Workflow Builder - (2023-US-PO-1500)

Mandy Chambers, Principal Test Engineer, JMP

 

Now that JMP 17 has introduced the Workflow Builder, it's time to discover more details of the UI. Your workflow may encounter an error and the workflow stops. How do you do an in-depth analysis of the step settings to figure out what went wrong? This talk offers you a closer look at how to diagnose problems, work through JSL errors, and add custom JSL to optimize your workflow.  Are you aware of the red triangle menu options that will allow your workflows to be more effective?  We share helpful tips that will enable you to take full advantage of workflow features. Becoming proficient using Workflow Builder will help you create smarter and more efficient JMP workflows.

 

 

Hello. My  name  is  Mandy  Chambers,

and  I'm  Principal  Test  Engineer in  the  JMP  development  group.

I  want  to  talk  to  you  today about  the  wonderful  ways  of  workflows.

It's  a  deep  dive into  the  Workflow  Builder.

For  those  of  you that  maybe  haven't  had  a  chance

to  see  Workflow  Builder,

in  order  to  activate  it, you  go  to  the  File  menu  in  JMP

and  you  see  File,  New,  New  Workflow, and  the  Workflow  will  pop  up.

As  you  see  on  your  left,

you  open  data  or  import  data to  begin  your  recording,

and  then  it  begins  recording  your  steps as  you're  working  in  JMP.

There  are  a  lot  of  buttons, a  lot  of  images,

mini  check  marks,  and  more.

Workflow  Builder  has  a  lot of  built-in  functionality.

I  created  a  QR  code  up  here that  you  can  scan.

I  did  a  talk  previously  in  the  spring

that's  a  little  bit  more  introductory about  Workflow  Builder.

If  you  scan  that  QR  code, you  can  go  back  and  pull  up  that  talk

and  get  all  the  beginning  things  you  need for  Workflow  Builder  to  get  started.

But  for  today,  we're  going  to  talk  in about  a  little  bit  more,

about  the  UI  and  some  of  a  deeper  dive into  Workflow  Builder.

Now  this  PowerPoint  presentation is put together  so  that  you  can  review  it.

I  have  built  a  journal that's  part  of  the  demo

that  has  a  lot of  Workflow  Builders  included  with  it

where  you  can  get  those, edit  them,  and  try  some  things  out.

But  for  today, I'm  just  doing  a  short  presentation,

so  I'm  going  to  flip  through  this a  little  bit  quickly.

The  red  triangle  menu has  a  lot  of  functionality,

and  you  can  see  that in  the  image  on  the  left.

The  right-click  menu for  the  Workflow  steps

that  is  inside  of  the  Workflow  Builder,

there  are  also  commands  in  there.

Here  is  not  a  total  list of  all  the  red  triangle  menu  options,

but  some  of  them,  some  of  my  favorites.

You  can  read  those  on  your  own.

Then  I  also  have  the  Workflow  steps right-click  menu  options  in  here.

Then  when  you  open  up  the  right-hand  side of  the  Workflow  Builder,

you're  taken  to  the  Step  settings.

There's  an  Add  Action  button

and  there  are several  commands  listed  on  there.

I  am  going  to  speak  briefly to  a  couple  of  those  today

so  you  can  use  those to  enhance  your  workflows.

It's  one  thing  to  run  a  Workflow  Builder and  have  it  succeed.

You  see  the  green  check  marks that  run  down  the  page,

but  it's  quite  another  thing  to  run  it and  have  a  red X  jump  out  at  you.

We've  had  questions  about how  to  diagnose  those  errors.

I  included  a  couple  of  workflows

for  you  to  try  that  out and  I  gave  you  instructions.

But  this  one  here  is  just showing  the  red X  on  the  open.

If  you  hover  over  that  little  red X, it  will  sometimes  tell  you.

You  can  see  this  says it  can't  open  the  table.

You  can  see  I  typed  in  wrong  directory,

so  it's  looking  for  something that  it  can't  find.

If  you  correct  that, nine  times  out  of  10,  it  will  run.

Another  example  here  is  one  that  failed.

Someone  had  done  a  dashboard

and  the  table was  substituted  as  a  table 1

instead  of  being  the  name  of  the  table.

JMP  was  a  little  lost.

If  you  fix  that, you  can  also  resolve  that  error.

I'm  going  to  show  this  one  today.

This  is  a  mental  health  workflow with  some  COVID-19  data.

It's  a  little  less  about  the  data and  a  little  more  about  pulling  it  in,

cleaning  it  up, and  doing  a  few  things  here.

But  in  this  particular  example, I  touch  on  a  number  of  things.

I  create  a  workflow  package.

I  hide  the  tables.

It's  a  big  table, so  I  use  a  subset  data  table.

I  create  some  of  my  own  JSL.

Then  I  do  put  it  in  a  dashboard  at  the  end

because  people  have  asked about  that,  and  that  does  work.

I'll  show  you  that  one  today.

I  have  another  workflow  in  here

that  is  what  I  call  a   stop-and-wait for  an  action  to  happen.

This  was  done  with  SQL  query,

and  I'm  using  a  breakpoint in  this  example.

There  are  other  ways to  cause  your  workflow  to  stop  and  wait

using  show  message  and  things.

But  today  I'm  just  showing  you  this  one about  how  to  use  a  breakpoint.

Then  finally,  but  not  last,

people  are  always  wanting to  publish  their  reports.

Does  it  work  with  JMP  Live?

Well,  you  can  publish  reports if  you  have  JMP  Live.

It  does  not  publish  the  workflow. It  just  publishes  the  report.

But  I  do  have  an  example  of  that.

Let's  exit  out  of  this and  let's  go  to  the  demo  quickly.

This  is  the  journal.

I'm  going  to  go  through  the  steps real  quick  at  the  beginning.

I  tried  to  be  clear,  but  it  tells  you  here

if  you  copy  the  zip  file to  the  presentation

into  a  single  folder that  will  give  you  the  best  results,

you  have  the  journal and  you  have  all  the  workflows

that  go  with  the  journal.

Then  I've  got  a  note  here,

and  I  also  embedded  a  note in  every  single  example

that  says  close  the  workflows without  saving  them

so  you  can  preserve  the  examples.

You're  going  to  open  things  up and  make  some  changes  yourself.

If  you  want  to  save  those  changes, I  just  suggest  going  up  to  the  File  menu

and  saying,  File,  Save  As and  give  it  a  different  name.

Now,  if  you  happen  to  write  over  it, you  can  obviously  just  grab  them  again,

but  I  just  thought would  give  you  that  hint.

Real  quickly,  I'm  not  going  to  spend a  lot  of  time  again  on  the  introduction,

but  as  I  said,  you  can  go  back

and  here  is  a  link  to  that  talk as  well  as  the  QR  code

if  you  want  to  scan  and  go  back

to  the  more  introductory level  of  workflows.

But  just  to  show  you  where  it  is, if  you  go  up  to  the  File  menu  and  go  here,

say,  New  Workflow, it  opens  up  just  like  that.

I've  also  added  in  here,  this  is  again, the  how  to  some  definitions  and  shortcuts

for  things you  can  peruse  that  on  your  own.

This  is  the  first  example I  want  to  show  you.

Again,  I'm  not  going  to  do every  single  one  of  these  steps.

I'm  going  to  pop  open  this  workflow.

But  this  one  covers  re-recording  a  step.

Then  it  also  talks  about  at  the  end, a  little  shortcut  for  creating  a  column.

Let's  run  this  real  quick.

I  use  the  diabetes  table and I just  ran  a  Graph  Builder.

What  I  want  to  show  you  how  to  do,

and  then  I  did  create an  extra  column  here  at  the  end

that  was  just  a  new  formula  column.

I  want  to  close  this  up and  I  want  to  demonstrate  to  you

one  of  the  features of  the  right-click  menu.

The  arrow  here executes  the  entire  workflow,

but  this  arrow will  step  through  it.

If  I  click  one  time,  I  only  go  one  step,

and  now  I've  stopped on  this  Graph  Builder.

What  I  want  to  do is  I  want  to  re-record  that  step.

If  I  right-click  while  I'm  sitting  on  that

and  I  go  down  here and  say,  re-record  steps,

it  changes  the  look  of  this.

You  can  see  right  here it's  grayed  out  and  it  says  done,  cancel.

It's  waiting  for  me  to  do  something.

I'm  going  to  go  up  to  Graph  Builder ,

and I'm  going  to  go and  grab  a  couple  of  columns.

It  really  wouldn't  matter.

I'm  twisting  this  graph  around a  different  way.

You  go  up  here and  you  click  your  done  step

and  then  it's  waiting  still.

You  can  see  here  it  says  launch  platform

and  then  it's  still  sitting  on  this  report that  it  didn't  run  yet,

which  was  the  one  I  had  in  there.

I  need  to  hit  this  Done  button to  stop  the  recording

and  then  it's  going to  replace  this  on  top  of  the  launch.

I'm  going  to  hit  Done  and  you  can  see that's  now  my  new  Graph  Builder

and  it's  been  put  into  the  workflow

and  now  it's  waiting on  the  next  step  to  execute,

which  is  my  new  column.

That's  just  an  easy  quick  way to  execute  that  step.

I  did  want  to  show  you  that  inside  of  here I  made  some  notes  on  things.

That's  actually  showing the  image  of  the  table.

But  in  here there's  some  notes  on  the  column,

like  how  to  change  the  columns to  create  that  formula  column.

If  you  look  inside  of  the  Workflow

in  the  step  settings, you'll  be  able  to  find  those  things

and  follow  along,  I  think, and  I'm  not  going  to  save  that.

Hopefully,  that  will  be  helpful  to  you.

The  Workflow  Builder  2  example is  this  dashboard  that  I  created

with  the  mental  health  data.

A gain,  I  stepped  through some  of  these  images  here,

telling  you  what  to  do.

What  I  want  to  do  now is  just  show  you  some  of  these  things.

This  is  a  big  data  table,

and  sometimes when  you're  dealing  with  bigger  data,

it  can  make  your  workflows go  a  little  slower.

When  you're  building  the  workflow,

there  is  a  little  option  up  here called  Allow  Backsteps.

By  default,  it's  always  on because  you're  building  workflow.

A s  you  step  through  the  workflow,

you  may  want  to  go  back, you  may  want  to  redo  something.

It's  a  good  idea  to  keep  that  on.

But  when  you  get your  workflow  completely  built,

sometimes  when  you  uncheck  that, and  I  have  a  note  right  here,

it  just  enhances  the  performance a  little  bit.

For  this  workflow  to  run  a  little  quicker, I  have  unchecked  it.

That's  just  a  little  tip  for  you.

The  other  thing  that  I'm  doing  here

is  I  didn't  care  if  I  really  ran  this with  all  the  data  or  some  of  it.

I  used  a  couple  of  the  buttons  here.

I  went  to  Add  Action  and  I  said, I  want  to  create  a  subset.

Then  I'm  also  hiding  my  tables

because  I  didn't  want  the  tables all  over  the  desktop.

You  can  add  that  action and  it  comes  in  here.

What  you  have is  you  have  a  chance  to  subset  the  data.

Now  we  have  some  things  built  in.

You  can  use  all  the  data, 50 %,  25,  whatever.

For  this  example,  I'm  using  25 %.

Then  we  even  ask  you,

"What  do  you  want  to  do with  that  source  table?"

I  said  I  want  to  close  it.

Then  I'm  only  hiding  the  subset  table.

That's  a  nice  little  feature  as  well.

Then  as  I  was  creating  this,

as  I  said  before, we've  had  questions  about  dashboards.

I created  three  graphs

and  then  I  threw  them  into  a  dashboard by  using  combined  windows.

I'm  also  hiding  the  table  here because  when  you  run  the  dashboard,

it  opens  up  another  copy  of  the  table.

On  these  workflows,  though,

I  didn't  want the  Graph  Builders  to  be  on  the  desktop.

The  graphs  were  created, and  then  I  just  went  in  and  did  some  JSL

and  added  to  name  each  one  of  them.

This  one's  named  Graph  Builder  1,

this  is  Graph  Builder  2, and  this  is  Graph  Builder  3.

I  went  up  to  the  red  triangle  at  the  end and  said  add  a  custom  action.

That  pops  up  here.

Then  what  I  did is  I  went  in  and  typed  my  own  JSL

to  say  close  those  windows.

Graph  Builder  1,  2,  3, close  those  windows.

I  don't  want  them  left when  the  workflow  is  run.

Let  me  run  this  real  quick and  just  show  you  that  it's  going  to  run.

It's  going  to  create  my  dashboard.

There's  my  dashboard  and  you  can  see there's  nothing  else  on  the  desktop.

The  table  is  hidden.

You  can  see  that  down  here in  my  JMP  home  window.

But  now  you  have  one  clean  report.

You  don't  have  a  lot  of  stuff  around

that  you  have  to  close and  move  and  all  of  that.  That's  nice.

Then  one  more  part  of  this that  I  added  in  here

is  that  this  workflow  will  work completely  fine  for  you  locally.

The  way  it  is,  you  can  save  it

is  just  go  and  file  save, saving  it  as  a  dot J MP  flow.

But  if  you  want  to  give  to  somebody,

the  best  thing  to  do is  to  create  a  workflow  package.

That's  what  I've  done.

But  you  can  tell  by  the  name  of  this,

it's  got  an  underscore  PKG attached  to  it.

When  you  do  that, it  packages  the  files.

The  files  go  with  the  workflow,

and  then  you  can  share  it with  your  coworkers.

Give  that  a  try  and  see how  that  works  for  you.

Now,  these  other  examples, three  is  doing  some  generalized  workflows.

The  steps  are  in  there  for  that.

Step  four  is  working  through  the  errors that  I  mentioned  earlier.

Then  step  six is  my  publishing  to  JMP  Live,

but  I'm  actually not  going  to  do  that  one  today.

Then  I  briefly  want  to  show  you  here this  fifth  one  that's  a   stop-and-wait.

Real  quick,  this  is  running  a  report. It's  going  to  stop.

This  little  dot  here  is  a  breakpoint.

If  you  right-click,

you  can  set  the  breakpoint  here, and  it's  enabled.

When  it's  enabled,  it's  black, which  means  it's  active.

If  I  uncheck  that,  it  gets  hollowed  out.

What  that  means  now

is  that  the  breakpoint is  still  sitting  there,

but  it's  really  not  doing  anything.

Then  if  I  go  over  here and  click  it  one  more  time,  it's  gone.

The  other  nice  thing  about  this  feature

is  I  can  check  it  here and  say,  set  a  breakpoint,

or  I  can  go  over  here

to  the  little  tray  on  the  left and  check  it,

and  now  the  breakpoint is  activated  there  as  well.

When  I  run  this just  so  you  can  see  what  it  does,

it  runs  to  that  point.

It's  waiting. It's  sitting  there.

I can  look  at  my  analysis,

I  can  look  at  my  distributions and  analyze  things,

and  then  I  can  hit  the  arrow and  I  can  continue  going.

Then  my  last  Graph  Builder  ran.

It's  a  nice  way  to  run  something, do  some  checks,  run  some  more  stuff.

You  can  set  multiple  breakpoints.

There's  no  limit  to  that.

You  can  do  it  while  you're  maybe trying  to  debug  something.

It  works  very  nicely.

That's  all  I  have  time  for  today.

Thank  you for  letting  me  share  with  you.

I  hope  that  you  get  a  hold  of  JMP  17 and  get  the  Workflow  Builder  going.

If  you  have  any  questions, I'm  always  around  to  answer  those.

Thanks  a  lot.