Mark wrote:
> The challenge is to expose features like this just enough to stimulate
the
> user into looking it up. I think that's what the Bases First setting
should
> do. It'll still work without, but more efficiently with.
But they don't have any way of knowing that it's set without opening up
the transformer first, and changing the connection order would cause the
process to break without the user knowing what they did wrong.
I agree that documentation is definitely an important best practice, but
I also think that there is a difference between documenting language
features and documenting process. I don't feel that I should have to
document items that are exposed to the user (such as Bases First) any
more than I should have to explain what a FOR loop does in my code
comments.
> In this case - would it help to show in the workspace what order
datasets
> are read or reach the transformer? To be fair our Workbench team is
doing
> a great job of gradually exposing all items like this, but if you can
> think of a way to make some of these oddities more obvious then let us
know.
Just so we're clear, I think that Workbench rocks. I've lost a couple
teeth arguing over that one. As a suggestion, would it be possible to
allow the users to alter the order of the Inputs on the transformer, and
have this determine the order in which the features are accepted? In
this case, having Bases be first by default would force Bases First
unless the user specifically changed the order of the Inputs.
> I'm sure we could even do this - though when to tell if the user is
> intentionally not doing this is a problem.
Is there a case where it makes sense not to input the bases first?
> Then I'm afraid our server is going to zap your FME license with a two
minute penalty.
Huh. Call it a strategic penalty... :)
Jason
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