Viewing parameters all in one glance

Jukebox56

Hi,

I've been evaluating RapidMiner for our firm -- it seems like a great tool! Currently exploring Studio and hope to look at Server soon.

Question on the UI: is there a good way to see all of the parameters for all of a process's operators in one glance, i.e. without needing to individually click each operator icon?

Reason I ask is that I fear abstracting away parameters like this could make it challenging to debug larger processes. Say for example that we have 10 or 20 filter operators in a process, and that we suspect one of them wasn't set up properly (filtering on a wrong variable or something). To think about how the process operates as a whole--and hence about where the issue lies--would we need to click each of the 10 to 20 operators individually and perhaps even write its parameters down on paper so that we could think about everything together? (Say we didn't design the process ourselves and so we don't know the original intent of each operator.) Were we working with code, to get a sense for the process as a whole, the worst we'd have to do is scroll up and down.

The graphical interface of course in general I think is much preferred over code, and may especially help our users who don't have coding backgrounds. Though were the parameters to appear within the operator block icons themselves or something, so that we could get a full sense for what's going on just by glancing at the process pane, perhaps it could help avert this debugging / refactoring challenge.

(I did notice that we can look at the XML to see all parameters in one go, though sifting through the XML to debug a process I fear could also be tedious for our users, given the amount of info it stores that's superfluous to the process itself, e.g., positioning of the blocks on the screen, etc..)

Just thought I'd see if you have any suggestions or points of view. Thanks in advance for your help... and for the great product!

Neil

JEdward

Hi Neil,

Yes, it's perfectly possible with XML.  In fact, in some ways it can be more flexible.  Because of the fixed structure XPath becomes very helpful. 
There are many XPath readers available, but within RapidMiner you can use the Import Wizard from the ReadXML operator this gives you a nice easy to scroll view of the entire process with all parameters easily visible.
There are other XPath readers available so it might be worthwhile integrating some of these features into a new RapidMiner View.

One note on building processes.  Make use of RapidMiner's annotations features to document operators and the whole process. 
I normally add into annotations which contain the key parameters of a process into my comments.