List/Reorder Tool Processing Priority

[_richardr]

I would like the ablity to view the processing order of tools within module prior to processing and if needed reprioratize which tool processes first/last.  It would also be great to have the ablity to disable a subset of tools within a module prior to processing.

[Ned]

As far as disabling a subset of tools, the Tool Container makes that easy.  Put the tools intot the container that you want to disable and then check "disabled" in the tool container and those tools will be ignored at runtime.

As far as setting the order, it is complicated.  There is an optimizer in the engine that changes the order of inputs based on downstream connections.  Things like Find/Replace, AppendFields, SpatialMatch, etc... run faster if the right input comes in 1st.  It elimiates the need for a temporary file (or temp data in memory if there is enough sort/join memory).  Exposing a processing order of the inputs would defeat this optimization and potentially slow things down.

[_richardr]

Thanks for the tip, I'll try that!

How much do you want to bet I am better at optimizing than an algorithm. :)  Especially if I want to test one part of a process first.  I often have blocks of processing prior to a union, it seems that they process in the order I created the code but sometimes I would like one block to occur first.  This has no effect on the overall performance, it just gives me more flexiblity when debugging.