General Discussions

terry10 · ‎03-03-2022

Gotchas - those things that can trip us up leading to errors or data that's not as we expected!

For example:

Forgotten Row Limits - I've learned from experience that row limits on Input and Download tools are easy to set and easy to forget! So that finding them doesn't require looking into the configuration of each input tool, I add **ROW LIMIT** to the annotation when setting a row limit.

An alternative approach is to use a Sample Tool following the Input or Download Tool instead of setting a row limit. When developing, I might put the Sample Tool within a detour, which makes it easy to toggle between running all the data or just a subset.

What gotchas have you encountered? And how do you catch or prevent them? Please share!

mbarone · ‎03-03-2022

An oldie but goodie . . . . you have a wide table, say 150 fields and a million rows of data and it's very sparse (lots of nulls). You want to change all null numerics to zero. You can use a Data Cleanse tool. But with that many rows/fields, and if your only goal is to update numeric nulls to zero, it's actually faster to use a Multifield Formula tool, select all your numerics, and just use a ToNumber([_CurrentField_]) function :)

patrick_digan · ‎03-03-2022

Great topic @terry10 . I'll just highlight a couple:

1) Append Fields, I always change the warn/error to allow all appends.

2) Output Tool, I always change the output option from create new sheet to overwrite sheet or file. I've output to excel my fair share and I've never needed create new sheet. Ever. The default of create new sheet means it will work the first time and error out after that.

3) Multi-Field Formula Tool, I almost always uncheck the box about copying output to a new field. Especially with a wide data set, I'll go check my fields, wonder why my formula didn't work, and then realize it created a new field.

4) Apps, don't forget to uncheck the disable outputs when you publish to the gallery! ( @NicoleJohnson ) Disabling outputs is useful when debugging, not useful when saving to the gallery.