CS Macro Dev: Detour Tool Alternative - Tool Container and Union Approach

[MattD]

This article is part of the CS Macro Development Series. The goal of this series is to communicate tips, tricks, and the thought process that goes into developing good, dynamic macros.

The Detour Tool and its counterpart, the Detour End Tool, are tools that come in handy in building out custom Analytical Apps and Macro workflows when you want to “turn on” or “turn off” entire sections of the workflows based on a user input. While handy, there is an alternative to the approach in using Tool Containers to encapsulate the sections that you’d like to turn on/off and using a Radio Button(or other Interface Tools) and action to “Enable/Disable Container from Condition.” There are other action types that are also useful if you’d like to implement more logic to the enable/disable approach. As long as you conjoin the outputs of each Tool Container to a Union Tool none of your data streams require records to be output, successfully completing your bypass!

Attached is a short v10.5 example of the approach, using Radio Buttons, and the “Update Value with Formula” action to update the “Disabled” attribute of Tool Containers:

[StephenR]

This is super useful.  I used it with a check box to turn on and off sets of inputs and their associated workflows to add simple logic to an interface.