Pipeline GUI Issues
I am wondering if anyone else is encountering troubles creating pipelines using the GUI. I spent most of the day yesterday attempting to create a very simple pipeline that is triggered by a date cha...
Forum Discussion
Hi Paul,
I feel your frustration, and cannot provide any specific solutions to your problems right now. However, I will echo that my experience using Pipelines has been a double-edged sword.
Pipelines have introduced many powerful features and functions for our organization. Some of these we already feel are indispensable. But the User Interface and Pipeline development experience is miserable. I am shocked that the Quickbase Team has allowed this product to exist for so long now without at least resolving some of the biggest issues. And now Automations are already on the path for deprecation, while Pipelines don't feel honed in perfectly yet.
One of my biggest complaints is that you can not re-order steps in the UI, and you cannot insert a brand new trigger as the first step to replace the existing trigger. You can download the YAML file, carefully edit it, and then create a new Pipeline using that.
------------------------------
Joel Hickok
------------------------------
I feel your frustration, and cannot provide any specific solutions to your problems right now. However, I will echo that my experience using Pipelines has been a double-edged sword.
Pipelines have introduced many powerful features and functions for our organization. Some of these we already feel are indispensable. But the User Interface and Pipeline development experience is miserable. I am shocked that the Quickbase Team has allowed this product to exist for so long now without at least resolving some of the biggest issues. And now Automations are already on the path for deprecation, while Pipelines don't feel honed in perfectly yet.
One of my biggest complaints is that you can not re-order steps in the UI, and you cannot insert a brand new trigger as the first step to replace the existing trigger. You can download the YAML file, carefully edit it, and then create a new Pipeline using that.
------------------------------
Joel Hickok
------------------------------
You can re-order steps in the UI. Drag and drop but it doesn't always work exactly as you want. However your point stands about the trigger not being able to be replaced easily if at all in some cases through the UI. I only recently learned you could drag and drop in here lol.
My biggest complaint about Pipelines is the fact that it hides so much from you and it also seems to work based on the field name and not the field ID which seems insane to me. If you have a field that has a name change the Pipeline breaks. Not only does it break but a schema refresh won't fix your issue. You need to go to the original, and possibly all, steps the field is used in and click into the box with the field list. This is what updates the step to use the new schema after it gets refreshed, at least as far as the field names go.
I am sure I cannot be alone in hating the error reporting or lack of error reporting. If you have ever used Workato or similar integrations that is beautiful and it makes it super easy to determine your issues. Pipelines seems to do its best to hide what is actually happening under the hood with pointless error messages like "Something went wrong" or whatever. Even looking at the activity log it is incredibly unclear what actually went wrong most of the time.
That isn't even getting into the actual performance issues with Pipelines. I don't see bad performance often anymore but it does happen and it is never clear why. I understand Pipelines is an outside service now but it struggles to do things in a few minutes that an Automation would have done in less than a few seconds sometimes. I am so sad they are taking away Automations and replacing it with Pipelines when it is not a 1:1 service at this point. It is not as reliable as Automations in my opinion, not by far. I wish they just kept Automations like they did with Actions when they replaced that....
We currently only use Pipelines for things that are not business critical for the most part and that says a lot. We have moved everything we can to a service that costs us a lot in comparison but the reliability pays for itself 10x over in many cases. There are just things we are not comfortable using a Pipeline for when it matters if it works. If it can be down for a day or so then Pipleines is a good candidate for moving that data.
My biggest complaint about Pipelines is the fact that it hides so much from you and it also seems to work based on the field name and not the field ID which seems insane to me. If you have a field that has a name change the Pipeline breaks. Not only does it break but a schema refresh won't fix your issue. You need to go to the original, and possibly all, steps the field is used in and click into the box with the field list. This is what updates the step to use the new schema after it gets refreshed, at least as far as the field names go.
I am sure I cannot be alone in hating the error reporting or lack of error reporting. If you have ever used Workato or similar integrations that is beautiful and it makes it super easy to determine your issues. Pipelines seems to do its best to hide what is actually happening under the hood with pointless error messages like "Something went wrong" or whatever. Even looking at the activity log it is incredibly unclear what actually went wrong most of the time.
That isn't even getting into the actual performance issues with Pipelines. I don't see bad performance often anymore but it does happen and it is never clear why. I understand Pipelines is an outside service now but it struggles to do things in a few minutes that an Automation would have done in less than a few seconds sometimes. I am so sad they are taking away Automations and replacing it with Pipelines when it is not a 1:1 service at this point. It is not as reliable as Automations in my opinion, not by far. I wish they just kept Automations like they did with Actions when they replaced that....
We currently only use Pipelines for things that are not business critical for the most part and that says a lot. We have moved everything we can to a service that costs us a lot in comparison but the reliability pays for itself 10x over in many cases. There are just things we are not comfortable using a Pipeline for when it matters if it works. If it can be down for a day or so then Pipleines is a good candidate for moving that data.
- Thank you, after a couple of days of no response I was beginning to feel like I was the only one. I am disappointed at the lack of response from Quickbase.
------------------------------
Paul Peterson
------------------------------- MarkShnier__You
Qrew Legend
They do know about error reporting and delayed the end of life for creating new Automatons until about July 1st so they can address error reporting and Governance (who can access each other's Pipelines).
There other points you raise which are valid and we have to hope that there is ongoing plans to improve Pipelines and Documentation for the various Channels.
------------------------------
Mark Shnier (YQC)
mark.shnier@gmail.com
------------------------------
- Yes, I've known about the drag-and-drop for awhile now, and it is so inconsistent you might as well say it's not an option. I'm sure you will find that it does not work well, and it does not work all the time.
------------------------------
Joel Hickok
------------------------------
