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 Community members - Thanks for the feedback here, we appreciate the frustration you're voicing and really want to improve your experience. For those of you who I don't know yet, my name is John Karas and I'm a Group Product Manager here at Quickbase. I lead our a team of Product Managers that are driving Quickbase's integration & automation product strategy. One of the critical pieces to this is our Pipelines capabilities.
Paul, Joel, Mike, Austin, and Mark, you've really shed some light on issues that we are eager to address for you and the rest of our community on the Pipelines front. We have a sleek new look & feel coming to the "Pipelines GUI" (we call it "Pipelines Builder", the area where you create and edit your Pipeline details) and we'll be unveiling more at Empower 2022 on this. I strongly believe this will help in your GUI performance pains / loading aspects. Another thing I felt here was a better desire for Error Handling / Messages. This is something we have on our radar, and we will be bring some benefits into the new Pipelines Builder. However, I think there is more work we can do on the error handling / messaging front as well beyond the areas we've got active development occurring on. I also felt pain here around not being able to re-order / insert / move steps. This new Pipelines Builder is designed to enable this exact functionality. The feedback on field-name changes, step & error reporting, and additional experience improvements are all valid and my team is indeed looking at how we can tackle them.
Your feedback helps us continuously prioritize & reprioritze what things we build & deliver to make our customers jobs & lives easier. As with anything in software (or in life), we know there are bright spots and there are areas that need more attention. We hope you'll continue using this powerful platform as we continue to use your feedback to make it more delightful. I hope to see many of your Empower, and would be happy to spend some more time together catching up & hearing more of your thoughts.
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John Karas
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Paul, Joel, Mike, Austin, and Mark, you've really shed some light on issues that we are eager to address for you and the rest of our community on the Pipelines front. We have a sleek new look & feel coming to the "Pipelines GUI" (we call it "Pipelines Builder", the area where you create and edit your Pipeline details) and we'll be unveiling more at Empower 2022 on this. I strongly believe this will help in your GUI performance pains / loading aspects. Another thing I felt here was a better desire for Error Handling / Messages. This is something we have on our radar, and we will be bring some benefits into the new Pipelines Builder. However, I think there is more work we can do on the error handling / messaging front as well beyond the areas we've got active development occurring on. I also felt pain here around not being able to re-order / insert / move steps. This new Pipelines Builder is designed to enable this exact functionality. The feedback on field-name changes, step & error reporting, and additional experience improvements are all valid and my team is indeed looking at how we can tackle them.
Your feedback helps us continuously prioritize & reprioritze what things we build & deliver to make our customers jobs & lives easier. As with anything in software (or in life), we know there are bright spots and there are areas that need more attention. We hope you'll continue using this powerful platform as we continue to use your feedback to make it more delightful. I hope to see many of your Empower, and would be happy to spend some more time together catching up & hearing more of your thoughts.
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John Karas
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- John,
I'm glad to hear that you are working on some of the more major issues. The 2 things I would hope you would seriously consider:
1. Loading the list of pipelines is painfully slow. Once I transfer my automations, i will likely have 200+ pipelines. Even with the 70ish I have now, I can't load the Pipelines Dashboard in less than a couple minutes (my current solution is to filter by tags and then bookmark each tag). Every time i search for a Pipeline, and clear the search - another couple minutes just waiting for load.
2. Please extend the deadline for when you remove automations, until the Pipeline platform is up to speed. It does not make sense to force the change before Pipelines is ready.
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Mike Tamoush
------------------------------ - Thanks for the update John - great to hear improvements are on the way.
At the risk of repeating some of the other comments, here is a 'wishlist' I shared with our Customer Success Manager last year.
1. Access to all pipelines
While I do have the option to 'switch to another user' when viewing pipelines, it seems details in the activity log are not visible when viewing as another user, making it impossible to investigate problems. Is this a known issue? Are there any plans to make it easier to view all pipelines, regardless of who created them?
2. Basic editing controlsIs there a plan to add save, undo/redo to the editor or to enable view/edit modes? It's too easy to accidentally change a pipeline.
3. Adding comments
The pipeline editor would be much improved if we could add comments. It's impossible to understand what a pipeline is doing without accessing each step because the editor only shows the step name (On New Event, Search Records, Update Record etc.).
4. Copying applications/creating a sandbox
Is there any plan to replicate pipelines when an application is copied? Doing this manually adds a significant overhead to our use of pipelines. We have contemplated building our own utility to automate this process, but would rather not have to do this.
5. Modifying pipelinesIt seems to be very difficult to move and insert steps in existing pipelines and impossible to change the trigger step. Changing pipelines by exporting the YAML, editing and importing as a new pipeline is not a great solution and we usually end up starting again from scratch.
6. Notifications of errors
Are there any plans to provide notifications when pipelines generate errors?
7. Pipeline performance
Ideally we would use pipelines to provide some back-end functionality that would integrate with the front-end – i.e. user action on screen triggers a pipeline and the results are reflected back on screen – but I appreciate this cannot be guaranteed, and that with the current performance we're implementing workarounds to prevent users being confused and frustrated that their actions take time – often several minutes - to be reflected in the application.
I know there have been steps taken to increase the resources dedicated to processing pipelines, but is there a longer-term road map in place to improve performance of pipelines?
8. Analysing pipeline performance
Are there any plans to provide tools to enable us to analyse pipeline usage and performance and perhaps to prioritise some pipelines over others?
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Jeremy Anson
------------------------------ - John,
Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback. I look forward to the changes and hope the "new" builder resolves some of the issues. I still remain skeptical that pipelines are truly in a position to replace automations. There still seem to be several bugs to address in addition to the lag between trigger, pipeline execution and pipeline completion.
One issue that I did not hear you address is the primary issue for opening this thread. I found a way to create a pipeline to accomplish the desired result without but there are two issues. First, I still cannot search one of the tables so the pipeline is only doing half of the work, second, the pipeline ran for just over 90 seconds. With that kind of performance, I'm terrified of a situation where a few hundred records may trigger at one time. IF support is able to resolve my open case regarding this issue, I will likely return to my original approach for building this pipeline.
Like many other developers, I have a little over 100 Automations to convert into pipelines. I can't afford to burn an entire day converting each Automation to a pipeline. My experience with the tool to convert Automations to Pipelines has been laughable. This tool wasn't capable of converting a basic automation that updates a field based on a trigger. I'd be afraid to see what it would do with something more complex.
I will try to remain optimistic and continue to crunch away at converting my automations.
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Paul Peterson
------------------------------ - John, Thanks for the update.
This cannot come soon enough. Every week I continue to pain and labor over what has become a dreaded part of my job, and I continually am frustrated at the QB Team for promoting Pipelines so fervently before they were truly ready for the End User to have a good experience. It's hard to wait longer, but I hope these updates are "the cat's meow," as they say.
Even right right now, today, I am rebuilding a Pipeline from scratch simply because I now need it to fire on Create AND Update record, not just Create as it was setup. Wasted time for me. And my overall confidence is low due to the sheer number of other issues I have seen Users report, that you and other Quickbase staff have not yet openly addressed.
Another User in this thread summed it up, when they wrote: "I still remain skeptical that pipelines are truly in a position to replace automations." Even though they are more powerful than Automations, Pipelines are not reliable for now, and I do not believe they will be for 1-2 more years, judging by the pace things have been moving.
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Joel Hickok
------------------------------- Hi John,
Having watched the Empower presentation on the roadmap for pipelines I'm pleased to see the planned improvements to the editor, the addition of error notifications and the ability for admins to view all pipelines. The focus on supporting pipeline growth and meeting performance expectations is also very welcome, and it's clear the pipelines team are listening to and responding to feedback.
We've shared several additional pain points and requests through various channels back into QB and it would be great to understand if these are on the roadmap.
1. You mentioned that teams were asking for pipelines to be copied with applications, but it wasn't clear if this was on the roadmap. We have contemplated building our own utility to semi-automate this as it's a major headache whenever we contemplate creating a copy of an application for testing, but would obviously like to avoid doing this if we don't need to.
2. Support for UTF-8 - I've been told by the support team that we cannot switch on UTF-8 support and use pipelines with triggers, which - as we cannot work without these pipelines - means we cannot switch on UTF-8; it's very hard for our global business to understand why we're in this position.
3. Basic editing controls - Is there a plan to add save, undo/redo to the editor or to enable view/edit modes? It's too easy to accidentally change a pipeline.
4. Adding comments - It's impossible to understand what a pipeline is doing without accessing each step because the editor only shows the step name (On New Event, Search Records, Update Record etc.) and being able to add comments (e.g. 'When a Project is ready to be archived', 'Find tasks related to the project', 'Update task status to archived') would be a great time saver.
5. Analysing pipeline performance - Are there any plans to provide tools to enable us to analyse pipeline usage and performance and perhaps to prioritise some pipelines over others?
If you have time to comment on any of these points it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Jeremy
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Jeremy Anson
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