Connector routing 'Dummy' Component?

Hello,

So, as i usually create Graphs with 300-400+ component, Graph can be large.
Connectors going across everywhere, especially if i ‘SimpleCopy’ something from the beginning of the Graph to somewhere to end of the Graph. Disturbing, and sometimes i loose the ‘overview’.

Connector manual ‘positioning’ can be fine, but may be easier with some ‘Dummy’ component, what not do ‘Simplecopy’ just adjust the Connector line (and i can add some title on that, like ‘This line holds the XY data’).
We have something like that ‘Dummy’ component?

Note: i know, i can put ‘SimpleCopy’, and i can ‘Disable’, practically do the same.

Thanks, Andrase,

Hi Andrase,

Unfortunately we don’t have a dummy component per say, but I would highly recommend using the Reformat. Like you know the Reformat allows for the passing of input and output records by simply adding the following line of code:

$out.0.* = $in.0.*;

It won’t matter to what connector line you add it too the records will be the same for input and output.

This will simulate a dummy component in your use case.

Many Thanks, i do the reformat ‘trick’
Andrase,

I think SimpleCopy component is definitely prefered over Reformat, its overhead is much lower.

But the best approach in my opinion is to disable edge autorouting and move the edge wherever you want in the graph.

Yes, i agree, the ‘disable edge autorouting’ is the best overall.
Thanks for the SimpleCopy idea, one point it get less resource (cpu), in other hand its more resource (time) sensitive (as some disk io needed, even with 200-300MB/sec is can be time consuming). Off course, the disk and cpu need to be balance, but as 200-300MB/sec easy saturate simple SSD drives, the disk i/o is some point of view also my limiting factor to SimpleCopy usage.
Note: its can be a nice article in the help/kb, how disk i/o - storage space works in real world. My i write it once… (i already has some experience on that, i spend some hours to check it…)

SimpleCopy does not write anything to the disk so you do not have to worry about the I/O operations.

Dear Lubos,

I’m not fully agree on that. Monitoring the folder (example):
\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\com.cloveretl.gui.runtime\runtime-work\temp\clover_temp_node01\1\
=> nice SimpleCopy related files everywhere… off course its also some connection with ‘Phases’, etc.
I spend quite a few hour to understand how temp files working (when i run out of disk space too much time…)
Off course, if Disabled, its a different thing, but i just not like the ‘transparent’ disabled connector lines…

Andrase,

Hi Andrase,
I dare to presume that what you are seeing in the reported directory is the edge debug data being saved by the Designer. In other words, it is not the SimpleCopy component itself that would write data to the disk. It is the debug setup (on the edge that is pushing data to and/or pulling data from the SimpleCopy component) that affects writing the debug data to the disk. This debug data is typically saved in the binary format to a temp directory (named by the temp runID, for example, “1”) in the directory that you specified. You can confirm this by testing the different options of the debug setup (by right-clicking an edge, selecting “Debug” and choosing those various options). If you select the “No Records” option on all your graph edges and run the graph, the temp directory will still be created but no .dbg files will be written into it.
Best regards,

HI Vladimir,
Your perfectly right. Sorry about my confusion on that (and i also confused because some ‘Phase’, etc.)
I do synthetic tests, and yes: the SimpleCopy itself (without debug, phase, etc) practically not create any file by itself.
Many Thanks!
Andrase,