Designer
The Designer is the tool offered by the ALIDA platform for the creation of Workflows in a simple and intuitive way.
Features
- Intuitive visual construction: Creation of Workflows through simple drag & drop of components, eliminating the need to write code.
- Flexibility in Workflows: Support for branched and complex Workflows, allowing parallel executions and multiple aggregations.
- Immediate component identification: Clear distinction between datasets, Services and models through color codes and specific shapes.
- Intelligent connections: Automatic verification of compatibility between input and output during the connection of blocks.
- Centralized management: Complete control over metadata and configurations of the Workflow.
- Integrated advanced configuration: Possibility of detailed customization of each Service directly from the Designer.
Input and Output Ports of Services
Within the Designer, each Service is characterized by input and output ports. These ports define the communication interfaces of the Service.
The colors and shapes of the ports indicate the type of connection allowed.
- Input Ports (IN): Represent the inputs of the Service and are positioned on the top of the block. They accept the following data types:
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🟢 Green circle: ALIDA Dataset (pointing to a position within a Datasource)
- 🔵 Blue circle: Machine Learning / mathematical Models
- 🟩 Green rectangle: Generic I/O (intermediate data)
- 🟪 Purple square: Streaming data flow
- (Invisible): REST API Endpoint
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Output Ports (OUT): Positioned on the bottom of the block, they define the results produced by the Service after processing. Following the same color scheme as the input ports, they can generate transformed datasets, trained models or evaluation metrics.
Port Characteristics
- Typed compatibility: The ports follow a typing system that guarantees compatibility between connections. Only ports with compatible types can be connected to each other.
- Visual feedback: During connection, the Designer provides immediate feedback on the compatibility of the ports, highlighting valid connections in green and invalid ones in red.
- Multi-port: Some services may have multiple input or output ports, allowing complex operations such as data aggregation or result distribution.
The clear definition of input and output ports makes the construction of Workflows intuitive, preventing connection errors and ensuring the correct propagation of data between Services.