ICYMI / TIL - Or some cool things I found coming back after 6 months away

I’m back building in Foundry after parental leave and thought I’d share 4 small quality of life improvements (well 3 that I think are fairly new and one old favorite) in the spirit of things I noticed that people might have missed too. I’d love to hear about any similar “discoveries” folks have made in the last 6 months (or again, old oft-overlooked favorites)!?

The first three things I noticed were while helping refactor a colleague’s Workshop app. In no particular order:

Easy Workshop Headers
You can now easily add a Header to any widget from the layout bar - soooo so nice for easily and quickly adding affordances or creating a little menu bar above an already-in-place widget. Bonus tip: Try using the Leading Text configuration on the Header type…header (as opposed to the default Subheader) for an additional text layer with less visual weight. You can even completely delete the primary title. I find it really useful in making clean section layouts or mini-labels for specific widget clusters.

Compact Filter List Pills layout
There’s a new compact “pills” layout option for the filter list. I think it’s even cleaner than the existing Exploration Filter Pills for simple inline filtering; pairs really nicely with the Filter List for lightweight filtering. Bonus that it has a really nice configuration for setting up a default filter on linked object properties that let’s you present it to the user without making it obvious it’s on a linked object type; when setting it up change from Grouped to Inline for the linked object filter Display Properties config.

Inline Object List Sorting Affordance
There’s now a way for users to specify sorting in an object list without enabling the weird built-in list header!! This always caused awkward layouts for me and now, if you turn on Enable user sorting and leave off Show header, there’s a nice little hover affordance in the lower right of the list that pops up a dedicated modal for the user to manage their sort preferences.

Secret Data Lineage Presentation Mode
And finally, one that I was reminded of from a another post on the community: Data Lineage has an undocumented “Presentation” mode that you can flip on under the small :gear: User settings in the upper right corner. With this you can create snapshots of your lineage view in various configurations and save them as an ordered presentation.

Maybe you already knew about all of these, but maybe you missed them too? If this is useful I’ll share more as I come across them and would love to learn from everyone else’s hidden gem / overlooked favorite features across the platform.

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:bulb: Discoveries in last 6 months: all of AIP

:sunglasses: This post is cool because: easy reading that can quickly make a project 1% better

:heart: What I think I would like to see: Little before and after 45 second loom videos detailing:

  • what was the approach before “easy workshop headers” (aka ugly thing)
  • what is the outcome after you fixed it (aka how you got to pretty thing)
  • Than one day I might be actually able to get some micro-learning out of my X feed

Thanks for sharing!!

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Thanks - glad it’s a helpful format. I would love to make little videos here - I actually made one while taking the screenshots and then realized we can’t post GIFs or video files. Chatting with the moderators to see if we can change that or if I can find an easy place to post them and link/embed.

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[TIL]

Pipeline file tree organization in pipeline builder.

You can group nodes into a Folder (and have nested sub-folders) to organize large data pipelines. Under the :eye: icon, you can then toggle a few visibility modes to quickly pare down the complexity on the graph view to something manageable.

As a bonus, this frees up using the node colors to represent another dimension (i.e. maybe some code for the type of transforms in that node, or maybe some sense of pipeline “stage”) rather than being shoehorned into providing the organizing structure (because you can collapse-nodes-by-color), which is how I’d always previously used it.

Resizable Sections in Workshop

When I saw this on the recap of Workshop 2024 features I immediately went and refactored a few apps that have conditional side panels to make them flexible for the user to drag them wider or smaller.

This seems especially helpful for the super common “inbox” view where the user transitions from scanning the context in a list or table in one panel to looking at the details of a single selection in an adjacent panel. Giving the user more control than just expanding or collapsing the list, so that they can, for instance, drag it wider to more easily review, seems like a great bit of polish.