hello all, in this week’s Tip of the Week we wanted to share how you can copy and paste Steps between Apps. this feature can be especially useful if you download an app from the Library, but only need a specific Step of the App in your solution, or if you have a Step (registration, for example) that you need in every App. when you copy a Step, the Step Enter, Machine and Devices, Timer and Step Exit Triggers are also copied.
to Copy a Step, simply right click the Step you’d like to copy and press the Copy button:
Really useful feature indeed and I can remember when I started I was confused because I’m usually working with multiple tabs opened however to copy/paste steps as presented above you have to copy and paste using the same tab !
Indeed, this is a readlly useful feature and actually making importing functionality (steps) from the Library work.
However, I seem to have a problem with it (if solved elsewhere, please direct me to the proper thread): When I copy-paste a step as described above between apps (from a Library app to mine), it doesn’t copy all table queries & aggregations. I’ve checked and the table is in my Tables and all the variables were created / added successfully.
Can anyone suggest why it doesn’t work?
details:
I’ve copied the Andon Functional Example from the Library. This is how the Queries & Agg. tab looks in my app:
@AquaMaofian, your observation about table queries and aggregations not carrying over when you copy a step is accurate.
It would be a lot more useful if all of the details on a step carried over—obviously in this case the andon steps don’t do a lot for you if lose the functionality that makes them work when you export.
I want to tag @freedman into this discussion because I think it has implications for how we design library application, and I’ll share this internally as well.
@John, thanks for replying quickly. I must say that I’m surprised that it’s missing, I was assuming that I did something wrong.
To be clear, the queries and aggregations do existing in the Table, but they’re not populated into the steps (the Records tab), so Triggers don’t have them and consecutively fail.
What should I do in the meantime - create them 1 by 1 from the Library app and populate all the triggers manualy? Or better to wait for @freedman’s response?
@AquaMaofian, unfortunately the work around here is to re-create the table queries and aggregations in records pane manually. I checked w/ our product team and there is a ticket for this exact improvement, but I don’t have a timeline on this unfortunately.
No need to wait for @freedman. I mostly wanted to surface this copy/paste behavior to him because queries and aggregations not following after being pasted will effect how we build and document these in library apps we expect will be copied.
Thank you @John, understood.
With regards to existing documentation, I just want to point out as an example the app I’m copying from: https://tulip.co/library/apps/andon-app-(functional-example)-/
Check out the explanation give at 3:00 in the video - it seems to suggest that the copy-paste is done but as we see now, it’s not really.
Thank you for assisting!
This is indeed very frustrating - I couldn’t agree more. I can tell you that we are planning on making improvements to the importability of library content this year, specifically, we are hoping to allow step template imports into existing apps. This would be a huge improvement to both the kinds of library content we can create as well as overall composability.
Thanks for flagging!
This bug is currently in our backlog and I’ve just bumped it to get some more eyes on it.
After a long while, I came back to this issue and I can report that it’s the same as I reported before, Queries and Aggregations not being populated (and Table Records exist but they’s missing / not connected in Triggers).
For context: We have generic versions of our apps + a specialized version of each app for each factory. Adding (copy-pasting) new steps and their functionality is a pain ATM.
Is this feature coming any time soon?
and I can remember when I started I was confused because I’m usually working with multiple tabs opened however to copy/paste steps as presented above you have to copy and paste using the same tab !
