Making processes more robust: Confirming attribute types.

If you want a process to be robust and handle inputs gracefully, it makes sense to get it to check that example sets passed to it contain attributes of the correct name and the correct type. This is particularly true for processes exposed using the Server web interface.

Here's a process that takes an example set, determines the types and roles of each attribute, and outputs an example set for further processing. From there, it is a simple matter to work out if the input contains the required attribute names and types, and from there take appropriate action.

The key part is some Groovy scripting which works out the Role and Type of each attribute. The following table shows the output of the process.

Examination of the table reveals some interesting things. You can see that a regular string (also known as a polynominal) has a role of "regular" with a Type of 1. Text attributes have Type equal to 5; they are not the same as polynominal. Integers are Type 3. There is no Type 2. Of course, I could go on and examination of the code would reveal what the Types corresponding to 2, 7 and 8 are.

Once the output is an example set, it is easy to check that it contains attributes with the correct name and type to allow subsequent processing to occur. By using the "Filter Examples" operator it would, for example, be possible to confirm that a label of type integer is present in the input data and report and error (perhaps using the "Throw Exception" operator). This allows processes to be more robust to the vagaries of wacky input data.

Of course, this is one step along the road of making processes more robust. Another important step is unit testing to ensure that processes don't get damaged by well intentioned edits. That will be the subject of a future post.