Azure Data Factory UI Design Update for Container Activities

[Mark Kromer]

In ADF's pipeline designer, there are several activities that actually contain other activities, thereby acting as a "container". In order to help you, as a pipeline designer, understand what activities are occurring inside of your IF, UNTIL, FOREACH, SWITCH, we are updating the UI from this experience:

To a more informational and richer UX that will show a small set of the activities inside the container right on the primary pipeline canvas, with the option to show all:

We hope that this experience will provide a pipeline UX that is easier to visualize and quickly understand.

Our intent is to release this UX update week of Feb 24, 2020, as part of our regular UI update process.

Please send us your feedback & thank you!

[avixorld]

Is it same as grouping that is available in SSIS?

[Mark Kromer]

Not SSIS grouping, this is a way to visualize the activities inside the "container" style pipeline activities: IF, SWITCH, FOREACH, UNTIL.

[dataman]

VERY nice!

[SMRTech]

Will it be optional to turn this on or off?  Useful as long as you can change it with a checkbox or setting.

[kimani_mbugua_ns]

Hi. Thanks for the upcoming improvements. Will the visualisation change colour to reflect activities that have failed or succeeded, without drilling into the container activities? 

[EricHilton]

I like it - it is pretty frustrating to have to click the iteration/conditional to access the edit button. This gives you more feedback in the canvas with no click. And also saves you a click. 

[Jason Kohlhoff]

Very nice!  Thanks for caring so much about the user experience for us data geeks!

[Diksha05]

This is a great update, makes the coding and designing pretty easy and straight forward. 

Small suggestion there, if we can provide the exact error message in the pipeline run details instead on "One of the internal activity failed", it would be a great add on .

[Kure-leo]

Great, but what about adding a generic container, ie. without iteration/conditions?

[midziedelrosario]

Nice! This will be helpful to see the activities inside the Container Activities.

[MikeTaubman-Avanade]

This is a terrible change for us.  Our team has many pipelines that already did not fit comfortably on a page.  Expanding the activity boxes just to give quick links to true/false activities has chewed up most of the already scarce real estate.  This is especially true in our master pipelines, which are complex, and almost step is wrapped in an If activity.  This is even more problematic in the monitor, where half the screen or more needs to be given to log entries.  Please reconsider this design, or at least, give us a setting to turn it off.