Branches (1 parent) vs Joins (2 parents)

Suggestions
#1

I am finding branches kinda hard to work with. I’ve found I want to tidy up some branching I’ve done, and rationalize the “branch” structure on the left hand side of the UI, but I cannot.

I was thinking about why this this is. There’s two ways to pull in tables (“modules” of steps):

  1. Branches (single parent inheritance)
  2. Joins to a named table (two parent inheritance)

I wonder if you can remove the need for 1, by having a step that is something like a Join that allows you to pull in a table from a single parent.

I also see there’s a two level hierarchy: you can’t branch a branch. At times this can be restrictive. I wonder if rather than try to show the hierarchy on the left of the UI, you just list all the tables in a flat manner, and provide good inheritance exploring tools.

I hope that makes sense!

#2

Hi Dan,

You can join the branch back to the main data frame. Here’s an old blog post that talks about it. (at the very end.)

https://blog.exploratory.io/introduction-to-join-filtering-data-based-on-the-target-data-in-exploratory-eedbd7b39d0a

We’ll be supporting ‘Branch of Branch’ down the road, hoping to release it in the next release v5.0. Until then, you can create a new data frame with all the steps that are used in the both main and branch data frames, though this will create a new data frame which needs to be maintained separately.

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