Process automation modeling

 SuperMap iPortal has a built-in Processing automation modeling App for visually building processing automation models. In iPortal home page, click "Resource Center" > "GPA Model" to enter GPA model resource page, and click "Create GPA model" button on the right (login required) to enter Processing automation modeling App page; Through this WebApp you can: visually drag and drop and connect tools to build a model that meets your work requirements, run the model step by step, run to your selected tools to verify the correctness of the processing automation process, and run the entire model to automate the spatial data processing and analysis process.

Before you can use Processing Automation Modeling, you need to add a server from the Administration > Servers > Server List page of iPortal and Specify the server as a managed server. After adding a hosted server, the administrator needs to configure GPA shared storage and specify a storage path for the data.

The Data Catalog in GPAModelBuilder has access to the data in the portal and can be dragged and dropped directly into the modeling process to participate in the calculations, see: drag and drop data.

• Build model
  • Add tool
  • Mobile tool
  • Connection tool
  • Renaming tool
  • Simplify display tool
  • Add marker
• Setting parameters
  • Set model parameters
  • Setting the Cluster Environment
• Operation model
• Model reuse
  • Publish custom models as tools
  • Import or export templates
• Edit Tool Parameters
• Model Metadata
• Save, share model
• Task center
• Theme setting

Build model

1. Add tool

You can add processing automation tools through the following methods:

• Enter the processing modeler page, select the tool you want to use to build the model from the list of processing automation tools on the left, drag it to the canvas in the middle of the page, and the tool and its nodes will be displayed in the canvas.
• Search for the desired tool by handling the search box above the list of automation tools and then drag and drop it to the canvas for modeling.
• Add tools to the canvas, support boxing multiple tools, copy (Ctrl+C) and paste (Ctrl+V) in the current canvas and across the canvas.

2. Mobile tool

Drag-and-drop to canvas processing automation tools support movement and manipulation of:

• Tool overall movement: Select the function node of the tool to move with the left mouse button.

3. Connection tool

A model usually needs to be composed of multiple automated processing tools, and connections need to be established between the tools. The main operation for drawing connections is:

• Move the cursor to the connection point of the output node of the front tool, the connection point is highlighted.
• Press and hold the left mouse button and move the cursor to the connection point of the input node of the tool to be connected. After the connection point is highlighted and the mouse is released, the connection line is drawn successfully. To ensure the proper operation of the model, it is necessary to ensure that the output parameters of the predecessor node are the same as the input parameters of the subsequent nodes.
• After clicking to select a tool or connection line, select delete in the right-click menu, or, use the delete key on your keyboard to delete it.
• If you delete a tool by mistake without re-dragging, all operations of the modeling canvas support the shortcut keys Undo (Ctrl+Z) and Restore (Ctrl+Y).

4. Renaming tool

When the model contains multiple tools with the same name or the tool name does not match the usage scenario, you can click the left mouse button to select the tool node and select "Rename" in the right-click menu to rename the tool.

5. Simplify display tool

If the visual modeling page is cluttered with too many tool parameters or too many tools, you can right-click on a blank area of the canvas and select the "Collapse All" button to collapse the tool parameters. The collapsed tools also support movement.

At the same time, You can also select "Horizontal Auto Layout" or "Vertical Auto Layout" from the menu on the right side of the canvas to tidy up the canvas layout. By doing so, you can optimize the display of the visual modeling.

6. Add marker

When the model is complex and the business process is not easy to understand, you can add annotations to the model elements to improve the readability of the model. To add annotations to the model, simply right-click on a blank area of the canvas and select "Create Annotation". Alternatively, you can add annotations to a single tool node by clicking the left mouse button to select the tool node and selecting "Create Annotation" in the right-click menu. The annotation added to a tool node can be moved together with the tool node when it is moved.

      Alternatively, the xml template for visual modeling can be imported into the canvas for modeling via File-> Import Model.

Setting parameters

Set model parameters

To specify the parameter settings for the tool in the model, you need to click on the input node with the left mouse button, and then the parameter filling comment will appear in the parameter field on the right side of the page. Simply enter the parameter values that meet the formatting requirements according to the comments. After all the required parameters of the current tool are filled in, the function node of the tool will change from gray to blue, so you can quickly check the filling in of the model parameters according to the color of the outer node.

• File Path: Path information of the data to be imported, the sources include local upload, add from resource center, my folder. My folder data originates from the folder "personalDir/{userid}" in the specified storage path of GPA shared storage, you can copy the required data to my folder and use it directly without uploading.

If you don't want to use the default configuration of the operator parameter, then you can customize the operator parameter to suit your needs. See: customized operator parameters.

Setting the Cluster Environment

Using Apache Spark for distributed analysis of spatial big data, you can configure the cluster environment parameters before running the model in the following two ways:

• Set single-model cluster environment parameters

When the big data tool is used in the modeling page of processing automation service, click the tool node to switch the option of "spark Environment Settings "in the parameter panel, set the corresponding parameters, and connect the cluster and submit the processing automation task when running the model.

• Configure global cluster environment parameters

To reuse cluster environment parameters, you can configure global Spark environment parameters. The specific steps are as follows:

1. On the Process automation modeling page, click Settings in the upper right corner to set Spark global environment parameters;
2. On the environment setting page, click the "Add Mode" button to configure the environment parameters. You can set a set of environment parameters to the default mode. If Spark Cluster Default deployment mode is selected, the environment parameters will be automatically filled when a new model with big data tools is added;
3. On the parameter panel of the model, add Environment Parameter Type to Spark Environment Settings. You can easily configure and switch global environment parameters from the drop-down menu, or modify the default global environment parameters as required.

Cluster environment parameters include the following four parts:

• Deployment mode: local(single-process), local(multi-process), client, and cluster.
• Cluster master address: Required parameters, such as spark://172.16.16.8:7077.
• Name of the custom application: Required parameter, such as geoprocessing.
• Spark property parameter Settings: Parameter Settings for cluster configuration, optional parameters. such as, spark.rest.max =4,spark.executor.memory=16g,spark.driver.host=192.168.17.43.

Operation model

It is possible to run part of the model or the whole model in the modeler.

• Run a partial model: Right mouse click on a tool and click the "Execute to this node" button to run the processing automation process to the selected tool. This operation can be used to verify that the tool parameters are correct.
• Run the entire model: Click the "Execute" button in the upper right corner of the page to run the model in order until the entire processing automation process is completed.

A successful run will be indicated by a green success message in the upper right corner of the tool node, and vice versa by a red failure message in the upper right corner of the tool node. During the execution of the model, the execution log information can be viewed in real time through the execution log window at the bottom of the page. In addition, the execution log window can be used to filter different levels of information for quick diagnosis of model error.

Model reuse

Processing automation modeling supports publish custom models to the server and import and export models to support model reuse.   

Publish custom models as tools

The processing modeler allows the processing automation model to be saved as a tool in the server-side processing automation tool list, thus allowing the model to be used multiple times for processing spatial big data without having to repeat the modeling effort, The main operations for publishing are as follows:

• Click the "Publish" model button on the menu bar of the page to set the tool information, including model grouping and model name.
• Click OK after checking the tool information to publish the built model as a custom tool.

Note: To ensure the security of the tool's use, the model published as a custom tool must have been successfully run.

Add successfully, click "Model", the added tool can display in the tool list under the list of custom tools, drag and drop with the mouse to the canvas can begin to reuse, the specific use of the previous steps can refer to.

Import or export templates

You can also export the visual modeling template locally by File-> Export Model, and load the visual modeling into the canvas again by importing the model when you need to use and edit it again.

Edit Tool Parameters

After publish a model as a custom tool, you can edit its parameters to make them more intuitive and relevant to the tool's usage scenario.

• Find the custom tool you want to edit in the "Models" list on the left side of Processing Automation Modeling and click "Edit Parameters" for that tool.
• You can modify the description of the custom tool's parameters and hide some of the parameters that you don't want to show. Finish edit and click OK .
• Drag and drop the edited custom processing automation tool to the canvas and you can see the edited tool.

Model Metadata

Model metadata, important information that describes the model, illustrates how the model is used. Detailed model metadata allows others to fully understand the scope of application of the model to reduce barriers to knowledge sharing and application sharing. The contents of model metadata include:

• Name: a generalized title for the model;
• Author: can be filled in with the name of the modeler;
• Creation and update time: the system automatically generates the time of creation and modification of the model metadata;
• Abstract: for summarizing the project context in which the model is applied;
• Description: for describing how the model is used, and the scope of application;
• Tags: for adding keywords;
• Thumbnail: the model thumbnail can be automatically generated;

Model metadata can be viewed and edited by following the steps below:

• Right-click on the blank area of the canvas and select "View Metadata" to bring up the window for viewing metadata.
• If you need to edit the metadata information, continue to click "Edit Metadata" button in the View Metadata window, you can edit the title, author, summary, description and tags of the model in the Edit Metadata window, you can also generate the thumbnail of the model with a single click, after you finish the editing, click OK, and the metadata of the model will be saved to the model file.
• Publish the model to the model list, click "View Metadata" in the tool, a popup window for viewing metadata will appear.

Save, share model

After creating the model, click the "Save" button on the upper right corner to save the created model.

Clicking the "Share" button on the upper right corner, you can set the sharing settings for the created GPA model, and the supported sharing scopes are: private, public, specified departments, specified groups and specified users can retrieve, download/execute or edit.

Task center

Click the "Task Center" button in the upper right corner, you can query the list of current user data analysis tasks, track model execution in real time, and view the progress, time consumption, details and log information of historical tasks. In addition, you can click the "Restore" button to restore the original parameters of the model to the canvas through the execution log for debugging execution.

Theme setting

Click the "Skin" button in the upper right corner to switch themes. The system provides four default themes: blue theme, orange theme, dark orange theme and dark red theme.