alfred5 Searching for existing objects in the Workflow Editor with the Palette Search

[Chris Messina]

I'm stoked to see the Workflow Palette Search in Alfred 5!

 

 

I was disappointed, however, to discover that searching doesn't also match existing objects! For large workflows, being able to use search to locate objects in the workflow editor would be exceedingly useful! Here's an example:

 

 

[Chris Messina]

Here's why this was hard to spot (the object I was searching for is highlighted):

 

[Andrew]

@Chris Messina If you just pop up Alfred and use the ? search, that'll jump you directly to the item in the canvas.

[Chris Messina]

@Andrew how do you scope to a specific Workflow?

 

[Andrew]

@Chris Messina start typing the name of the workflow after ?images. From your impressive workflow screenshot I'd guess:  ?images twitter

 

The ? search is actually a bit fuzzy too, so you could abbreviate to: ?im tw

[Andrew]

Another quick tip for anybody reading this, in the above example typing ?keyword twitter toolkit (or ?keyword tw to) would show all the keywords in the workflow, then you could filter further down, so ?keyword tw to im would also find the images keyword in that workflow.

 

If you want to get really abbreviate-y... ?ke tw to im

[Chris Messina]

Ah, cool. A couple observations:

1. variable substitution isn't working (as we saw previously) (top image)
2. Actioning the result doesn't center the object in the Workflow editor (lower image)
3. I would still find it useful to be able to search for Workflow objects using the new contextual Palette Search.  

 

[Andrew]

1 minute ago, Chris Messina said:

variable substitution isn't working (as we saw previously) (top image)

 

The search doesn't know what that variable would be, as the workflow isn't running, just returning the object in the workflow. As such, Alfred leaves the placeholder.

 

1 minute ago, Chris Messina said:

Actioning the result doesn't center the object in the Workflow editor (lower image)

 

I suspect this is because Alfred asks the scroll pane to make the object rect visible within the viewport, and this happens automatically. I agree, improvements could be made here for centring.

 

[Chris Messina]

21 hours ago, Andrew said:

The search doesn't know what that variable would be, as the workflow isn't running, just returning the object in the workflow. As such, Alfred leaves the placeholder.

 

Right, that's what I've figured, as I've seen that behavior elsewhere.