KNIME WebPortal User Guide

You can create composite views in components, assembling different Widget nodes, Interactive Widget nodes and View nodes.

Once you have created them you can also style their layouts arranging them within the composite view and also adding some other elements to the layout. In this way you can decide how they will be visualized on the page once you run them in KNIME WebPortal.

Each composite view of a component at the root level of the workflow represents one page in KNIME WebPortal.

For example, a series of three pages can be modeled with a sequence of three components, as the one shown in Figure 1.

The composite view of each component will be a page in KNIME WebPortal, as shown in Figure 2.

To dynamically show and hide pages during execution it is possible to disable a composite view of one component, activating of disactivating branches in the workflow, e.g. by means of IF or CASE blocks.

It is also possible to insert components inside a loop to iterate over an item set or recursively refine a model, as shown in Figure 4.

If you want to write some data on KNIME WebPortal, which is later downloaded by means of, e.g. a web link, you can use Create Temp Dir node.

This node will create temporary files in unique temporary folders and expose the path to the temporary file as a flow variable. A Writer node can write a file to the temporary folder and a File Download node can make the written file available for download.

This is the configuration dialog of the Create Temp Dir node:

After logging in, KNIME WebPortal main page is displayed, showing the available spaces or workflows, as shown in Figure 6.

You can modify the general look of KNIME WebPortal. Instructions on how to do this are given in the Theming section of the KNIME WebPortal Administration Guide.

You can log out from KNIME WebPortal clicking the icon in the upper-right corner of KNIME WebPortal.

Clicking the folder of interest redirects you to a new page, as shown in Figure 7 where all the workflows available inside the space are shown in tiles, which display the name of the workflow and a preview of its description, if present. You can click the yellow "play" button in the upper-right corner of the corresponding tile to start executing a new job directly.

If previously executed jobs were kept in memory, dots and a number are also shown in the tile. A green dot indicates a successfully run job, a red dot a failed one, and an orange dot interrupted jobs requiring an action.

Clicking any other part of a workflow tile in the main page opens the workflow page, as shown in Figure 8.

Here the title of the workflow is shown, and if meta information has been entered before the workflow was uploaded, a description is displayed beneath the workflow name.

You can choose to get notified by email after workflow has run. In this case you will be asked to insert the email and, if a report is part of the workflow, the format in which you want to receive the report.

Then click the "Run" button to execute the workflow. A series of web pages will open allowing you to interact with the workflow or to visualize results, according to the workflow components, as explained in the Stepping through pages section.

All the different actions are shown in Figure 9.

(1) Click "Cancel" button in the bottom-right corner to interrupt the execution at any time.

(2) Click "Next" button in the bottom-right corner to navigate to the next page.

(3) Click "←Back" button in the bottom-left corner to go to the previous page.
Click "Close" at the end of the execution and decide if you want to keep or delete the current result. When the workflow is executed entirely the message Finished successfully appears on the upper part of the page. This message will appear also in case nodes are executed after the last component. Please notice that the page showing the composite view of the last component of the workflow can not be re-executed. In case a report is available you can also download it in the last page, choosing between different formats. Please refer to KNIME WebPortal and reports section for more details about it.

In case you choose to not delete the executed job, the result will be made available in the workflow page, with different information like the workflow’s owner name, the start date and the final state, as shown in Figure 10. Also other jobs that are running and need interaction or jobs that failed are listed here.

You can discard and delete any of the jobs from the workflow page at a later time by clicking the three dots on the line corresponding to the job execution and choosing Discard from the context menu that opens. Here you can also copy a direct link to the final results page of a specific job.

On the workflow page you can also click Copy link to…​ to obtain the address of either the link to the main page of the current workflow or to its execution page.

As explained in the WebPortal browser section the old WebPortal is still accessible and fully usable.

The functionality is slightly different from the new WebPortal available as of version 4.11 of KNIME Server.

For a complete guide for KNIME WebPortal on KNIME Server version < 4.10 please check the corresponding version of KNIME WebPortal User Guide.

&pm:<name>=<value> — Set configuration parameters: Sets the named configuration parameter to the specified value. Multiple configuration parameter pairs should be comma separated, e.g. &pm:input-1=value1,input-2=value2. Ensure that the value for each pair is correctly URL/URI encoded. Please see more specific explanation about this feature on the following page.

&emails=sample@mail.com — Enable email notification: enables email notification and sets the specified comma separated list of email addresses.

&formats=<formats> — Set report formats: sets the report formats included as attachments in the notification email specified by a comma separated list. Available formats are: pdf (enabled by default), html, doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, ps, odt, ods and odp. This list might have been changed by your server administrator to reduce the number of options available.

A complete URL might look like:

With the &pm-parameter it is possible to override the default values of Configuration nodes. They are addressable by using the same name as the one set in the "Parameter name" field in the configuration dialog of the corresponding node. It is best practice to keep those names unique, however it is possible to address nodes, when there are multiple of the same parameter names in the workflow by appending the node id (e.g. param-name-32:34). There are a few nodes, which require a special format, which are listed in the following.

To be configurable the Configuration nodes have to be:

Configuration nodes that are not configurable over URL parameters are:

From KNIME Server version 4.11 we changed the Widget nodes to an updated version. The backwards compatibility is in any case assured for the Widget nodes, so that you can continue to use the Widget nodes in KNIME WebPortal version 4.11 with the same behavior and user interface they had in KNIME WebPortal version <4.11.

In fact, the Widget nodes contained in workflows created with KNIME Analytics Platform version 4.1 will be displayed by default in the legacy mode. However, it is possible to change this option re-opening the workflows in KNIME Analytics Platform version 4.2 and deselecting the Use legacy mode in the Visual Layout tab of the Node Usage and Layout window.

Also when creating the workflows with KNIME Analytics Platform version 4.2 allows to use legacy mode for the whole component encapsulating the Widget nodes or for each node individually.

Please see the Components Guide for documentation about how to activate/deactivate the legacy flag when building workflows for KNIME WebPortal.

If a workflow contains Quickform nodes it will still be executed in the same manner, as in previous versions of KNIME Server.

However, we discourage the use of Quickform nodes in favor of Widget nodes.

Note that legacy Quickform nodes will have to be separately installed on the server executor and any client designing or executing legacy workflows. The plugin is found under KNIME & Extensions → KNIME Quick Forms (legacy) in the "Install KNIME Extensions" dialog.