Bike Outliner & Shortcuts

[Jesse_Grosjean]

@sylumer

In fact, if I run the Find action set to “All Rows” with no limit (or sorting), on an outline of that volume, then Shortcuts times out the execution entirely. I can’t even get a count of the rows from that.

What happens when you run Find All on this “Moby Dick” outline linked at bottom of this article?:

https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/posts/moby-dick-workout/

That’s ~2700 rows and on my computer (MacBook M1 Pro) takes ~5 seconds. I’m surprised that your 2.5K row outline is never finishing and wonder if there’s some case that your test outline exposes that I’m not handling well.

@sylumer

Ideally a more performant return of data for both would be ideal.

I think I’m reaching limits of Shorcut’s encoding performance. I’ve just tried to remove a few more of the returned Row’s attributes, but it doesn’t seem to affect the performance much. I’ve also tried a few other app’s Find All actions and they seem to have similar performance.

If anyone knows an app that can return 1000’s of items quickly using Shortcuts please let me know. Maybe there are more tricks to try.

@sylumer

Should an alternative consideration be on the cards, perhaps having a parameter in the Create Outline action to opt out of returning data (i.e. the action would could return Rows or Nothing) would workaround the lag post import?

Good idea, assuming I don’t run out of time I’ll add this for next release.

@sylumer

After import I would imagine most people who did want to interact further might be looking at say focuing on the first or last row. To get the first row, a Find “All Rows” with a limit of 1 and no sort works fairly quickly even on large numbers of rows, but unless you have a sorted outline, the last row’s out of reach. An option to find “First Row” and “Last Row” might be useful additions to “All Rows” and Shortcuts’ inbuilt variable options for the Find Action to help with that, and potentially bring useful options in any case to the action.

I’m going to add an “Index” attribute that you can sort by. Then to get last row you can Sort By Index, Biggest First, Limit 1.

[sylumer]

@Jesse_Grosjean

What happens when you run Find All on this “Moby Dick” outline linked at bottom of this article?:

Moby Dick Workout

That’s ~2700 rows and on my computer (MacBook M1 Pro) takes ~5 seconds. I’m surprised that your 2.5K row outline is never finishing and wonder if there’s some case that your test outline exposes that I’m not handling well.

The Find All was highlighted green and running inside of some shortcut I had the other day, which I’d further modified, so I created a new one, and I have had better results on the find … but not the count.

Here’s the shortcut I’ve used for this testing.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/4b75d4a1faf84bfa9675971b786798ba

If gives you two options to choose from when run. Whether to count rows or not and a choice of files - tailor it to your own test file locations. It takes the time before and after the find, and the optional count. It works out the elapsed times for each of the two actions, and it displays the results at the end.

Running for each test file with no row count, I also got 5 seconds for this shortcut - I must have had the other one doing something extra like a count, but I am positive it showed in Shortcuts as the Find action running.

Outline Name: moby_dick.bike
Find All - Elapsed Time: 5 seconds

Outline Name: local_file_listing.bike
Find All - Elapsed Time: 5 seconds

However, when I tried both of them with row counting, I let each run for four minutes before I cancelled them. This time Shortcuts shows the count action as green. For both files, my fans kicked in after about 10-20 seconds of counting, and I could see the siriactionsd process hogging the CPU.

I wonder if, the amount of data associated with each row item could be pegging the process?

Check the shortcut above through to ensure you are happy it is safe to run. Set your test file location(s). Then try running without and with the count of rows. See if you see similar behaviour or not.