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Workbench best practices

Tips & Tricks for making Fused Workbench work for you

Workbench Overview

Workbench is a web-IDE built to make working with Fused UDFs even faster!

Experimenting with UDFs, fast​

In UDF Builder you have access to a Code Editor that runs your UDFs and outputs results directly on the Map View for you. As soon as you make changes they show up in Map View!

💡 Leverage all the UDF Best Practices​

While this page is for Workbench, it builds on top of all the Best Practices that make your UDF fast & efficient. So if you haven't yet, take a look at our dedicated UDF Best Practices.

Use return to quickly explore data​

Your UDF will stop at the first return it sees, which you can use to your advantage to return an intermediate result and explore it directly on the map:

Example: Exploring bbox mid-UDF

In this example, we're using the Overture Maps Example UDF but not sure exactly what our bbox object looks like.

The easiest way to check is simply to return it inside our UDF before any other logic:

Use Workbench to explore data on top of Python​

While you might be tempted to explore a specific row of a GeoDataFrame by filtering it and printing it, sometimes it faster to just click on it in Map View and explore in the Selected Object section

Format your code for more visibility​

You can hit Opt + Shift + F (or Alt + Shift + F on Windows/Linux) to format your code with a smaller line-length. This comes in handy if you don't want to scroll left and right to read your code, at the expense of having a bit more up and down scrolling to do

🗺️ Visualizing results​

Changing map view​

Map View supports multiple base maps that might be better suited for different uses cases.

  • ⧉ Sometimes you just want a neutral basemap to focus on your data -> "Light" or "Dark" or even "Blank" basemaps are best
  • 🌍 Other times you might want some context, in which case using the "Satellite" basemap will suit your need best

Changing Map View

Using the Visualize Tab​

You can easily change the styling of your data in the Visualize Tab:

Changing Map View

Tilt Map view to explore 3D datasets​

Map View gives you a top-level view of the world by default. But hold Cmd (or Ctrl on Windows / Mac) to tilt the view!

Tilted View

🏘️ This can be really helpful to explore 3D datasets like in this DSM Zonal Stats UDF.

Using Keyboard Shortcuts: Command Palette​

Workbench has built-in keyboard shortcuts & quick navigation features: Hit Cmd + K (or Ctrl + K on Windows / Linux) to bring up Command Palette:

Command Palette

Without lifting your hands from the keyboard you can:

  • Open a New UDF
  • Search the Docs, directly in Workbench!
  • See some of the most helpful Keyboard Shortcuts

You'll find a more extended list of Keyboard Shortcuts under preferences:

Preferences - Keyboard Shortcuts

Quickly jump from UDF Builder to File Explorer​

UDF Builder & File Explorer work well together, so we've made easy to jump from one to the other

  • In UDF Builder, Cmd + Click on a s3://... path will open it directly in File Explorer
  • In File Explorer double clicking on a file will prompt Fused to do its best at guessing which Catalog UDF to use to load this file in Code Editor

Troubleshooting​

If things feel a bit off, for example your UDF output looks suspicious here are a few things you can do:

  • Manually rerun the UDF with Shift + Enter
  • Check how much RAM your tab is using (in Chrome can easily do so by hovering the tab). Sometimes too much data is brought in to your browser and while we do our best to manage it properly it can get out of hand. A good old tab refresh goes a long way