How To Use Building Blocks

MartinLiebig

In your everyday life as a data scientists and RapidMiner user you will encounter several tasks which you need to do frequently. To make your life easier you can use building blocks for those actions.

 

Building blocks allow you to store one preconfigured operator (e.g. a Subprocess operator with some contents) as a kind of template, that you can insert into another process. It is a little bit like copy/paste, just that what you copy can be accessed any time again.

 

Creating a Building Block

 To create a building block you can simply right click on the operator you would like to turn into a building block. If you would like to use more than one operator in the building block you can group them together using a Subprocess operator.

After right clicking you can choose Save as Building Block and give it a name and a description

After clicking on OK you are already done.

 

Expert Tip: The building blocks are stored in your .RapidMiner folder as XML and can be shared by sharing the XMLs.

Using a Building Block

 If you would like to use the building block in the process you can either hit ctrl+b or go to Edit->Insert Building Block. In the resulting window you simply choose your building block and hit OK

Calling a Process like a Function

If you want to "call" a process from another process, use the Execute Process operator. You can even pass data and macros around.
To pass data: on the inner process, connect the process input ports on the *right* of the process to get input, and connect those on the *left* to pass output to the calling process.
In the outer process, connect the data to the ports as you would do with any other operator.