La Tinaja

‘Code Comments’ for Workflow on iOS

13 Jul 2015

I have recently had occasion to start getting into working with Workflow on iOS. I’ve found, however, that most of my ideas are a bit woolier than the simple actions the interface seems to be designed to handle best.

I just finished a workflow that needs two nested conditionals inside of a double-nested loop. Workflow’s visual, drag-and-drop editor has a roomy design relative to code in a text editor, so there’s rarely enough of my nested structure on the screen at once for me to be able to easily parse where I am in the script. (This is not the fault of Workflow’s design; I fully accept it’s my fault for pushing it to do something that might be more easily accomplished in, for example, Pythonista.)

In typical coding, comments would be my friend here. Workflow doesn’t explicitly support comments, but combining the Text action and the Nothing action provides an easy workaround.

Text ‘Comment’ in Workflow

Using this technique has helped me tame some mammoth scripts by making it much easier to pick up where I left off from session to session.