Is the product polished? We need your inputs

[Abdul]

Hello @S_M, this issue should be fixed in about 15 mins from now, cheers to all of you guys pointing stuff out, we really appreciate it.

[Dennis]

This is what I really appreciate about Activepieces - devs who act quickly and listen to the community. Please don’t see this thread solely as negative critique; the only reason people are taking the time to comment is because they believe in the product and want to help make it even better.

Keep up the great work!

[HoldYourWaffle]

Spotted another good example of “meh” error handling and abstraction leak in another topic:

This is a weird combination of mixed signals for non-technical users. I absolutely see why it’s like this, an HTTP 400 is a valid response for a “succesful” request, but for an end-user the thing they wanted to happen has failed. Activepieces doesn’t always recognize this properly, which can lead to even weirder behavior down the line.

I’d like to see Activepieces become much more vigilant in this type of error handling, i.e. fail-fast in programmer’s terms. Deployed flows ideally don’t receive attention from humans, so errors could currently easily go unnoticed for extended periods of time. Error handling and resiliency is already incredibly hard to get right for even experienced programmers, I’d love to move as much of this burden to Activepieces rather than the (non-technical) users.

The “output values” idea I mentioned earlier could help with this, since it creates a clear “expected value”, which makes it much easier to detect when something weird happens.

Like @Dennis said, please don’t let my flood of (hopefuly constructive) criticism get to you, Activepieces is already a solid product with tons of potential to become the greatest in its class!
I’d also like to mention again that it’s 100% my intention to actually help contribute to these things rather than functioning as the classic “idea man”, but unfortunately health issues are a limiting factor at this point in time.

[S_M]

Thanks, Abdul, this has been fixed!
@Abdul If you could please fix the trackpad scroll bug I mentioned here too:

Is the product polished? We need your inputs

That’s a lie…one thing that is not polished…is the two-finger scroll/panning trackpad gesture on my Macbook - navigating within a flow. I want it to function similar to the click/grab-and-pan gesture (within a flow), but for some weird reason, the two finger scroll does some weird visual stuff and doesn’t pan smoothly (which is an understatement). It’s quite annoying and almost unusable actually as a scrolling/panning method. I’ve learned to avoid using the trackpad gesture, but it would make a…

[HoldYourWaffle]

Another example of problematic error handling from another topic:

[Bram]

hi @S_M what do you mean with Auto-save for flows?

It feels like my concepts are saved right automatically? Or is this maybe just the cloud solution?

[S_M]

Sorry @Bram, I was tired when I wrote that.

I meant revert to an auto-saved flow instance, not just a published instance.

For example, if you don’t ever publish a WIP flow but have been working on it for several days or even weeks, there’s no way to go back if you make a mistake.

This would also extend to undo/redo functionality which @Dennis mentioned.

[Bram]

No problem! I understand what you mean. Makes sense

Also not sure if it is mentioned but saving HTTP pieces would be amazing, I’ve set up quiet a lot of HTTP Pieces but have to set these up again for every flow. Saving these and reusing them would be amazing and saves a lot of time.

Besides that Pabbly has set-up something a while back where it is easier for users to create these HTTP pieces please see this video,

How to Import cURL Request in Pabbly Connect (New Feature)

Kr Bram

[S_M]

Yes, 100%! Same for the Code pieces, please!

[HoldYourWaffle]

Another example of unpolished/undocumented/unintuitive behavior: Google Drive "Read file" bug? - #3 by abuaboud

[Eduardo]

Thanks for asking!!!

I’d suggest a few things:

• Undo and redo button at the top of the screen.
• More info on errors and input fields. For instance, in the Drive piece, in Folder ID there is no information on what folder id is or where to get it (I already got it, but sometimes it is frustrating not having any help on how to get it)
• A view of favorite pieces.
• A view of favorite flows.
• A changelog on pieces to see what changed or new improvements.

Thanks!!!

[Konrod]

@ashrafsam

Every single opinion is important, please share yours!

A lot of pain is caused by the lack or poor documentation of feature blocks and the lack of implementation examples. I know that you have this functionality that I need, but I can’t start using it, because all that you have written about it is that it exists…

Example - 🔒 Authentication for Webhook - #3 by Konrod

And yes, I write about this because I like what you do and how. If I didn’t believe in the product and your team, I would simply leave.

[Verso]

I can see the effort and the community, but in my opinion the product is far from polished.

The reason being is the lack of Pieces as well as the lack of triggers/actions for the ones existing. In many cases, it’s members of the community, and not from ActivePieces, that create them altruistically.

I knew Activepieces was a young project when I purchased it, but I was not expecting it to develop at this slow pace. However, I still have faith

[Adik]

Despite being a paid user, am unable to use AP. It breaks, especially chat gpt. Most of the templates (1500 word blog, for example) does not work

[ashrafsam]

What do you mean by “it breaks” and “does not work”? Can you help us understand your perspective?

[Adik]

Yes, in fact both. Have showed @kishanprmr this. CHat GPT token doesnt work. Simple Rss to Twee does not work.

And the one use case that I bought AP for (Automatic blog writing from SHeets), never worked. Sharing the issue link with you to you.

[Tobias_Geisler]

The documentation is lacking. Eg. I still haven’t managed to connect Excel, as there is no complete documentation and nobody replies to the topic in this forum.

[kishanprmr]

Hi @Tobias_Geisler ,

Could you please share details about the error you are encountering while connecting to Microsoft Excel?

[Tobias_Geisler]

I just checked again, and my setup suddenly seems to be working (before it said “an unexpected error occurred” in the workbook selection). Still, my point holds, we need explicit documentation on how to set up connections. I descried the issue in this thread.

Getting Excel to run involved searching on Google, finding this thread , moving on to this the microsoft integration guide and then just guessing which rights should be assigned where and hope it would work (which initially it didn’t). Then weeks of no replies to my inquiries followed and finally now the error seems to have been fixed. Not exactly a polished feel to setting up an Excel connection.

[HoldYourWaffle]

Unfortunately I mostly share the experiences of @Adik and @Tobias_Geisler.
In theory Activepieces is a great product, but there’s next to no documentation and pieces are more often than not fragile and/or unintuitive. Activepieces markets itself als “no-code business automation”, but in my experience it’s too much of an abstraction leak and definitely not reliable enough to serve these purposes well.

On paper there’s a large number of pieces/integrations, but in practice a lot of them are incomplete, fragile or outright broken. It feels like a classic “quantity over quality” situation.
I suppose this might be a case of “open source syndrome”: a bunch of awesome people have graciously donated their time to contribute pieces for their usecase, without taking into account the platform as a whole. This seems to have created a flood of low quality/poorly thought out/fragile pieces.

To be clear, I don’t think this is the responsibility of these awesome contributors. They just want to get their work done, they’ve already gone out of their way to donate their time to someone else’s commercial product. However, given that Activepieces is a commercial venture, I’d expect the developers to be more involved with quality control, for example by adjusting and extending these altruistic contributions to match quality standards.

Please don’t see this as some kind of roast though! I assure you all of my (admittetly intense) feedback comes from a place of love and genuine enthusiasm for this project, and I hope I’ll be able to contribute more to improving these things soon.