Control / subflow · All operations

Replay a recorded recipe of steps

A variant of Call a reusable workflow

Apply a saved sequence of preparation steps or recorded commands to the current data.

Status

In arcform

Not built yet

arcform does not do this yet; it would live in how a Protocol runs. Its place on the roadmap

What other tools call it

Meridian's classification; an independent blind rating agreed on 95.7% of 324 rows (variant, version 3).

AWS Glue (1)
  • Data preparation reciperead 2026-09-27

    Apply a recipe of data preparation steps authored in a grid or imported from AWS Glue DataBrew

Azure Data Factory (1)
  • Power Query activityread 2026-09-27

    Run a Power Query mash-up at scale on the data flow Spark environment

OpenRefine (2)
  • Apply…read 2026-09-27

    Paste operation JSON to run those operations on the current project

  • Extract…read 2026-09-27

    Pick operations from the history and get them encoded as JSON

Talend (1)
  • tDataprepRunread 2026-09-27

    Apply a preparation built in Talend Data Preparation to the rows

VisiData (5)
  • exec-<macroname>read 2026-09-23

    Run a saved macro; one command is registered per macro

  • macro-recordread 2026-09-23

    Start or stop recording commands into a macro bound to a keystroke or longname

  • macro-sheetread 2026-09-23

    Open index of saved macros; each opens as an editable command log

  • replay-allread 2026-09-23

    Replay the commands in the CommandLog sheet

  • replay-rowread 2026-09-23

    Replay the command in the current CommandLog row

Background

Application macros are created by carrying out a sequence of actions once and letting the application record the actions.[1] In OpenRefine, operations performed in one project can be extracted as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and applied to another project.[2] In VisiData, a macro binds a series of commands to a key, and the commands are replayed within a session when that keystroke is used.[3]

When to use it

In OpenRefine, not all operations can be extracted; edits to a single cell, for example, cannot be replicated.[2] In VisiData, a saved command log, or cmdlog, records the exact file name and sheet names from the original session.[4] In VisiData, reusing a cmdlog with a different input file means editing it to remove the open-file line and erase all its sheet values.[4] In VisiData, blank sheet names in a cmdlog work only for linear workflows that never switch between sheets.[4] Before replaying a recipe on new data, look for the names it carries from the data it was recorded on: files, sheets and columns. (Meridian's view)

In Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glue Studio, not all AWS Glue DataBrew recipes are supported, and recipes with UNION and JOIN transforms are not supported.[5] In AWS Glue Studio, Data Preparation Recipe nodes are supported for jobs starting with AWS Glue version 4.0.[5]

The method

In OpenRefine, any activity that changes the data can be undone, and the change history of each project is saved with the project's data.[2] In OpenRefine, Extract lists all operations up to the current state, leaving out undone operations, and encodes the selected ones as JSON.[2]

In VisiData, pressing m starts recording a macro, and pressing m again completes the recording and prompts for a keystroke or name to bind it to.[3] In VisiData, a macro's inputs can use {param} or {param=default} placeholders, and VisiData prompts for their values before executing the macro.[3] In VisiData, a saved cmdlog is replayed from the command line with vd -p, and the -b option runs it in batch, non-interactive mode.[4]

In Azure Data Factory (ADF), the Power Query activity builds and executes Power Query mash-ups for data wrangling at scale in a pipeline.[6] In AWS Glue Studio, after a DataBrew recipe and version are chosen, the recipe's applied steps are visible in the node properties tab.[5]

Sources

  1. [1]Macro (computer science)secondary source
  2. [2]Running OpenRefine | OpenRefinedocumentation
  3. [3]Macros | Docs | VisiDatadocumentation
  4. [4]Save and Restore | Docs | VisiDatadocumentation
  5. [5]Using a data preparation recipe in AWS Glue Studio - AWS Gluedocumentation
  6. [6]Power Query activity in Azure Data Factory - Azure Data Factory | Microsoft Learndocumentation