Dynamicly generated steps not shown as "children" of the uploader steps

[zenogueira]

Hello,

I know this is a cosmetic question, but I wanted to understand if there is a reason why, in the canvas view, dynamically uploaded steps ($ ./script/dynamic_step_generator | buildkite-agent pipeline upload) don’t show as children of the step that uploaded them?

I never really gave it much thought, but we have a new situation where we want to group steps, and we want to control this pipeline visually, and the groups of steps show as dependents of the uploader step, but not the single steps. eg:

(in the screenshot above, setup creates and uploads all the steps)

We have other pipelines that we sometimes control visually, but those are much more complex than this one, and we always assumed it was the complexity of them that doesn’t allow the canvas renderer to make the visualization more correct, but in this case, it should render correctly.

I’m sorry if this is a repeated question, but i couldn’t find it in the forum or the docs.

Thank you

[Micheal]

Hi @zenogueira I believe the Canvas view shows dependency relationships rather than the upload ownership. When you dynamically upload a group of steps, the canvas can render the group step as dependent on the uploader step, while the individual steps inside the group stay within that node and don’t appear as separate nodes with their own dependency lines. This is by design as the canvas treats groups as single logical units to keep the visualization clean and manageable so you’ll typically see the uploader connected to the group, but not to each step within the group.