On 2014-06-24 11:55, Bob MacCallum wrote: > Hi Nicklas et al, > > Getting up to speed with BASE3 and NGS - so far all seems good - even > upgrading our own API code has gone smoother than I expected. Thanks!
Great to hear that it is going well. > > A possible feature request for general discussion: > > Would it be possible to have "placeholder" files in the BASE file system > which weren't on disk but had an FTP location stored in the DB? It > would be a bit like the current "offline" option but for our use case > (fastq and BAM files stored elsewhere and never processed by BASE3 or > plugins) we would never even upload the files in the first place (I > can't find a way to create a file that is offline from the start). > > The debate for other users/devs would be: should BASE automatically > retrieve the files when needed? I say no need for that - treat them > like offline files are currently (if I understand correctly how offline > files work). There is already the *external files* feature. It can accessed with "New URL" in the BASE file manager. It's not the same as an *offline* file since by default BASE will try to check if it exists and download some metadata (such as size and modification date). And BASE will also retrieve the file if is requested by a plug-in or a user tries to download or view it. The external files feature is "pluggable" and the BASE core only provide support for files that can be accessed with http or https. In theory it is possible to register unsupported URLs (eg. ftp://...) but I guess error messages will popup here and there. As it happens, we discussed a similar problem last week. Up until now, our approach has been to simply store the file path as an annotation on bioassay items. In the future we'll need to provide access for external researchers to our data, but we really don't want to have them on our internal file servers so the idea is to let BASE act as a proxy. So, I am currently working on an extension that add support for accessing external files via FTP, FTPS and SFTP (see http://baseplugins.thep.lu.se/wiki/net.sf.basedb.xfiles). I might be able to release a first version later this week if you want to try it. If you prefer the *offline* files feature there is unfortunately no support in the GUI for creating offline files without first uploading them. A possible solution would be to modify the "New URL" dialog to make the "URL" field optional, and use this to decide between offline/external file. If you have any other ideas please let me know... /Nicklas ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open source business process management suite built on Java and Eclipse Turn processes into business applications with Bonita BPM Community Edition Quickly connect people, data, and systems into organized workflows Winner of BOSSIE, CODIE, OW2 and Gartner awards http://p.sf.net/sfu/Bonitasoft _______________________________________________ The BASE general discussion mailing list basedb-users@lists.sourceforge.net unsubscribe: send a mail with subject "unsubscribe" to basedb-users-requ...@lists.sourceforge.net
