On Mon, 12 Feb 2007, Tom Oinn wrote:
Syed Haider wrote:
I've just learned that the order of fields in the FASTA header returned
by Biomart is based on the order in which you pick the fields, as
opposed to, say, the order that the checkboxes appear on the form or
some such.
They appear in the order you hit the checkboxes. That gives users
flexibility to have any order of result set columns rather getting
restricted e.g you can never have chromosome column at any place except
the very first one.
Dear lord that's hideous.... I mean, no offence but that's just plain nasty.
I'd far rather have an explicit ordering over attributes; what if the user
building the query doesn't know this and happily uses downstream code from
another user, unaware that this code makes an assumption based on that user's
query? If you want users to be able to change the ordering of results in the
FASTA format output I'd strongly suggest you make this an extra stage within
the query building process rather than have it as a side effect of way the
user has interacted with the UI.
Tom,
we have had way more requests to do it the way it currently is ie the
results come out in the order they are selected and appear in the
left hand summary.
You have to remember 90% of the useful biomart queries come thro bench
scientists using the basic web interface. I agree though that some way of
changing the order easily after would be nice though ie being able to drag
and drop the atts in the query summary panel.we definitely don't want the atts just to come out in the order thety are
on the webpage though. some user flexibility is needed
I assume that for queries submitted through the service interface it's the
ordering of attributes, and that this is made absolutely explicit within the
query language definition?
yes - the order you put in the query xmls is what you get
What if the user changes the checkboxes, so removes an attribute then
reapplies it, does it move to the end of the current list? Please tell me the
order is at least shown in the query UI?
yep - that is the problem in the web interface currently - the order you
will get is summarised but we need something like my drag and drop idea
above to make ift totally flexible
cheers,
Damian
Tom
