Damian Smedley wrote:
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
Fair enough - we don't currently use the FASTA output but we've had
requests for shim services to convert from our 'individual outputs' to a
FASTA document so we were considering it, I suspect we won't though; we
don't really want to have to present the ordering within an already
complex UI and we can handle that in the downstream shim.
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
That sounds like a worthy improvement, how about showing a 'template'
fasta header if that output mode is selected and putting the controls to
change order there? That would seem most intuitive as it would directly
map to what the user was expecting to get :
" >identifier {property 1 ->} {<- property 2 ->} {...} {<- property n} "
where the '->' and '<-' are glyphs for promote and demote within order?
Even without the ability to change the ordering it might be handy to
have a preview of what you'll get, especially with people making rather
large queries as is often the case.
Tom
