[mart-dev] Canned queries 2 - How to modify results set before display

[Roger Hull]

Hi, The URL API provides a good solution for canned queries which can be implemented as standard BioMart queries. But I also need to implement another type of canned query, which takes data from a BioMart and post-processes it in various ways. I can do this using the perl API, for example, and display the results in a new web page. However, what I would like to do is to make use of the existing MartView features for displaying and downloading the data, so that the user has a more uniform experience. Also, for some types of canned query, I would like the user to be able to change the filtering and/or attribute selections and press "Results" to get a new set of post-processed results, displayed in the MartView page. Is there some function that I could hook into which delivered the results internally within MartView? Of course I want to minimise the code changes, for future maintainability, but if there is one place (or a small number of places) where I could insert a function call which would post-process the data, this should be manageable. I also need to do the same for the Count function. Currently the Count returned is "how many rows in the main table of the dataset match your filters so far". In the case of PRIDE, this is the number of experiments. But often I need to know the number of rows returned from the query, not the number of rows from the main table - for example I want to know the number of distinct proteins or peptides which match my filters. Regards, Roger.