2009/12/7 Syed Haider <[email protected]>: > Yes, the new system will replace the whole perl side of the project with Java. May I then suggest two improvements to the tabular display in MartView, which I have implemented in the soon-to-be obsolete Perl code: 1. alternate the background colour when the contents of the first column change, and 2. introduce a new data format that allows one to have tooltip-style pop-ups over link-out data.
The first suggestion addresses the readability of MartView's output. Especially for larger tables with lots of columns and rows it is sometimes difficult to see where, for example, the data concerning one gene ends and the data for the next gene starts. By alternating colours, one gets a simple but effective visual grouping. The second suggestion is a bit esoteric, but I imagine that it could be useful for other people and projects too. I use it to display additional information about data that we incorporated into our BioMart. Displaying all of the data in the table would be too much, but if a user is interested about a particular entry in the table, then they can just hover the mouse over the respective item and see some supplementary information in the pop-up, before they finally decide whether they want, or do not want, to follow the link in question. As I have implemented it, the data is stored in the format 'x|y', where x is displayed in the table as a link and y is the HTML-formatted text that is displayed in the pop-up. Perhaps at least one of these suggestions sounds useful to the BioMart developers too.. :) Thanks, Joachim -- B.1079 Michael Smith Building Faculty of Life Sciences The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PT United Kingdom
