Hi there. I'm fairly new to the BioMart team myself but here's my first thoughts on your questions:
> - Multiple selections per attribute > Is there a way to run queries with more than 1 value per attribute? > I'm thinking of a list with the available values, where you can select > multiple entries, translating to a sql statement like "WHERE > attribute1='value1' AND (annotator='joe' OR annotator='jack') AND ..." No, there's no way to do this, not even using the other tools available. The BioMart query engine is designed around a single-value-per-attribute model. > - automatic drop-down updates > when selecting e.g. an organism from a drop-down, some other drop-downs > should be updated on-the-fly, e.g. the list with anotators should be > updated so that only the people who are referenced with this organism > should be visible. the function for making drop-downs in MartEditor just > doesn't quite do the job You'd have to write code to do this yourself. There is no way I know of to define dependencies at row-level for a BioMart database. (The code you mention in MartEditor allows you to define drop-downs but without dependencies at row-level, so you can only show all the rows, not just some of them depending on some other restriction.) > - "pretty" query result > i figured the only way to get the query-results is via an OutputStream, > so when i want to show a pretty table-widget with nice sorting, i have > to parse the output line-by-line and put it into a suitable object. > is there an easier way to do this? In version 0.5 there will be the concept of a Formatter, which does just what you say. It is an object which parses a BioMart response and turns it into some predefined format. I'm not sure if this will exist in martj, but it will definitely exist in the perl libraries. Martj as a whole is pretty out-of-date and needs a serious rewrite. It's on the to-do list! cheers, Richard -- Richard Holland (BioMart Team) EMBL-EBI Wellcome Trust Genome Campus Hinxton Cambridge CB10 1SD UNITED KINGDOM Tel: +44-(0)1223-494416
