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.
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?
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?
Tom
