Re: [mart-dev] Adding canned queries to MartView

[Roger Hull]

Hi Syed, Thanks for your comments. Well, just getting the xml of the biomart query is a possibility - it might be possible to get back to what the user had selected/typed from the xml. But really I want to store my own data which makes it easy to reinitialise my form (in header.tt) to what the user had selected/typed. (Also in some cases the same biomart query might have arisen from more than one canned query.) I guess AJAX is still an option for this job (with a simple perl script to handle the request). Originally I thought of adding some extra GET or POST parameters to the martview page to pass it this information, but then I would need to be able to run a CGI script as the page loads, which would involve hacking into your martview code. As far as I can see you don't provide anywhere official for me to put a CGI script which gets run when martview loads. So I wondered if you have any other suggestions? If I write such a conversion function (xml -> URL parameters) I'll certainly share it. Regards, Roger. Syed Haider wrote: Hi Roger, On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 17:36 +0000, Roger Hull wrote: Hi, I am in the process of adding some preformed queries to MartView. The user will select from a list of queries, possibly enter some parameters (depending upon the query), and I have code (either perl or _javascript_) which will send the query to MartView using a Mart URL Request. This works fine for my first test query. This is implemented in _javascript_ added to header.tt and footer.tt. My main problem is how best to find out using _javascript_ what query was requested when I come back into the martview page (so I can reselect the user's canned query and re-enter the parameters). Can you suggest how I could do this, minimising the changes to the biomart code as far as possible? One idea I had is to handle the generation of the query URL from perl, and store the canned query somewhere (in a session parameter maybe). Then when I come back to the martview page, use an ajax request to find out the details of the canned query. by storing a 'canned query' in session param, what exactly do you intend to store ? is it just like an XML query which our XML button generates ? then of course write a simple AJAX _javascript_ request and ask from XML query. Currently, if you see the code behind OnClick() of XML button, it asks for XML by setting the target to a new window, you can call it exactly the same way and just avoid the target window bit. AJAX code is already available in _javascript_ 'martview.js' which can be reused. This seems rather complicated, but could all be done without changing any biomart code, just adding _javascript_ to header.tt, and some extra scripts on my server to handle the requests. But if you can suggest something better (simpler :-) ) I would be grateful. Also, do you have handy perl and/or _javascript_ functions to convert between a query in xml format (for MartService) and URL format? It would be convenient to store the canned queries as xml templates (ready to fill in parameters), then convert the completed xml into a URL query. I guess I can write such a function if necessary, but don't want to re-invent the wheel. I am afraid, we never felt a need to do this conversion, please feel free to write such a conversion function. This may help other users in the future. good luck! cheers syed Regards, Roger