Hello.
MartEditor is undergoing a big rewrite as it is not the friendliest tool.
Watch this space, but for now, here are some tips...:
> 1. If I now have a bunch of new data for the tables, how do I get it in
there? Am I supposed to load the data into my "raw" schema (the one
martBuilder plays with) and drop all the tables in my final schema and
recreate them using the SQL martBuilder gives me?
Yes. Marts are supposed to be read-only denormalised copies of some data.
Therefore when the data upon which they are based changes, they will need
to be rebuilt from scratch. You can however preserve your configs by
copying the tables called meta* from your old mart to the new one.
> 2. In other bad news, martEditor isn't saving for me. If I try "Save
All",
> it lets me browse to a location on disk, but then doesn't save a file
there. (I even tried saving in /tmp/ in case there was some weird
permission issue.) Also, if I Export All, nothing changes (even if I
restart Apache, which I tried out of desperation). Actually, it's worse
than that: it seems like it saved (that is, exported) some of the
martEditor changes I made, but then a different time I changed things it
didn't save. Can you tell me where it would be saving things and why it
would sometimes work? And while the changes sometimes show up in
martEditor, they're never visible in the actual web page.
"Save All" should dump out all configs from the database to a set of files
in the chosen location. This does not include configs that have not yet
been exported to the database, and so if you did this before using Export,
that would explain the lack of files.
"Export" will write the config back to the database inside a bunch of
tables starting with meta* (same as the ones I mention above). It should
be saving everything so that when you next do "Import" you get back what
you exported, but if this is not the case we may need to investigate your
specific case to find out the details.
If you change the config and export it, then MartView will only pick up
the changes if you re-run the perl configure.pl script you used to set it
up initially and then restart Apache.
> 3. Also, assuming I input new data into the mart (see #1), how do I get
dropdowns to reflect the new set of possible values? If I select "insert
dropdown" or whatever, it creates all of the filter values anew, which
means I have two copies of some of the values. (Of course, I can't
really
> tell what's going on since nothing changes in the web page.)
You have to delete all the options from the dropdown ('delete options')
then recreate it ('make dropdown'). If you don't delete first then you'll
get duplicate values.
> 4. Is there an easy way to reorder options? If I have six options, how
do
> I move option 4 to be in between option 2 and 3? Anywhere I try to drag,
option 4 ends up being placed INSIDE either option 2 or 3. I only
managed
> to reorder by dragging everything in my required order into the
container
> object.
Dragging-and-dropping should work to reorder in most circumstances but
some kinds of options are valid when nested, and so it will nest them if
it can. The only way round this is as you say to drop them into the
collection in the right order.
> 4a. In the end I may be happier editing the XML file, but I don't know
where it is right now, and for some changes, it might be nice to use
martEditor.
This would probably be harder than trying to get MartEditor to work! The
problem with this approach is that internally the XML config is split into
two pieces, which are near- but not quite-identical. Also there are
compressed copies of them stored in different places, which would need to
be compressed and checksummed using the same algorithm MEditor uses. Quite
apart from the fact that the XML syntax is not really human-readable in
this instance.
I hope the above helps a bit!
cheers,
Richard
--
Richard Holland
BioMart (http://www.biomart.org/)
EMBL-EBI
Hinxton, Cambridgeshire CB10 1SD, UK
