Searching through Galaxy Libraries and Library Datasets effectively

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Greetings!

I was hoping someone could help me with this.
In our local Galaxy installment we have made some internal data available to users on a permission basis (using groups and roles) using Galaxy Libraries.
In these libraries we create folders in which we add specific datasets.
These datasets are ported over from another system we use internally, with specific naming and identifiers.

My hope was, that when a user enters a specific library, then a specific folder, they could use the search option in the folder to look for a dataset.

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This is an example dataset:

Name somename.fasta
Data type fasta
Genome build ?
Size 810.8 KB
Date last updated (UTC) 2025-12-08T10:27:23.096117
Date uploaded (UTC) 2025-12-08T10:18:35.815827
Uploaded by admin@company.nl
Data Lines 500
Miscellaneous blurb 14 sequences
Miscellaneous information 20) some nice name special to us uploaded fasta file
Tags [ “name:somename”, “20” ]
UUID some-code-as-uuid

The misc info is filled by the admin (sadly Galaxy adds “uploaded fasta file” and renames the dataset automatically after hashing, but thats a different topic).
And the admin adds tags.
All uploads and naming is done using [BioBlend]( BioBlend — BioBlend 1.7.0 documentation).

I already found a topic Search Data Libraries Datasets - usegalaxy.org support - Galaxy Community Help about this, but sadly there is no response there.

You CAN search for datasets if you know the exact name of the dataset (which is renamed to the filesystem name by Galaxy after hashing), but my users will not know this filesystem name most of the time. They will only know the name in the description.

It would also be great if my users can search on the tags, I’ve added an identifier there that the users will know.

Say a user searches 20 in the folder, this file above should pop up.

tag:20
20
tag=20
tags=20
tags:20
name:somename

The list above will not find me my dataset.

Is this already a feature in Galaxy Libraries? The topic I linked seems to suggest it is. If so, how do I make sure it works locally for us as well?

Thank you for your help in advance! If anything is not clear, let me know!

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Hi @JBoom

Yes, the Data Libraries view needs a major revision!

If you want to create a new issue about ideas for added functionality, if you reference the other ticket, community ideas will be included in the chain of other open suggestions. Having real use-case examples from our local administrators helps to guide the design!

Right now, I think the current ideas are to make Libraries work similar to how the Workflows and Histories views currently function (both were updated in the last year). The other major listings with pending changes are Pages, Workflow Invocations, and (probably) Datasets. All these required some underlying infrastructure changes that were happening first.

This was good to ask about! If you want to link this topic into your Github ticket, then post back your ticket link here, that would be great! And I’ll try to point the other questions at this forum back here too. :slight_smile:

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Hereby the link to issue I submitted on the GitHub issues page: :sparkles: Feature Request: Improve Search Functionality in Libraries (folders & datasets) · Issue #21417 · galaxyproject/galaxy

:grin:

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