I’m setting up a wrapper for a script we use, and need to populate a select field from a file. I’m struggling with the concept of data_tables, data manager, data manager tools etc. All I want is:
- i have mytool/mytool.xml with the tool definition
- i have mytool/options.loc (or csv, or txt) with a list of options (it is a list of parameters to choose from that can be extracted from a raw file)
- i want to define a param of type select in mytool.xml that lets me choose from an item in options.loc. This is not a link to external data, it’s simply a table.
- These parameters should be there automatically when the tool is installed, not installed separately.
- I don’t understand how a .loc file differs from a regular TSV. Is there some info about LOC files?
- Is my only option to hardcode the values in the mytool.xml?
It seems that simply accessing this file directly does not work, because it has to reside somewhere else. There seems to be the mechanism of a “data manager” which points to a tool which returns data which then form a table, but I don’t understand where to start. I have looked at the documentation at:
data managers
data managers
data manager xml syntax
but these look like they’re covering use cases much more complex than mine.
I have also looked at data tables but it seems that the admin would have to add the data table by hand to tool_data_table_conf.xml after installing the tool, do I understand that correctly? Overall it just seems more complex than I would expect to provide a simple list of options sourced from a file…