Generalized collections

[chaoran-chen]

On CoV-Spectrum, a popular feature are the collections. Any user can create a collection which mainly consists of

• Title
• Description
• List of variant entry where each only consists of
  • Name
  • A normal variant query or an advanced variant query (the SARS-CoV-2-specific query, not the new advanced query)
  • Description

To create a CoV-Spectrum collection, a user does not need to register but get an admin URL that consists of a key. With the URL, they can edit or delete the collection in the future.

To generalize the feature for whole GenSpectrum / different pathogens, we need:

• Implement an API to create/edit collections in the backend
• Define an authentication mechanism (Do we do it the same way as with the CoV-Spectrum collections?)
• Create a web interface to create and maintain collections

[fhennig]

Hey! Good to have this issue, also sounds like a useful feature!

I think you can also just have a query page with the URL encoded query, and you could share that as well (obv. with some size restrictions for the query). But this is persistent and named, and thus more easily shareable, which is nice to have, right?

To create a CoV-Spectrum collection, a user does not need to register but get an admin URL that consists of a key.

To clarify: You can just create a collection, and when you get it you get an admin URL (some UUID or similar) that you can use to edit the collection in the future. If you lose the URL, you can't edit it anymore.

Cool, because no login, no user management, great. And I suppose you didn't have many issues with people loosing the URLs or something, right?

Implement an API to create/edit collections in the backend

The README shows that the backend is currently not in use, we'd first have to reactive it, right?

[chaoran-chen]

I think you can also just have a query page with the URL encoded query, and you could share that as well (obv. with some size restrictions for the query). But this is persistent and named, and thus more easily shareable, which is nice to have, right?

That might also be useful, but for CoV-Spectrum, people like to have stable URLs/pages that are regularly updated and used by many people. For example, you can find many mentions of "collection42" (see Twitter) that refer to the collection with ID 42 on CoV-Spectrum. For #939, we'd also need persist the collections.

To clarify: You can just create a collection, and when you get it you get an admin URL (some UUID or similar) that you can use to edit the collection in the future. If you lose the URL, you can't edit it anymore.

Cool, because no login, no user management, great. And I suppose you didn't have many issues with people loosing the URLs or something, right?

ok, what I left out is that you can also specify an author name and email address. We don't have any automated reset mechanism but there were cases where people contacted me via email and I sent them the admin link.

The README shows that the backend is currently not in use, we'd first have to reactive it, right?

Yes!