I’m looking at extending the metadata fields for one of the supported file types. The files can get VERY large, and since I’m creating those files, I’d like to save as metadata some of the information I have on the contents.

Specifically, I’d like to tag the files with information about the sample as well as the byte offsets in the file for every millionth record (to facilitate fast file splitting). I saw the sample script for uploading a file to a library via the API. It looks to me like the most direct approach would be to modify LibrariesController.create() to handle arbitrary key-value pairs to be set on the data file.

However, that might not support things like having metadata values be arrays.

So, does my understanding of the problem and the areas involved seem reasonable? Is there something already out there that does what I need? I saw the set_metadata.py script, but that looks like it is meant to operate directly on the files, which might not make a running instance of Galaxy too happy. Is there an API version of that (or something in one of the web controllers I can repurpose to my needs)?

Thanks!

John Duddy
Illumina, Inc.