On Apr 5, 2012, at 8:45 AM, Daniel Blankenberg wrote:
If you are designing a new datatype for a (set of) tool(s) and this datatype requires a bunch of files to be in a directory and these files are generally only useful when they are bundled together as a single unit (i.e. you wouldn't normally want any one of the files to exist as a separate history item), then you may want to look at composite datasets: http://wiki.g2.bx.psu.edu/Admin/Datatypes/Composite%20Datatypes
I was looking at composite datatypes, but it seems that they require knowing the filename in advance? While the filenames can be normalized within a reference package, they typically aren't. I'll take a second look at this, though.
That works well for user-supplied data. If you just want to provide reference data for users, a look into the tool_data_tables would be a good start.
There will be both user-supplied and presupplied data. I'll look at this as well. Thanks, ~Aaron