Doesn’t this violate one of the basic tenets of Galaxy – reproducibility? Without the ability to provide full traceability to the inputs, one can make no guarantees about the outputs.

John Duddy
Sr. Staff Software Engineer
Illumina, Inc.
9885 Towne Centre Drive
San Diego, CA 92121
Tel: 858-736-3584
E-mail: jduddy@illumina.com

From: galaxy-dev-bounces@lists.bx.psu.edu [mailto:galaxy-dev-bounces@lists.bx.psu.edu] On Behalf Of Paul-Michael Agapow
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2011 7:45 AM
To: galaxy-dev@lists.bx.psu.edu
Subject: [galaxy-dev] A tool with no inputs

One of my colleagues is having trouble developing a peculiar tool: it has no inputs. This makes sense in our local context – it fetches some constantly updating remote data for the current user – but implementing it has escaped our skill. Galaxy complains about a tool with no params (i.e. an empty <inputs>). It complains about a tool with no <inputs> tag. Hidden input fields don’t seem to work (i.e. looks like I’m getting the cached value of the form).

It is admittedly a fairly niche use-case and we could put in a dummy field and simply not use it, but that seems inelegant. Any suggestions?

----

Paul Agapow (paul-michael.agapow@hpa.org.uk)

Bioinformatics, Centre for Infections, Health Protection Agency

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