Hello John,
I tested this out on the github Galaxy with a commit from August 4 (253ce7b8e3ddad7693da034374bed1a751173839) in dev. Were any of the fixes you added done since then? I'll try it out on the 15.07 release though.
I would like to ask your opinion about something though. So, the tool I'm trying to write is one to merge 2 dataset lists together into a larger list. The problem I want to solve is that we often deal with paired-end sequencing data (and collections work awesome for that), but not all sequencing is paired-end. Sometimes we have single-end data as well we want to put through the same workflow.
So, I figured I can just have another "input" element in my workflow for both paired-end and single-end. The first step is reference mapping which produces BAM files. I can do that separatly (since the mapper needs different parameters for single vs. paired end), but then I want to merge my BAM file lists together).
That is, I have a workflow like:
+--------------+ +---------------+
| | | |
| Paired-end +------^+ Ref Mapping +--------------+
| | | | |
+--------------+ +---------------+ +--------v--------+
| |
| Merge BAM Lists +------>
| |
+--------------+ +---------------+ +--------^--------+
| | | | |
| Single-end +------^+ Ref Mapping +--------------+
| | | |
+--------------+ +---------------+
So, I was trying to develop a tool to merge both lists together. I was doing this by writing a tool that takes as input both BAM lists, along with another list defining the exact size of the merged lists but with empty datasets, and copying any datasets over. That is:
Input List1: [A: a.bam ,B: b.bam]
Input List2: [C: c.bam]
Input Size List: [A: empty, B: empty ,C: empty]
Output List: [A: a.bam, B: b.bam, C: c.bam]
I know it looks a bit ugly to have that "size list" around, but I'm automating execution of the workflow so it's not as big of a deal to me. Not sure if you have any other solutions?
Thanks for taking the time to read over this. I'll do a bit more testing of my tool in other Galaxy versions.
Aaron