I’m staring at the discussion of handling dataset collections:

but failing to see the solution to my problem.

I have a tool that creates a dataset collection, a group of files with names like 1_1308_1_2_092-ch6-speaker16.TextGrid where the 1_1308_1_2_092 part is a unique identifier that I’d like to keep track of.  I’ve used a discover_datasets tag in the tool xml file to match my output filenames and extract the designation (1_1308_1_2_092-ch6-speaker16.TextGrid) and the ext (TextGrid).  

I have another tool that runs a query over these files and generates a single tabular result that will ideally include the identifier in some form. Here’s the command section for that tool:

where ‘$textgrid’ is one of my input parameters that has multiple=“true” set so that it can be a dataset collection.  That works ok but the input I get are the filenames (dataset_1.dat, etc.) not the name of the datasets.  

The page above mentions something called the ‘element_identifier’ and gives this funky example:

merge_rows --name "${re.sub('[^\w\-_]', '_', $input.element_identifier)}" --file "$input" --to $output;

I can’t see what this element_identifier thing is - the suggestion is that it might be the dataset name, but I’m not sure.  Also I don’t understand why the command above is doing replacement of whitespace with underscores.   

If this is the name I’m after, it would seem that I’d need to pass these names along with the textgrid files and then pair them up inside my script - is that what I need to do? 

All of this cries out to me for a more explicit representation of a dataset collection that my tool can create and consume rather than this hacky treatment of filenames.   If I could generate a manifest file of some kind describing my dataset collection then none of this parsing of filenames would be needed.  I could also consume the manifest file as well and it could be used for collection level metadata.  Is this a silly idea? 

Anyway, any help with my immediate problem would be appreciated. 

Thanks,

Steve