Hello Jens, A high priority for the team is to replace the tool form with one that is more javascript driven - right now it repeatedly POSTs to the web server and has a lot of complicated server state handling. Moving this client side and doing these things more dynamically should enable enhancements like the ones outlined in this card (https://trello.com/c/RllVlsfg). These issues came up at the conference and they will hopefully be addressed soon-ish. This addresses the repeat tag limitations specifically - but workflows with variable numbers of input parameters isn't a problem that is just solved with UI enhancements. To broadly tackle the problem the team has been working on datasets collections and I just presented the work at the community conference bit.ly/gcc2014workflows. A lot of this is in -stable, but -central contains some important UI work and bug fixes that will be released with the next version of Galaxy. There are certainly times when it makes sense to place input dataset parameters inside of repeat blocks - but I think more tools are switching over to us multiple="true" on a single data parameter input. It allows for more rapid selection of many inputs and work more seamlessly with dataset collections. Hope this helps, -John On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 2:03 AM, Keilwagen, Jens <jens.keilwagen@jki.bund.de> wrote:

Hi guys,

this threads has been inactive for quite a long while. However, I'd like to restart the discussion.

There are two alternatives for improving the usability of the repeat tag. 1) If the repeat tag arguments could be populated using white pages and a filter similar to the possibility for workflow, the user would be able to add several inputs at once. 2) If workflows would allow for using multiple (but not fixed number of) inputs obtained via white pages as input of a repeat tag argument of a tool, the user could use the functionality of multiple inputs (white pages) in workflows.

I would vote for the second proposal as it allows for building workflows with variable number of inputs (e.g. read mapping and combined SNP calling for a variable number of samples). Workflows with variable number of inputs have been brought up from time to time at several posts or meetings. Hence, solving this could be hitting 2 birds with one stone.

However, proposal 2 has the drawback that using repeat tag arguments outside of workflows is still a lot of manual work.

This could be circumvented by tiny workflows consisting only of the tool of interest (containing the repeat tag argument).

best regards, Jens

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