I don't know of a way to accomplish what you are describing with the tool framework - without prepopulating static files with all of the data you will need - and even then I am not exactly sure what to do. But it sounds like you would like to fetch this data from a database or web service of some kind dynamically - so that doesn't sound like a good path. More details however would help formulate a better response. My guess is a tool is not an ideal abstraction that you should be using right here - you could write a local extension to Galaxy to do this or you can write a data source and corresponding data source tool (https://wiki.galaxyproject.org/Admin/Internals/Data%20Sources). Though some people have done really creative things with the tool framework so I could be totally wrong, hopefully if someone else has an idea they will speak up. If you want to write a local extension to Galaxy you can look at some the controllers in lib/galaxy/webapps/galaxy/controllers/ and write your own that would have actions for displaying a form to collect the data and update the page with details, as well as one to perform the import, and you will need to write mako templates to describe your pages (in templates/webapps/galaxy). You could do the import using the existing structures in Galaxy or target the API. Regardless this will be a lot of work. Another possibility is to drive this entire process from an external webapp either existing (is something being used to manage this data you targeting) or a new one in whatever web programming environment you are most comfortable with. In response to how to transfer files to your local Galaxy instance faster - I would need to know where you are getting them from and what method you are currently using to copy them. I hope this helps. -John On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 8:35 PM, Huayan Gao <huayangao(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: