Feature Request: Additional standard field types

Hi,





Newbie to IJC and ChemAXon in general. Overall, very impressed with IJC. would it be possible to have some additional field types into a future version?:





E.g.,


- Graphics field (png, gif, jpeg, etc)


- binary field to handle files (Word, Excel, PDF, etc)





This way, we could embed spectra files, reports and images into an IJC database.





Apologies if these are a repeat request, or are already planned/included.





Cheers,





A.

We have plans for this type of thing which will be implemented shortly in the 2.x versions.


The initial idea is to handle this as follows:





1. Create a new field type that basically has 2 properties: a URL template and a mime type. The url would be generated by substituting the values of fields (usually the ID field) into a template to generate the correct URL.


2. Create a new widget type that loads its data from a URL.


3. Provide renders for that widget type for each specific Mime types.





As renders are already an extension point this would allow a third party to easily plug in new renderers for any type of data. We would provide some standard renderers for things like images, and plan to use JSpecView (http://jspecview.sourceforge.net/) for displaying spectra in JCAMP-DX format. Word and PDF documents would probably be best displyed as hyperlinks and opened in external viewers.





We think this is probably better than having to load the data into the database as binary data. The files could be located locally for a local database allowing them to be distributed along with the database.


We may however also support loading binary data directly in the database at a later stage if there is a specific need.





Tim

Hi Tim,





Thanks for the feedback. Links in most cases would be fine, particularly Word, where an external viewer would be best. For images, I think this would be helpful if loaded in directly and a widget to view the image within e.g., the form view.





Cheers,





A.

Hi,





This is a redundant entry, but has this feature been implemented yet?





Thanks

This is not yet implemented. We are hoping to have it ready for IJC2.3, which will expect to be available by the end of Q1 2008.





Tim

Hi Tim,





Is there any way I can be a beta tester for this feature?

Yes, you will be able to test this.


We will shortly be making the latest development versions of IJC continually available via Java Web Start, so this will allow anyone to test features as they are developed.








Tim

Hi Tim,





Will you make an announcement or shall I keep looking in a certain area of the ChemAxon site?





Thanks for the info, I can't wait to equip my database forms with my GBs of images!

Yes, we we make an announcement about this via the IJC news feed (what you see in the welcome screen).





Tim

Hi Tim,





I know I'm a persistant bugger, but is there any way I can test out this feature "as is" now?





My reason for pestering you is that I'm dealing with annotation of image data from a large chemical screen and it would save me an immense amount of time and effort to have all the images, annotation, and compound structures in one place. The imput image widget is just what I need.





I can report to you my usage, encountered problems, etc. As well I will be using it in the academic setting.





Please let me know either way, and thanks,





Andrew

I'm afraid there is nothing that is ready to be tested yet.


We are currently finalizing the IJC 2.2 release, and we expect this feature to be part of IJC 2.3. Once we have something that can be tested we will let you know.








Tim

I take it this is still under development? Do you know of anyone that has developed a widget as you describe above, that can take a url and display an image in the form or table?





If you guys can come up with this feature, AND have it exportable to Excel as an image, just as you do with the structure, IJC will be even more unstoppable than it is already.

Yes, I'm afraid this much requested feature is still under development.


We hope to have it for IJC 2.4, but can't be totally certain :-(





Tim

tdudgeon wrote:

Yes, I'm afraid this much requested feature is still under development. We hope to have it for IJC 2.4, but can't be totally certain :-( Tim

Hi Tim,





When do you plan on releasing 2.4?





Thanks,





Andrew

We can't provide a definite date, but we are hoping for around August time.


There will be 2.3.1 bug fix release quite soon.





Tim

I'd like to second this feature request.





It would be great to be able to store image data (e.g. from a cell-based fluorescence screen) to JChem tables and to have a corresponding widget to see the image in IJC.





Cheers!


Andy

Hi all,

 

Any updates on this feature request? Ie. the linking of image data into the database. Thanks.

We have this feature working in the development version of IJC which we hope to have released in about 2 months time. You will be able to define image locations using dynamically generated or static URLs and display those images in an IJC form or grid view.

Tim

Wonderful, this will dramatically change my high throughput screening lifestyle. Please post here when the feature is added. If been waiting since 2007, so I'm a bit excited!

The ability to link out to data using URLs and displaying such content (images, HTML etc.) in an IJC form is now implemented in the IJC 3.0 release.

Tim