Serratus Explorer querying experience

[victorlin]

#112 requires some under-the-hood rewriting and also some UI decisions. Here's a blueprint:

Each Search type selection will yield different options for Match type:

• Nucleotide: family/genbank/run
• Protein: family/protein/sequence
• RdRP: phylum/family/rdrp

Main points of discussion:

• Are Search type and Match type the right labels here? I was thinking Match level to reflect the hierarchal relation amongst the options, but "SRA Run" isn't really a level - rather a summary of matches from all levels.
• Do we want to re-visit the idea of having a "priming" feature and/or one dropdown per match type? Explorer page refactoring #79 (comment)

[ababaian]

An alternative would be to "tab" out through the different search types. I think it will be easy to get confused "what kind of data" am I looking at, and if we keep a distinct visual identity for each search type (blues, reds, purples) then you'll know where you are.

The examples do that "Priming" very well in my opinion, we would just have to include more variety of them (i.e. example of a GenBank Search too) and then for each "tab" we would have a different set of examples in the priming.

[victorlin]

Nice idea. Proposed URL examples:

• serratus.io/explorer/nucleotide?family=Coronaviridae
• serratus.io/explorer/rdrp?family=Coronaviridae
• serratus.io/explorer/protein?protein=rdrp

[ababaian]

Let's focus on rdrp and nucleotide first, the protein data was a pilot search I think it's less critical to get it operational soon. But the idea of generalizing the results is what is important since we will add more "experiments" as time goes forward.

We can shorten it to rdrp and nt for the URL

[ababaian]

With respect to the labels: Search Type I think works. Maybe a more accurate description for the next selection would be Query by, as in how are you querying the data: "SRA Run", "GenBank", "Family" all make sense in this respect

[victorlin]

Not sure about this one - since Search and Query are synonymous, having both Search Type and Query by could be confusing to an inexperienced user.

I'm also trying to avoid confusion in the code - currently using queryType for family/genbank/run and it's already a bit confusing since there exists other "querying" options (score/identity - these are termed filters internally). And the number of options will only grow when we add geo+time filters.

[victorlin]

Search Type / Search Level ?

[victorlin]

I went ahead with Search Type / Search Level in the code: c7a0911

[ababaian]

sounds good :D