New Features for OS Metagenomics

Here are some of the new features that are now included in OS Metagenomics:

Saving/Loading Your Data

This new feature is more of a developmental infrastructure change that gives the app a better use of persistent data and what we could do with it. Before, saving your data in orkut meant saving a JSON formatted object in the form of this:

{ userId :
   { "savedResults" :
      [ "title 1" , "title 2", "title 3",... ]
   }
}

This only allowed the application to later retrieve the titles of the data and nothing else. Later, an idea came about allowing the application to retrieve the actual data from this list of titles obtained in the Your Data section. So in order to do that I had to change the JSON formatted object to hold the phone number with its respective titles, like this:

{ userId :
   { "savedResults" :
      { phoneNumber 1 :
         [ "title 1", "title 2", "title 3",..., "title 9" ],
        phoneNumber 2 :
         [ "title 10", "title 11",... ],
        phoneNumber 3 :
        ...
      }
   }
}

What this does is allow the user to retrieve his/her data much quicker. Instead of filling in the input fields, if the user saved their data into orkut they can now view their previously saved data in the Your Data section as a drop-down list. After choosing a title to access, the app searches it’s internal application data for the “savedResults” object and parses the JSON string, searches for the chosen title and remembers the corresponding phone number associated with it. The app then sends a request to our server to retrieve the data, which is similar to “filling in” the form for you and loading the data for you.

Friends

The Friends section has been successfully added to the OS Metagenomics application. With this new section a user is now able to click the View Friends Data button to retrieve a list of drop-down lists. These drop-down lists are separated by the names of the user’s friends and contain the data the friends saved into orkut, not the data they saved onto the server. So, if someone would like their friends/colleagues to see which metagenomes they now have data for, they would just save it into orkut when viewing the data and their friends would see it in their Friends section. Also, a Request Data button is located next to the drop-down list. Clicking this would send a message to the friend asking them for the data that was chosen in the drop-down list. (orkut is actually not allowing me to send this message for some reason. Every time I try it a message at the top of the application screen shows saying “You have temporarily been disallowed from performing this action. Please try again after some time.” This may be disabled during the development phase of an application but it seems that orkut knows I’m trying to send an email which is a good thing Smile).