Improve user interactions in the UI for feed and workflow related activities

[Sandip117]

Abstract

The regular (non-admin) user is expected to have more power in the UI than in CUBE. This is the reason why the user should be able to make changes (like add/update/delete) files and directories in any new or existing feeds. In the case of workflows, the ability to change/switch compute env in any node in a pipeline would provide a much richer experience to the user in the UI.

Motivation

While creating any new analysis/feed, a user is expected to examine the input and output files of the entire workflow or any node in particular. Since we currently have an UI that can provide a read-only experience for any particular file or directory, it is obvious that a user would want to be able to modify one or multiple files in the UI itself. Currently the process of achieving this task is much more complex which can be a reason for a user to abandon the task itself. In order to facilitate the user to spend more time in the Feed-UI page, we should provide more CRUD tasks in this page.

Similarly, while selecting any pipeline to add in a feed, the current UI provides a read-only rendering of the selected pipeline tree. In the event of any particular node in the pipeline failing on a particular compute, the user has no option to change that in the UI. This again could be a reason for the user to not use any pipeline that is currently available in the UI. The UI should at least provide an option to change default compute env assigned to a particular node of a pipeline in the UI itself.

Challenges

Some of the immediate challenges could be :

1. Reproducibility and back tracking in a particular feed that has been modified by the user.
2. Updating a file means creating a new file in the file system. Storage and duplication overhead.

Effort & Reward

This could be a low to medium effort task. The workflow APIs currently provide the agility to modify compute and titles to a pipeline node. After a brief discussion, implementing notebooks like jupyter in the UI to modify files could be an immediate solution.

The rewards of this particular feature could be many fold. This gives more power to a regular ChRIS user and allows the user to continue/return to their feed more often. The ability to modify files in the UI would mean an user would never have to leave the Feed-UI or abandon a particular feed. The ability to switch compute-env in pipelines the UI would mean the user now can now create/use much larger pipelines using ChRIS.