thoughts on replacing webclient with omero_search_engine_client for IDR

[will-moore]

The IDR team has recently been discussing the phase-out of omero-mapr and using the searchengine instead to improve performance. We have been testing the "redirect" of mapr searches to the search engine.

E.g. Instead of going to https://idr.openmicroscopy.org/mapr/gene/?value=PAX7

you are redirected to https://idr.openmicroscopy.org/search/?key=Gene+Symbol&value=pax7&operator=equals&resource=image

When you click on the images there, you are taken back to the webclient!

One issue has been that users are taken back and forth between these 2 very different apps.
We are also looking at supporting more complex queries in the UI (which searchengine already supports) - see IDR/idr-gallery#34

One option is to try and combine the search engine UI (currently provided by idr-gallery) and the webclient into a single app.
To start an investigation of this idea, I have a working prototype at https://omero-search-engine-client.netlify.app/

We discussed this briefly this morning (Jason, Frances, Dom, Khaled) and the question arose of how long would it take to replace the webclient. This really depends on what functionality we need from the webclient, bearing in mind that the webclient wasn't originally designed for public data and has lots of features that we don't need, including ALL operations to modify data.

So let's try to list the functionalities that we DO need from the webclient and mapr, including some we might need(TBD). To start, I'll 'check' all that I think are essential, in order of importance...

• Open image in iviewer
• Link from KVPs to show other images with same KVPs (mapr functionality)
• Format external KVP links with favicon (mapr functionality)
• Handle links. e.g. /webclient/?show=screen-2152 (maybe handle with redirect?)
• Show Project/Screen in right panel
• Image Details (dimensions, pixel size, ROI Count) in right panel
• Group images by Dataset or Plate (as in current mapr search UI)
• Show Dataset or Plate in the right panel
• Plate layout, fields in Wells (not supported in mapr search)
• Open OMERO.table (could link to e.g. https://idr.openmicroscopy.org/webclient/omero_table/24828166/ in webclient)
• Show OMERO.tables values (row) for Images
• Batch selection of Images
• Acquisition metadata
• mapr "Top Links" to Gene, Phenotypes, Cell Lines etc.
• Filter centre panel by Name/Rating/Tags/KVP etc
• Table layout for centre panel
• Browse Tags (only have OME-NGFF_on_s3 and Study Example Image
• Show Fileset ID, paths on server etc
• Show Attachments on objects in right panel
• Export as JPEG / PNG / TIFF
• Show "parent" KVPs in right panel, e.g on Screen, Project (and Well?)
• Top Link to About pages https://idr.openmicroscopy.org/about/
• Zoomable thumbnails
• Preview panel

Outstanding issues/bugs with https://omero-search-engine-client.netlify.app/ currently:

• pagination not supported (just shows first 1000 images)
• load search from URL query and vice versa
• Bug: when rapidly changing the filters, various async queries to the search engine can get returned at different times, so the results can get out of sync with the UI
• Thumbnails sometimes not loading