[kepler-dev] [Bug 3566] New: - order collection contents displayed in provenance browser?

[bugzilla-daemon at ecoinformatics.org]

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3566

           Summary: order collection contents displayed in provenance
                    browser?
           Product: Kepler
           Version: 1.0.0
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: general
        AssignedTo: mcphillips at ecoinformatics.org
        ReportedBy: mcphillips at ecoinformatics.org
         QAContact: kepler-dev at ecoinformatics.org


When the data elements inside COMAD collections are displayed in the provenance
browser they seem to be arbitrarily ordered, both in the dependency history
view and the collection history view.  It would be helpful to have these data
and collection elements ordered according to their sequence in the data stream
(as recorded in the trace file).

Consider an invocation of the Gblocks actor.  It takes a collection of
biological (e.g., protein) sequences and outputs another collection of
sequences, where each output protein sequence corresponds to one input (those
segments of the input sequences not aligned reliably between the input
sequences having been removed from the outputs).  If the sequences represented
in the dependency history were ordered then clicking on the third input protein
sequence and then the third output sequence displayed in the dependency history
view would give one a before-and-after view of that sequence.  As it is, it's
difficult finding the corresponding sequences in the input and outputs.

The same holds for the collection history view. In addition, if the collections
themselves were ordered according to trace order, then incremental buildup of
the collections when stepping through the actor invocations would more closely
represent the construction of the collection stream during workflow execution.