• type: rewrite
• priority: high
• assigned: fredm
• status: closed, completed
• keywords: quality control

Since the quality control application will mostly be maintained outside active GeneNetwork development, and might actually be handed off to other maintainers, there is a need for it to be in an "accessible" language, so that it is easy to hand it off. This rewrite was therefore found to be necessary.

The original QC app(s) were developed by

• jgart

and were written in Common-Lisp. The two applications are:

• QC library

• QC App Front-end

In this document, the discussions of what is necessary to get the application in an acceptable state will be detailed and discussions to get there will also be included.

Some other related issues for consideration, and superseded by this issue are:

• Enumeration of QC checks for all platforms to test against
• Mappings between representations of symbol names
• Some checks to run against files
• Notes on original QC App ideas
• Some UI design notes on the QC app

• Arthur
• jgart

The following questions require some feedback on your part for further clarity on the requirements.

Please just add the answer below the question.

#### Question 01

In the requirement

• no data cells with spurious characters like `eeeee`, `5.555iloveguix`, etc...

I see us encountering an issue with that requirement, if the first field is ever anything other than a number. For now, the first field is a *ProbeSet ID* which is numerical. If a field is ever, say, something like *Publish ID*, which can take a form like `ILM304582` then this assumption that all fields are numerical would break, and the application would be doing the wrong thing. Is there a possibility for the first field ever changing?

#### Question 02

The requirement

• check line endings to make sure they are Unix and not DOS

seems a little unnecessary if the files are not used for anything else. Most programming languages these days have facilities for translating the line endings appropriately, and so, we really should not add the manual cognitive overhead to the users, unless it is an absolute necessity, and even then, we will probably be doing something wrong. Is this requirement absolutely necessary?

#### Question 03

Can there be zero values, i.e.

• "0.000", "00.000", ... etc. for average files
• "0.000000, "00.00000000", ... etc. for standard error files

in the files?

The rewrite of the data verification part is mostly done.

@Arthur hints that the next step is the quality-control proper, where, if the file(s) pass the verification stage, the user can attach some extra information to the data, such as:

• Species
• Group
• Platform
• Study ID

etc. that will be used when adding the data to the database, to link it properly.