Views¶

A view is a view of all entities (File, Folder, Project, Table, Docker Repository, View) within one or more Projects or Folders. Views can:

Provide a way of isolating or linking data based on similarities
Provide the ability to link entities together by their annotations
Allow view/editing entities attributes in bulk
Allow entities to be easily searched and queried

Let's go over some examples to demonstrate how view works. First, create a new project and add some files:

import synapseclient
from synapseclient import Project, File, Column, Table, EntityViewSchema, EntityViewType
syn = synapseclient.Synapse()
syn.login()

# Create a new project
project = syn.store(Project("test view"))

# Create some files
file1 = syn.store(File(path="path/to/file1.txt", parent=project))
file2 = syn.store(File(path="path/to/file2.txt", parent=project))

# add some annotations
syn.setAnnotations(file1, {"contributor":"Sage", "class":"V"})
syn.setAnnotations(file2, {"contributor":"UW", "rank":"X"})

Creating a View¶

To create a view, defines its name, columns, parent, scope, and the type of the view:

view = EntityViewSchema(name="my first file view",
                        columns=[
                            Column(name="contributor", columnType="STRING"),
                            Column(name="class", columnType="STRING"),
                            Column(name="rank", columnType="STRING")),
                        parent=project['id'],
                        scopes=project['id'],
                        includeEntityTypes=[EntityViewType.FILE, EntityViewType.FOLDER],
                        addDefaultViewColumns=True)
view = syn.store(view)

We support the following entity type in a View:

* EntityViewType.FILE
* EntityViewType.PROJECT
* EntityViewType.TABLE
* EntityViewType.FOLDER
* EntityViewType.VIEW
* EntityViewType.DOCKER

To see the content of your newly created View, use syn.tableQuery():

query_results = syn.tableQuery("select * from %s" % view['id'])
data = query_results.asDataFrame()

Updating Annotations using View¶

To update class annotation for file2, simply update the view:

# Retrieve the view data using table query
query_results = syn.tableQuery("select * from %s" % view['id'])
data = query_results.asDataFrame()

# Modify the annotations by modifying the view data and store it
data["class"] = ["V", "VI"]
syn.store(Table(view['id'], data))

The change in annotations reflect in synGetAnnotations():

syn.getAnnotations(file2['id'])

A View is a Table. Please visit Tables to see how to change schema, update content, and other operations that can be done on View.