crazy idea: show folder hierarchy from a single annotation that represents a slash delimited path

[toloudis]

Crazy idea and not sure if worth anything, but I wanted to write it down here.

What if there were a special annotation, or type of annotation, that was considered "pathlike". The canonical example here is the annotation that records the original user-space path from the Vast.
If only that annotation is added to the Group By, then the main view could automatically create folders based on the slashes in the path annotation string! In this way one could re-create the old folders from the Vast, for files properly annotated.

This is a bit of an anti-pattern in that it might discourage proper annotation, but could also be an interesting use case when the path is added at the end of a list of other group-by annotations. for example, if you grouped by cell-line and then by vast-path, then you could see what are the vast folders of all the images of a given cell line.

This idea occurred to me in the context of dealing with old files on the Vast that are not yet added to FMS, and would be difficult to assign thorough and correct annotations.

[SeanLeRoy]

I've been thinking about this one & I'm unsure it would make sense for it to appear in the same format of the groupings that the actual "Group" function creates rather could we still do the nested groupings but implement a different component to separate this feature from this since they are IMO fundamentally a bit different. My only hang up on adding this would be how it would look if there was a group added underneath the "folder like grouping" for example:

Group by:
Vast Path
Cell Line

File List:
-on
--the
--- vast
----AICS-0
----AICS-14
-somewhereelse
--on
---vast
----AICS-7
----AICS-9
-another
--spot
---AICS-0
---AICS-84

In the above example AICS-0 appears at two different levels hence why if we added this I think the styling of the "folder like grouping" should be a bit different.

[toloudis]

Linking to related issue for posterity. #434

The ticket as described here probably doesn't make sense to implement in BFF unless you completely switched away from a "Group By" view, and into a "Filesystem-only" mode that just used a single designated annotation as the path.