Using parameters in commands and file names
Parameters are arguments sent to commands as flags, or unnamed values, or sometimes just the occurance of flags.
SciPipe does not provide one unified way to handle parameters, but instead suggest a few different strategies, dependent on the usage pattern. This is because it turns out that there is a very large variety in how parameters can be used with shell commands.
To keep SciPipe a small and flexible tool, we instead mostly leave the choice up to the workflow author to create a solution for each case, using a few helper tools provided with SciPipe, but also all the programming facilities built in to the Go programming language.
Below we will discuss how to handle the most common uses for for parameters in SciPipe. For any more complicated use cases not covered here, please refer to the mailing list or the chat, to ask your question.
Static parameters
If parameters in your shell command is always, the same, you can just add them "manually" to the shell command pattern used to create your process.
For example, if you always want to write the string "hello" to output files, you could create your processes with this string added manually:
helloWriter := scipipe.NewProc("helloWriter", "echo hello > {o:outfile}")
Receive parameters dynamically
Receiving parameters dynamically is a much more technically demandning solution than using static parameters.
The idea is that by using placeholders for parameter values in a command, each parameter for a particular process, will automatically get a channel of type string, on which it can receive values. When the process is ready to execute another shell command, it receives one item on each parameter ports, in addition to receiving one file on each (file-)in-port, and merges the values into the shell command, before executing it.
An example of this would be a little too complicated to cover briefly on this page, so please instead see the dynamic parameters example. In the Run method of the Combinatorics task you will find the code used to send values (all combinations of values in three arrays of lenght 3, in this case).
See also
Handle boolean flags
Topic coming soon. Please add it as a support request in the issue tracker if you need this information fast, and we can prioritize writing it asap.
Handling parameters in re-usable components
Topic coming soon. Please add it as a support request in the issue tracker if you need this information fast, and we can prioritize writing it asap.