Customization

Customizing collections

Models have been designed carefully in order to best define common lab goods, and annotations are available to add certain items properties that are for example only relevant for yourself or your group. However, sometimes, enriching certain models globally at the instance level is necessary. Instance administrators can both enrich existing collection and add new ones.

Enriching an existing lab collection

Admin can easily enrich an existing collection by adding new attributes. If you think an attribute is missing, simply get in touch with your LabID admin and provide :

• an attribute name
• a value type (free text, number, date, user, controlled vocabulary...)
• a multiplicity (single or multiple values)
• a textual description of this attribute that will be used as a help (tooltip)

Adding new lab collections

Admins can define new lab collections i.e. a new consumable, specimen, equipment sub-category.

Considerations creating new collections

The philosophy of LabID is to maintain a consistent list of collections universally relevant to all life science scientists. We advised against creating peculiar item sub-categories when the interest for is limited. To record additional information and discriminate items from the same sub-category we instead recommend to use annotations. The annotation module is indeed available on all models and can help capturing specific information, with controlled fields and controlled vocabulary.

Nonetheless, creating additional collections is possible. We recommend involving several people that have expressed the need for customisation in order to better specify the new sub-category as well the set of relevant attributes describing it.

What information does an admin need to create a collections

• The name of the parent category (consumable, specimen, equipment, or storage equipment)
• A name for the new collection
• A list of attributes specific to the sub category: attribute names, attributes value types, description, and multiplicity (i.e. Are they storing a list of value?). Example: Assuming we want to create a new consumable collection to track pizzas that will be called Pizza

Here we want an Ingredients [list] attribute, allowing for multiple selections from a predefined list of ingredients, and a Vegetarian [true | false] attribute.