Registry Panel

A panel showing all Biomoby entities: Services, Data types (aka Moby Objects), Service types, and Namespaces. It also allows to select which Biomoby registry should be shown (always the whole Dashboard, all its panels, works with just one registry). Finally, it allows to store almost the whole content of a Biomoby registry in a local file-system (local cache), and let the user choose when to update it.

Local cache

This is a very important Dashboard feature. We recommend to use cache always - otherwise the performance and response time would be almost unusable.

A cache is a local directory where Dashboard creates sub-directories - one for each registry it visited. Therefore, anytime you "update" or "reload" a cache, only the cache of the currently displayed registry is changed. The location of a local cache can be changed in the text field Cache directory. By default, when you start Dashboard the first time, it uses some temporary directory whose location is operating-system dependent. Be aware that some operating systems, time to time, clean up such temporary directories so it may be better to put the local cache to some more permanent place.

Button Update: Allows to update or reload the current local cache. The update is faster but it may not reflect changes in the contents of the entities. The reload guarantees that the full contents of all cached entities is up to date.
Button Info: Informs you how big and old your cache is. Do not be surprises that you see relatively small number of services: the number there is not a number of services but of the authorities (each of them can have more services).

Biomoby registry location

It tells what registry you want to be browsing. Each Biomoby registry is defined by two attributes - a URL (endpoint) and a namespace (URI) (this does not have the same meaning as the term "namespace" in the contents of a Biomoby registry).

The endpoint and namespace could also be selected from the list of known registries. Selecting a new registry, however, only fills endpoint and namespace - it does not reload the entity lists (for that you still need to press "Reload all lists" button"). A selection can also show additional information about the selected registry in the console window (if the check box "Show info" is checked).

The currently selected registry (its name or URI) is also visible on top of the Dashboard where you can see it from any panel.

Button Reload all lists: It re-displays the lists of Biomoby entities. It does not reload cache, so if you are using cache, the reload is instantaneous. It is useful when you have cached several registries and you want quickly to swap them.
Button Restore defaults: Fills the Biomoby registry location by a default Biomoby registry (in Canada).

Lists of Biomoby entities

This is obviously the main purpose of this panel - to show what is in the registry.

Selecting an entity displays its details in the console sub-panel.

RIGHT-CLICK brings sorting options. Reloading does the same as the button Reload all lists but only for one tree. For data types, you can choose to see all children members (Show HAS/HASA members), or to show/hide data types that are not correctly defined (this is now almost an obsolete option).

When trees are being reloaded (from a real registry, not just from a local cache), there will be an animated progress bar. The red button can cancel loading. The current item is also shortly displayed at the bottom status bar.