Request: Make linked jobs clearer

Feature request to make it clearer when a job is linked. Currently, there’s no indication beyond the option to unlink the job.

image

Something like a blue outline might be nice? I spent a few hours in photoshop mocking up this prototype:
image

2 Likes

@ccgauvin94 Are you asking to more prominently show jobs that are linked to more than one workspace in any workspace to which they have been linked?

1 Like

Yes, when a job in a workspace is linked to that workspace from elsewhere.

Although perhaps some would find the opposite useful as well? When a job has in a workspace is linked to other workspaces.

1 Like

I absolutely agree. I have (ahem, often) mistakenly deleted very large and necessary linked jobs that I thought originated from my current workspace and were now irrelevant, but which were actually very much needed for other datasets within my project.

1 Like

The reason for deletion/clearing is just because I am trying to make more space, but if in doing so I might sabotage my entire project I tend to not want to delete any intermediate work or job output, which is also a problem.

Can’t say I haven’t done this

100% agree this would be helpful

Thank you all for the suggestions! We’ll work on improving this in the future.

- Suhail

1 Like

Another approach would be to take the linking logic from unix (and windows and mac to a certain extent) - where deleting a link by default deletes only the link/shortcut, and not the originating job. In these cases also the link is generally either color coded or has a little badge to indicate that it is a link/shortcut, not the original article.

1 Like

Hey @olibclarke ,

We’re planning the following:

  • Showing a link icon for each job that exists in more than one workspace (with a tooltip that lists out each one). This would be similar to what is shown in the sidebar when you select a job. This task is on our to-do list.
  • Speeding up data cleanup of a workspace or project by introducing the concept of ‘final’ jobs. Let’s say you’re testing out many branches of jobs (each with their own set of parameter tweaks) but end up only wanting one (or a few). You can mark a job as ‘final’ and CryoSPARC will keep track of what jobs are ancestors to those final jobs. This is applies project-wide, so if you’re in another workspace you can see that the job is an ancestor of an important result. We’re adding a new ‘Data Cleanup’ action to quickly clear/delete jobs that are not important (e.g. failed parameter explorations) or take to much space and can be reproduced later (preprocessing jobs). This is almost ready to be released - more details and documentation to come.

Final jobs are marked with a solid flag icon, final ancestor jobs are marked with an outlined flag icon:

The data cleanup action that allows you to reduce the size of your workspace/project while retaining important results:

Let me know what you think!

- Suhail

6 Likes

This looks really nice. One nitpick thought is that it’s not clear that ‘Clear’ removes results but retains the settings. Perhaps it should be renamed ‘Clear Results’, which would also keep the terminology consistent with ‘Clear Intermediate Results’.

I look forwards to better data management tools because that’s honestly the biggest factor limiting throughput at our facility right now.

On a tangent, but, I wonder if it’d be possible for extract particles to show a disk space estimate before queuing the job? If I remember correctly, MRC has no compression, so total space should just be box size * number of particles * 1. That might scare some users from performing unnecessary extractions.

6 Likes

This looks good to me! One other related data management issue, would it be possible to give a size estimate for individual workspaces? Obviously this would only include jobs originating from that workspace, but that would be consistent with how workspace deletion works, and would help when deciding which workspaces to prioritize for deletion. This would also allow one to sort workspaces by size on disk, which I think would be very useful.

3 Likes

Hi @olibclarke ,

Yes, the size of the workspace will be listed in the sidebar as part of this update too.

- Suhail

1 Like

A post was split to a new topic: Clear certain motion correction results

This is not currently implemented, but we noted your suggestion. Thanks @ccgauvin94.

1 Like

Hi all,

The Data Cleanup tool is available to use in v4.3 (August 9, 2023). Check out the docs!

- Suhail

2 Likes