Importing Views

GenomeSpy facilitates reusing views by allowing them to be imported from external specification files. The files can be placed flexibly – it may be practical to split large specifications into multiple files and put them in the same directory. On the other hand, if you have created, for example, an annotation track that you would like the share with the research community, you can upload the specification file and the associated data to a publicly accessible web server.

Importing named tracks

Currently unsupported

Named imports are currently not supported. Will be back at some point.

GenomeSpy provides a few built-in tracks, mainly to support genomic data exploration. They must be imported by a name. Read more at genome tracks.

Usage:

{
  ...,
  "concat": [
    ...,
    { "import": { "name": "cytobands" } }
  ]
}

Importing from a URL

You can also import views from relative or absolute URLs. Relative URLs are imported with respect to the current baseUrl. (TODO: Document baseUrl somewhere)

The imported specification may contain a single, concatenated, or layered view. The baseUrl of the imported specification is updated to match its directory. Thus, you can publish a view (or track as known in genome browsers) by placing its specification and data available in the same directory on a web server.

Usage:

{
  ...,
  "vconcat": [
    ...,
    { "import": { "url": "includes/annotations.json" } },
    { "import": { "url": "https://genomespy.app/tracks/cosmic/census_hg38.json" } }
  ]
}