News

Opal 2.10 Released

We are pleased to announce that Opal 2.10 is now available. Opal is OBiBa’s core database application for biobanks.

This release introduces new pages and web services to perform advanced search both on variables and entities:

• variables can be searched using controlled vocabularies (as specified by the taxonomies) and/or full-text search; found variables can be added to a cart for further processing,
• a specific entity can be searched by its type and identifier,
• entities matching variable criteria (from different tables) can be counted and listed; a view can be created to match these filtered entities.

A variable cart can be filled-in by the user for further processing:

• variables can be added to the cart by individual or group selection when browsing table dictionaries, or by selecting the variables resulting of a search operation,
• variables from the cart can be used to make a view, build variable criteria of an entities search operation, or apply/remove controlled vocabulary (taxonomy) annotations in batch.

Other notable features are:

• the variable attributes handling and rendering has been improved by using the controlled vocabularies,
• the search engine implementation (based on Elasticsearch ) has been wrapped in a plugin,
• the plugins can be managed from the Administration page based on a plugin repository (configurable, default is OBiBa plugins repository ).
• addition of new python commands to backup and restore annotations (export-annot and import-annot ),
• addition of new javascript methods to handle longitudinal and repeated measures data (filter , subset , trimmer , reduce and insertAt ),
• improvement of some javascript methods to handle longitudinal and repeated measures data (any and map ).

This presentation explains the new features:

See Opal documentation for installation and operation instructions.