Dear Galaxy Dev,
We'd like to formally request a new subformat be created that allows a comment-style line in a tabular dataset to be converted to the metadata header. We have had previous discussions with you in the past that recommended using the tool xml wrapper to define the metadata of the output. Due to the nature of our tools, this later method is non-trivial, potentially not applicable to all tools and would escalate the cost of tool development hugely.
We do not have the resources currently to develop this tabular sub format ourselves, but believe it would be of significant value to ourselves and others. We integrate many different and variable sized tabular datasets in Galaxy, whose format cannot be defined for example in the way a GFF can. We thus have been using the first line as a header.You can understand that this then becomes an issue if we try to sort or join datasets.
We thank you for your guidance in our previous discussions, but believe that requesting this feature is the most practical solution.
If you already have this item somewhere else, or would like me to move this post to another forum, please don't hesitate to let me know. Thank you for your help. Kindest regards Jo
