We are pleased to announce release 1.8.8 of the CEDAR Workbench, offering a series of improvements since our last release. We'll be providing more news with additional information about this release in coming days. Here are some of our improvements since release 1.8.1, starting with a few very specific improvements.
Fields as first-class objects
CEDAR includes the ability to work with fields as first-class objects. Now with CEDAR you can compose fields individually, and use them as part of CEDAR templates.
You also have the ability to include or exclude fields in views from your CEDAR workspace.
In addition to providing more flexibility for CEDAR template editors to work with individual fields, this feature will allow CEDAR to represent certain other templating content as CEDAR fields. In particular, the Cancer Data Standards Registry and Repository at the National Cancer Institute maintains a large collection of Common Data Elements, or CDEs. These are very detailed field definitions used in a wide variety of Case Report Forms in clinical medicine. With these changes in CEDAR, we hope to be able to provide CDE-based field definitions to CEDAR template creators. We'll have more information on this prospect in the next few months.
Fallback Location for Creating Instances
When a user attempts to populate a metadata template, CEDAR will normally try to put the resulting metadata instance in the same folder as the template. When instances are created from a URL that specifies the source template, the instance location defaults to the user's most recent folder. In either of these cases, the default folder location may not be a location the user can write to. In these cases CEDAR will now default to the user's home folder. This makes it easy to give people a URL for populating a template, even if they aren't already in CEDAR.
References
You can review the GitHub release history for Release 1.8.2 and Release 1.8.3.