SessionsIntro
A dataset session is a directory on the server which holds a collection of files related to a single gene expression dataset. The session is useful for storing gene expression data, manipulating the data, performing calculations, and loading the data from the specific files and into the SQL portion of the full app.
To view all the sessions, click the "Settings" link in the upper right of every page:
Then click the "Sessions" link:
To view a particular session, click the name of the session in the table (it will usually have a different name in this table than the series name that you see elsewhere in the app):
An alternate way to go to a particular session is to go to the Series/Dataset Details page and click the link to "session data":
Once you reach the main "wizard" page of a session which shows all the steps of the workflow, you can view all the files in the directory of the session by clicking the "View, Edit & Download Files" link on the right of the page. On the resulting page, all the registered files and additional files are listed with the most recent files at the top. Each file has some allowed actions.
The FSSA project (which is part of the Gene Atlas) is a way to manage a set of directories, where each directory contains certain workflows ("steps") which are manipulated via a django web app. Each directory is referred to as a "session." The workflow expects certain files, called "RegistedFiles" which have inherited methods associated with them so that the workflow can ensure that certain files are ready at each step. The web user can trigger each step in order to prepare data and upload it to the SQL portion of the app. FSSA is extensible so that different workflows can be made.
For exprdb, the reason that FSSA was built was to handle the database import process (which is done by reading from several files), and also for downloading data from GEO and cleaning it then eventually uploading the the database. Additional functionality can be done, such as performing analyses interactively on the data files or altering the sample annotations.
Generally speaking, and in the context of this app, a session can have different types, depending on what you are trying to do. Within each type of session, there are certain files