Explore how to support multi-level nested folder structure

[rrchai]

See issues mentioned in #302 and #422.

Since the NF app also captures the subfolders within top-level folders (current upstream app only display the top-level folders), it will be hard to distinguish the duplicated names of subfolders in the folder-dropdown.

Approach 1

The easiest solution would add parent folder name and display entire folder path. Take below file structure as an example:

data-folder1/
├─ sub-folder/
│  ├─ sub-sub-folder/
data-folder2/
├─ sub-folder/
│  ├─ sub-sub-folder/

The expected dropdown will consist of these folders:

data-folder1
data-folder1/sub-folder
data-folder1/sub-folder/sub-sub-folder/
data-folder2
data-folder2/sub-folder
data-folder2/sub-folder/sub-sub-folder/

The caveats of this approach would be too many folders, as well as possibly over-extended folder paths.

If it's an urgent blocker for NF pipeline, I can help to write the function in the app to achieve ^. Ideally, it would be better to get nested list of folder structure from backend.

Approach 2

A more modern way is to update the UX with a multiple-level nested dropdown, but will need some time.

• as far as I searched, there is currently no available shiny extension package supporting multi-level dropdown, other than stla/NestedMenu that requires further testings.
• I could also explore to write our own multi-level nested dropdown input
• I am also super interested learning how to implement react/angular component (not familiar with react though) in shiny, i,e. synapse-single-pane

[rrchai]

@milen-sage I move this ticket into next sprint, since it seems a critical issue of NF app.

[milen-sage]

@rrchai and @allaway one setup that we do support currently is tagging (i.e. annotating) dataset folders with the following key:value pair

contentType:dataset

schematic would treat all datasets tagged this way as dataset folders, independent of their place in a project's hierarchy. This doesn't go around the folder naming issue (i.e. duplicate names w/in the hierarchy).

Otherwise, I do agree that the ability to select a folder from directory hierarchy in the app and submit (meta)data for this folder would be convenient and likely the best solution.