H5Web

H5Web investigation

H5Web is a web-based HDF5 file viewer. It allows you to visualise HDF5 files without needing to download them first, for example. HDF5 is a file storage and organisation format designed for large amounts of data. DataGateway will be able to access NeXus files, which are fully valid HDF5 files, and "can be read by a large number of applications without any further modification". There is no NeXus-specific support in H5Web yet.

Demo App

https://h5web.panosc.eu/ is a live deployment of the demo app (the app that runs when you clone and run H5Web).

The different providers can be accessed from the demo app by changing the path: The default path "/" takes you to the silx provider with domain "bsa_002_000-integrate-sub", "/mock" takes you to the mock provider, and "/hsds" takes you to the HSDS provider with configuration as set in the local env file.

The left pane contains a breakdown of the structure of a file, called the Explorer, and the right pane has the visualisation or data.

Providers

H5Web has three Providers.

1. A mock provider - contains mock data read from a JSON file
2. A Silx Provider - accesses files from the base domain silx.org/pub/h5web
3. A HSDS Provider - given a URL, username, password and filepath, it will access HSDS object-based storage.

Use within DataGateway

The initial idea is to have a second action button (alongside 'download') to 'explore' NeXus files. This could open up a popup window or a new tab with the file viewed in H5Web.

This would likely require extracting H5Web as a plugin within DataGateway and designing a new Provider. Currently, to choose a provider to run you need to call the App component wrapped in the desired provider. With React Router the new button could cause the App to open on the new path.

Both Datagateway and H5Web are running the same React version.