Schema Field Tooltips

  • 13 February 2024
  • 15 replies
  • 614 views
Schema Field Tooltips
G
Rank
Userlevel 2
  • glou Benchling Employee
  • Benchling Employee
  • 2 replies

You asked for it and we listened--Schema Field Tooltips are now available, making it easier for users to understand how to correctly fill out data within a structured table!

 

Tooltip on a dropdown field in a registration table

Tooltips are small pop-up windows that display when hovering over an indicator icon next to the item you want more information about. You can add text to be displayed in the schema field tooltips in the schema admin section.

Tooltip setup within the Schema admin page

This feedback was captured in the Community’s most upvoted idea. Thank you to all who contributed to and upvoted!

We’re excited to mark this idea as “Shipped”!

Schema Field Tooltips can be found below the field titles. Schema field tooltips are available for:

  • Box schemas
  • Container schemas
  • Plate schemas
  • Registry schemas
  • Result schemas

When schema fields have tooltips, the icon displays when:

  • Creating a new entry from the schema
  • Viewing the metadata of an entity from the schema
  • Viewing a Registration table created from the schema

You can access the tooltip by hovering over the i icon next to the field name or the column name in a Registration table.​

Tooltip during entity creation process

Let us know what you think of this new feature below--we’d love to hear your feedback! 

15 replies

rooshabh
Userlevel 4

Nice! This’ll help keep our templates clean!

vinniev
Userlevel 5

Is the tooltip text queryable from the data warehouse?  Can we do “mass updates” to the tooltip through API calls or an “update from spreadsheet: option? That would really help with data catalog work we’re doing to surface this information in a couple of different ways :)

 

"The answer is metadata"
stefano_g
Userlevel 3

Finally one of the most wanted features is out! Thanks Benchling! :) 

 

@vinniev Agreed, I checked and it's not yet possible (the only option would be the API in alpha for creating new schemas (which is not an update) and does not have this new field, yet???). We do have excel files with the description of each field, so it would be really easy to automate this task, but I guess we will copy/paste for the moment.  

- Stefano
JasonDG
Badge

Will these tool tips be migrated using the migration tool? I will assume it is part of the schema, so yes? Also, is there a way to export these into a CSV?

Melissa DiTucci
Rank
Userlevel 5

@JasonDG just double checked with the Product Manager and YES they are able to be migrated using the new tool! 

Melissa
Ken Robbins
Userlevel 6
Badge +1

This is awesome, thanks to the team who implemented this and to the community who drove this.

A few additional thoughts…

  1. Required notation.The data type appears as a prefix in parentheses. It would be good to show the “required” status in that annotation as well. This also applies to when there is no tool tip and we get the default of just showing the data type. This would be particularly helpful since the red star is very small.
  2. API access. I like the idea of an API to update this. However, the real need is the API to create/modify schemas in general (recently marked as “backlogged”). I’m happy to get incremental improvements, but since we have no way to create/modify schemas at all, I would prioritize the fundamentals before we worry about the API for tooltips.
  3. Comment field. I maintain an external database of all my fields and a comment for each field. Sometimes these comments are suitable as user-visible tooltips, but other times they are design notes as part of documenting the schema. In the future when we have the ability to programmatically create schemas, I’d like a separate field for the comments (a peer field to the tooltip) to preserve schema design comments. While, I’m at it, it would be good to have a comment on the entity itself too.
  4. Line breaks. In case anyone cares, line breaks are preserved (to help format certain tooltips) but you need to create the text with line breaks offline and then paste into the tooltip field.
Ken
A
Userlevel 1

I was really happy when I saw this got out, its simple feature but something that really helps to improve the data. Only daunting task is back filling so many field descriptions…… 
 
@vinniev  My first question when I saw this feature was are they in the data warehouse?? I should have learned by now that the DW and API usually arrive a little later. 

 

Adam Brown
Userlevel 1

Big fan of this feature, and planning on adding these to our tables.

vinniev
Userlevel 5

I love having these descriptions for each “field” of a schema -- but I would love to have one master description for the WHOLE table -- just made a new feature request here:

Description field and Corresponding Tooltip for the WHOLE schema (not just individual fields) | Community (benchling.com)

"The answer is metadata"
Robert

Hi, as far as I can see the tooltips for the entry schema fields are not displayed when creating a new notebook from a template (i.e. in the “Create entry from template” modal). They are displyed after having created the notebook, but it would be a great help to have them displayed already at the create step as that is when the data is naturally entered. Thanks! 

 @Melissa DiTucci 

Melissa DiTucci
Rank
Userlevel 5

@Robert that is a good observation -- I wonder why that is! Could be a good piece of feedback for the ideas portal!

Melissa
Robert

Thanks @Melissa DiTucci , I’ve created Display field tooltips also when creating notebook entry from template | Community (benchling.com)

vinniev
Userlevel 5

@Robert are these new templates you created AFTER putting the tooltips on the tables?  or were they older templates that had these tables in them already and then you updated the schema with the new tooltips.

 

The reason i ask → Templates store the state of a registration table or result table at the time it was put into the template -- so if you add fields, they don’t auto expand.  if you add tooltips, they don’t auto show.  You need to refresh / re-sync these tables in your templates (or in your entries) to get them to show up with the latest “additions” made by Admins behind the scenes.

"The answer is metadata"
Robert

Thanks for your comments @vinniev! 

The feature request is actually related to the first step in creating a new notebook from a template, as it would be great to have the tooltips displayed for an Entry Schema used already at that stage (before the notebook has been created). 

vinniev
Userlevel 5

Thanks for the clarification @Robert -- I misunderstood your post -- but this totally makes sense and I will vote for that idea :)

"The answer is metadata"

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