filter annotations by multiple columns

[nicoalee]

A conversation with a user showed a use case for filtering study analyses using more than one annotation column, potentially involving the use of multiple logical operators to filter out which analyses are desired for the meta-analysis.

A discussion will be needed to understand what changes will be needed for this
@jdkent what backend changes will be involved to implement this feature?

What kind of logical operators do we want to support?
What do we want the ultimate UI to look like? There might be some examples of this kind of UI (think excel spreadsheet column filtering UI)

[jdkent]

You're using handsontable in other places right? We can start here: https://handsontable.com/docs/12.0/column-filter/#custom-filter-menu

or do the external filter menu, so it's more obvious that you choose what columns to filter by and how you want to filter them. That way people see what they are filtering by. Ideally this is the same/similar table view as the annotations page, since people will want to preview how their filters look before they specify a meta-analysis.

They would give this filter a name (or we generate a name) and save it as a new annotation column.

Another thought is to have the users combine/filter columns right after extraction on the annotations page, save the column, then it's normal selection as before during the meta-analysis specification stage. Then additionally, during the meta-analysis specification wizard we give them an opportunity to go to the annotations page to create a filter if they haven't before hopping back into the wizard.

[jdkent]

here is my proposal on logical operators to support:

• is_true
• is_false
• contains (importing the AI features will place multiple entries in some columns, (e.g., [healthy, depression]), and people may not want to clean the columns and be okay with any analysis that contains the word depression, I want to include)
• equal to (string or number)
• greater than
• less than

The default combination between columns will be the "AND" operator. For live updating tables, this is the more intuitive view since the rows that don't match a condition are not shown in the UI.

I'm deciding against "OR" combinations for now since i think that would be more confusing to visualize. We would need a query builder like in https://www.ag-grid.com/react-data-grid/filter-advanced/?utm_source=blog.ag-grid.com.