Professional Open Source at Work

To see a good example of how the Professional Open Source business model works, you should have a look at our User List, Bika-Users (register - view archives).

Take the post with subject 'File Attachments', which was initiated by Dr. Michael Kirchner (Institute of Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Duisberg-Essen, Germany) on May the 11th, with the question:

"The most important feature is to be able to attach files (raw data, crystal information files, images) as the results of a measurement. Is this possible with bika?"

This was recognised by Bika LIMS user Chris Bolton (CEO of Benchmark Laboratories Group, Canada), who replied:

"...in our case a number of our clients are now requesting that we
attach copies of our chromatograph reports (images of chemical
signatures) produced from our gas chromatographs (GC's)"

The discussion kicked off which led to a distilled specification over three months of various inputs. The final spec, which was project managed by Lemoene Smit, was as follows:

Set-up
---------

To maintain flexibility and redundancy, attachments are allowed on both
AR and Analysis level and this is configured in the LIMS setup:

Global flag in 'Laboratory information' to indicate attachments per
AR yes/no

A similar flag per 'Analysis Service' to indicate attachments per
Analysis yes/no

In both cases:

Compulsory Y?N


Set-up table of Attachment types

Title

Description


Set-up per Client Contact
-----------------------------------

For the user to decide whether to include attachments with emailed
results or links only (default)

Radio button on the contact's publication preferences


At run time, on each AR or Analysis as configured earlier, Upload
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Manage results tab

Functionality to multi load attachments from the file system via
standard *nix/Mac/Windows file browsing

Add Keywords

For ARs only

Remarks field – drop down to select Attachment title and description

It'll be quite difficult to fit all of these in per analysis

NB. Workflow dependency: ARs/Analyses without compulsory attachments
cannot proceed to to_be_verified


View and download attachment
------------------------------------------

None of the attachments will be shown in views or results emails
directly, but hyper linked only to where they are kept inside the database

File sizes are displayed to warn users of the size of the download

Clicking the link will open the attachment using the user's standard
browser preferences

AR attachments only: For display / email / print functionality these
files listed at the top of the AR window


Printed reports
--------------------
Each attachment referenced by

Title

File name

URL

Upload date


Search and Queries
----------------------------

Users finds Attachments using

file name

title

file type

Chris then sponsored this development, which was managed by Anneline Sweetnam, development manager of Bika Lab Systems, on the main trunk of Bika LIMS.

This development has been finalised and is now available on a test instance to be evaluated and signed off. If you're interested send me an email, and I'll supply you with access details

This and several other developments will be released in a major upgrade of Bika LIMS 2.2 in the next quarter.

Did you miss the announcement of the small Bika LIMS 2.1.1 release and the upgrade demo?

Here is the news item that carried the announcement, and here the list of changes in 2.1.1.
You can request a demo by sending an email to demorequest@bikalabs.com and mention that you would like to try Bika LIMS.