This topic is under construction.
LabKey Server provides a variety of different data structures for different uses: Assay Designs for capturing instrument data, Datasets for integrating heterogeneous clinical data, Lists for general tabular data, etc. Some of these data structures place strong constraints on the nature of the data to imported, for example Datasets make numerous uniqueness constraints on the data; other data structures make few assumptions about incoming data. This topic explains how to best prepare your data for import into each of these data structures in order to meet any constraints set up by the target container.
Data Structure | Description | Required Columns | Data Constraints | Documentation |
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Demographic Datasets | Demographic data in a folder of type 'Study'. Records permanent (or relatively permanent) features over time, such as birth gender, eye color, etc. |
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Uniqueness constraint: Participant id values must be unique. | |
Clinical Datasets | Clinical data in a folder of type 'Study'. Records features that change over time, such as blood pressure, weight. |
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Uniqueness constraint: Participant id + time point values must be unique. | |
Study Specimens | Table for holding specimen vial and tissue data. | See Import Specimen Spreadsheet Data | todo | LabKey Data Structures |
Sample Sets | ||||
General Assay Type | ||||
Lists |
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When you import a data table into LabKey Server, it generates both a "name" and a "label" for each column it encounters in the table. The name is used as the internal database field, while the label is used as an external, user-facing field for display. In general special characters and white spaces are stripped out to form the name, while these characters are left in place in the label. The table below provides examples of how LabKey Server generates names and labels from table columns.
Original Column Name | LabKey Column Name | LabKey Column Label | Notes |
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Lymphocyte Count (cells/mm3) | Lymphocyte Count _cells_mm3_ | Lymphocyte Count (cells/mm3) | Parentheses are replaced with underscores in names. |
Signature? | Signature_ | Signature? | Question marks are replaced with underscores in names. |
blank field | column1 | blank field | Blank columns are given a generic name, "column1", "column2", etc. |