Open a CSV via query parameters?

[will-moore]

If I have a URL to a csv file, I would love to be able to open it directly in the app by going to something like:

e.g. https://bff.allencell.org/app?csv=http://localhost:8000/data/biofile_finder.csv

Is that already possible somehow?

Thanks

[SeanLeRoy]

Hi Will! I haven't tested what you are suggesting explicitly with a local server - however BFF does support http & https resources that it has implicit access to (meaning no password auth). That is all to say that this should work out of box for you already. In the screenshot below that is where to input the URL you pasted, click return or the button at the end of the input to confirm and click the "LOAD button and it should render your CSV. You can then take the URL from the browser and send it off, reload, or do whatever and have BFF auto load it in, this is an example of what the BFF URL would look like: https://bff.allencell.org/app?source=%7B%22name%22%3A%22biofile_finder.csv+%282%2F13%2F2025+10%3A41%3A20+AM%29%22%2C%22type%22%3A%22csv%22%2C%22uri%22%3A%22http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A8000%2Fdata%2Fbiofile_finder.csv%22%7D

If this doesn't work let me know.

[will-moore]

Yes, it works entering the URL as you describe. I was just hoping for a simpler "human readable" URL that I could easily construct that would open the csv automatically. But I think it should work with creating the JSON and using that...

?source={"name":"biofile_finder.csv (2/13/2025 10:41:20 AM)","type":"csv","uri":"http://localhost:8000/data/biofile_finder.csv"}

I'll give it a go, thanks...

[will-moore]

This is working fine for me

[BrianWhitneyAI]

We have looked into improving the readability of our URLS. Unfortunately it would likely require an external service. See this ticket #221

[SeanLeRoy]

I think we could add a simple addition to our query argument parser that just accepts a URL like you describe https://bff.allencell.org?url=https://my-data-server/my_file.csv. Created #436 to track this