Should we (pre?)-generate workflow input schema ?

[mvdbeek]

It is customary in CWL to provide input values in a separate job file, which is then validated against the workflow input schema, and we do the same thing with planemo run / planemo test. A difference with CWL is that in CWL the inputs can be validated directly using the cwl process (tool / workflow), while we first need to spin up a galaxy instance, upload the workflow, and use the API to hopefully submit a valid workflow input definition.

With workflow submissions from terra or other platforms in mind, where a running Galaxy instance isn't guaranteed at the time that inputs are selected for a workflow, I wonder if it would make sense that we pre-generate a workflow run schema and deposit it together with our workflows. Such a schema would likely be quite useful for auto-generating UI components.

In a first pass the schema could be generated by planemo and we push these to the IWC *, or platforms like terra could generate input schemas for their particular configuration of galaxy (and maybe also validate that all the tools are available ?).

• We could also generate the schema directly from the workflow files, however I think there's some information we can only gather if we have the tools available.