When opening a module in the Data Lineage or Workflow Builder applications, join tables backing many-to-many Ontology links are notably excluded, which makes troubleshooting difficult (especially for access issues, or investigating stale data). This gives us an incomplete view of the lineage. Right now, we need to manually identify the join tables and add them to the lineage view to investigate their ancestors.
There are a few ways to fix this (focusing on Data Lineage here):
- (1) In the link sidebar, include a link to the backing dataset with a button to add that to the graph. Ideally there would also be a link to the Link Type in Ontology Manager. (this may be the easiest to implement and would be helpful, but would still require us to click through the many links to identify the relevant datasets) This would be a great enhancement regardless of if #2 or #3 are implemented.
- (2) make the link widgets clickable with the
</>toggles for hiding/showing ancestors (either as is, or display many to many links as separate resources in Monocle. If the latter, these could be ancestors to the Workshop Module if the link is referenced in the module). - (3) add dataset link join tables as pseudo ancestors to ontology objects (though this may be confusing if this conflicts with how MDOs show in Monocle.)
Whether these changes are made to Data Lineage or Workshop, it would be nice if these backing link tables were automatically rendered when opening that view for a given Module.
