Creating Result schemas and tables

Results tables capture experimental or assay data in lab notebook entries making your data centralized, standardized, and searchable. They eliminate variation and ambiguity, map your results back to your samples in the Registry, and sync to your data warehouse for advanced analytics and data visualization.

Results tables are determined by their schemas and configured by organization-level admins or teams with admin privileges to meet your team’s specific needs based on the types of experiments and assays you perform.

Create a Result schema

To ensure database clarity and prevent data silos, we recommend creating Result schemas only when capturing data for a new assay that is not addressed by existing Result schemas.

To create a Result schema:

1. Click your avatar in the bottom-left corner of your tenant.

2. Hover over Feature Settings and select Result Schemas.

3. Click Create in the top-right corner.

4. Enter the schema information, then click Create.

5. Notify members of your organization so they can update related notebook entry templates or workflow templates with the updated Results tables.

Tip: When creating a new version of an existing Result schema, we recommend including a version number in its name. For example, Cell Proliferation Assay v2.

Add Results tables to entries and templates

After creating a Result schema, you can add its corresponding table to entries and templates in workflows and notebooks. To add a Results table to an entry or template:

1. Click the Insert drop-down menu in the toolbar.

2. Select Result table.

3. In the pop-up window, select the Result schema.

4. Click Insert.

Note: The row order on the Results Schemas page corresponds to the column order in its corresponding Results table. Only newly created Results tables reflect changes to the column order.

View templates your Results table is in

After updating a Result schema, you can use the Relevant Templates tab on the Result schema configuration page to find templates that include:

• A Results table of the schema

• A structured table with a lookup function referencing the Result schema

Click a template link in the tab to update the relevant table or lookup function. To learn more about relevant templates, visit Updating templates and structured tables relevant to schemas.

Result schema field data types

The table below lists the available data types in the Definitions drop-down menu.

To create drop-down menus, visit Create or update dropdown options.

Set required and multi-select fields

To designate a field as required, check the box under the required column. Designate a dropdown or link-type field as multiple select by checking the box under the multi-select column.

Tip: You can further customize number fields using JSON.

Updating Result schemas that have been used

To ensure all previously recorded results remain valid for their schema, existing Result schema fields generally cannot be modified once a result schema has been used.

These backwards-compatible changes are allowed, even once a Results schema has been used:

• Add a new field
  • The new field cannot be required.
  • As soon as a new field is added to a result schema that is in use, it will also be restricted from editing.
• Archive or unarchive a field
  
  • Upon archiving, snapshot fields will be converted to regular fields.
  • To archive a required field, first mark it optional.
• Rename a field
• Reorder fields
• Relax an entity link field to allow "Any entity"
• Make a single-select field multi-select (but not vice versa)
• Make a required field optional (but not vice versa)
• Configure decimal field placement on a decimal field
• Remove or loosen minimum and maximum thresholds on number fields

If you want to make other changes to a field on a schema that already has data recorded, you will need to archive the existing field and create a new one.

If you need to add new required fields, you can copy and create a new version of the schema to include these fields.