Dear Seqera-Team,

As of Version 23.2.0, the Seqera Platform has poor support for launching multi-revision pipelines and the UI facilitates the misconfiguration of parameters.

Therefore, I wanted to point out a potential UI/UX improvement.A user launching a run via Seqera Platform’s browser interface is first presented with a form for entering pipeline parameters. Similar to nf-core launch, this form is based on the file.

Only if all mandatory parameters were provided, it is possible to proceed to the Launch settings. Here, a different workflow revision, e.g. an older version, may be selected. Unfortunately, it is rather the rule than the exception that parameters and schema change between workflow revisions. Hence, the current UI does not allow configuring launches of older revisions properly.

For example, uses the parameter up to revision and 1.0.1 and for newer releases. Even if a user is aware of this change, it is not possible to provide the correct parameter when launching older revisions, since it will be validated against the most recent schema. When providing instead, it is ignored for older revisions and the pipeline’s default is used. Moreover, it happens silently, so a user can easily fail to notice that the workflow is not executed as planned.

To no longer promote misconfiguration via the UI, I suggest putting the revision choice first and thereafter displaying the parameter form, based on the actual of that particular revision:

If the schema is for technical reasons only read when adding or updating pipelines, and looping through all revisions is not feasible, it should be possible to disable the parameter form in favour of a general text area to enter all parameters at once.

Thanks a lot for consideration.

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