Help : Help : Login page and Navigation

Contents

• Description
• The Login Page
• Navigation using the Menu

Description

This help document describes the intended behavior of the SMD login page. This behavior is dependent on the account type you have. For more information regarding the accounts and access to data in the database, please refer to the Accounts and Access document.

Login Page

• Database login: You need to have an account with SMD to use this login box. Type in your login and password, and click the 'login' button. If you have an unrestricted account (i.e. you can load data into the database, can edit your own data and can view all data that belongs to your lab group), your login will take you to your repository (even if you currently don't have data saved in it). If your account is restricted (i.e. you can't load data in the database, you can't edit any data and can only view experiments to which you were given specific access), you will be taken to either the advanced search page if you have no data in your repository, or to your repository if you have at least one dataset saved in it.

  
  
  Figure 1.: SMD login page.

  
  

• Public Data: If you don't have a user account, you can still view a subset of our data - all published experiments - and use our software to analyze these data. Clicking the 'Public Login' button logs you into the database as a 'WORLD' user and takes you to the advanced search page. The 'Publications' button will also log you into the database as 'WORLD' user but will display a list of all publications using data stored in the database.

  The other two buttons are there for convenience and bring you to tools that are not within the database. Clicking the 'SOURCE' button will take you to the Stanford Online Universal Resource for Clones and ESTs (SOURCE), while clicking the 'Caryoscope' button will display a page to this software that helps you explore microarray data in a genomic context. While developed by members of Stanford's Microarray and Genome Informatics group (MAGI), they are not part of the database itself.

• SMD Announcements: This section contains important and timely information about database access, new tools or other issues of interest to users. In addition it might contain information we think is important to microarray/SMD users (e.g. meeting announcements, etc.). Please, check this section before login.

• SMD Release: This section contains a short list of the latest features we added to our software/database. The title of the section indicates the current version of software. Clicking on the title will display the SMD News document, that lists the history of software releases and more detailed description of new features in each release.

• Recent Publications: This section of the page lists the most current (by publication date) publications using data from the database. Clicking any of the links logs you in as a public ('WORLD') user and displays the record for that publication within the database.

Navigating SMD using the Menu

• Menu: For menu we use a javascript software called 'Coolmenu', available from this site. The menu can have 3 different states, shown on Figure 2 that depend on the login state and the type of account the user has.
• Banner: The current page visited is always displayed on the banner above the menu and the current user is shown in the lower right corner of the banner.
  
  
  

  a: not logged in:
  b: logged in as 'WORLD' or restricted user:
  c: logged in as unrestricted user:
  Figure 2.: The menu can have 3 different states: (a) the user is not logged in; (b) restricted user logged in; (c) unrestricted user logged in.

  
  
  Menu Items: Figure 3. shows the items available for unrestricted users. A restricted user (who cannot load and modify data) doesn't have access to the "My Data" and "Tools" sub-menus. Access to the "Help", "Links" and "SMD" sub-menus doesn't require a user account.

  The sub-menus don't contain all the available links you have access to, only the most frequently accessed links are included here. The page containing all software links is available by selecting the "All Programs" item on the "Lists" sub-menu.

  The content of each sub-menu is static, except for the "Help" menu that shows a page-specific help document as the first item on the list, when available.
  
  

  
  
  Figure 3.: Items in the menu for an unrestricted user.