Linking to Factory Products

A design goal for the Product Factory was to ensure that a permanent url existed for every product. Although every image and dataset generated through the factory is addressable in this way, "mashups" and HTML forms involving factory products must be manipulated interactively.

For example, a CMOP investigator was recently interested in inspecting Cast 77 and Cast 83 from the August 2007 cruise.

On her behalf, a data curator might gather up the relevant links like this:

August 2007, Barnes, Cast 77 profile plot and CSV dataset

August 2007, Barnes, Cast 83 profile plot and CSV dataset

However, we'd also like to be able to extract a link to the CTD cast mashup such that the form is pre-configured to display a particular cast, and all the context products are updated appropriately.

To pre-configure the form, we just need a new factory method with different semantics for bound arguments. The "getform" method hides bound arguments; the new method will display them, but preset them to the specified value.

We can recover the functionality of customizable forms by providing a distinguished "hide" argument. Values of the "hide" argument are parameter names to explicitly suppress.