I apologize if this is a naive question, but where does the Entity List pull its description field values from? Every time I attempt to insert an Entity List into a wiki, the description field is always empty and I can't find a way to modify it.
-Artem
Created by Artem Sokolov ArtemSokolov The Table Queries are working very well for our purposes!
I have a couple of additional suggestions for future features:
1. It would be nice to have comments in the wiki. Wikipedia calls them [hidden text](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Hidden_text) and uses the standard HTML comment format. However, in the Synapse wikis this leads to strikethrough text. One purpose of comments would be to store the query text used to generate the table as a comment right before the table to aid with future readability of the wiki source.
2. I really like that the synapse IDs are automatically links in the table. It would be great to have a similar feature for wiki pages. Currently, if I store a link to a wiki page in one of the annotation fields and then select that field during the query, the link gets rendered as plain text. Perhaps this feature could be accomplished by adding a new annotation type (Link) in addition to the existing ones (Text, Integer, Floating Point, and Date).
Thanks again for all your help, Kenneth (and Jay)! We really appreciate it.
I neglected another option, which is using [annotations](http://docs.synapse.org/articles/annotation_and_query.html) - these can be set from the web on each `File`. However, you will not use the Entity List widget, rather the 'Table: Query on Files and Folders' widget. In one respect, you are limited to 'AND' queries. On the other hand, the annotations you add are much more flexible than with the entity list widget.
For example, if all of the files you want to have in a listing are in the same folder, you could add an annotation for the description (I called mine `myDescription`), and insert this query:
```
select id,name,myDescription,createdOn from file where parentId=='syn7067015'
```
This results in the following table:
${querytable?path=%2Fquery%3Fquery%3Dselect%2Bid%252Cname%252CmyDescription%252CcreatedOn%2Bfrom%2Bfile%2Bwhere%2BparentId%253D%253D%27syn7067015%27&paging=false&pageSize=100&showRowNumber=false}
One nice feature of this is if you add new files that match this query (in this case, add new files to a folder), this table in the Wiki will automatically reflect that. If using the Entity List widget, you need to manually make changes when new files are added. https://sagebionetworks.jira.com/browse/SWC-3201 Thank you, Kenneth. Unfortunately not. The 'description' field existed before we had `Wiki` pages for entities. We've shied away from using the description towards those. However your use case is quite valid and useful and exposes an inconsistency with the Entity List widget.
One potential workaround is the 'Note' field when creating an entity list using the widget. When the dialog box pops up to select which entities you want, there is a pencil 'edit' icon at the right side. You can use this to add a 'note'. This is only used when displaying the widget, and the notes do not persist with the entities (e.g., you cannot programmatically access them, and if you delete the widget from the Wiki, you lose all notes).
I've raised the issue with our engineers to determine how we can address this. Thanks, Kenneth. Is there also a way to modify it using the web interface? Some of the folks who are uploading the data for our project are experimental biologists with little to no programming experience. It is a property (not an annotation) of a `File` entity. In the `Python` client, if you have an File entity called `e`, you can do:
```
e.description = "My Description"
e = syn.store(e)
```
Note that changing the description will create a new version. If you don't want to, pass `forceVersion=False` to the `syn.store` command.
Something similar can also be done with the `R` client (also showing how to not create a new version):
```
e@properties$description <- "My Description"
e <- synStore(e, forceVersion=FALSE)
```