Storage Management
You can use Scifeon for registering and managing the storage of plates and samples. In addition, the Location entities are used for representing animal cages for in vivo studies.
Scifeon supports an arbitrary hierarchy of fixed (e.g. buildings) and movable (e.g. boxes, cages) storage locations.
Storage Tasks
Check-in
You can check one or more entities (plates, samples, animals) into a location. The operation is represented by a StorageTransaction entity. This can be done irrespective of whether the entities are already stored in a different location.
Check-out
You can check one or more plates and samples into a storage location. The operation is represented by a StorageTransaction entity.
Move a Container
If you move a location (e.g. moving a box from one shelf to another or a cage from one room to another), all child-containers will be moved, too.
Data Representation
The Plate, Sample and Animal entity classes have the following fields for managing storage:
- LocationID: ID of a StorageLocation entity, e.g. a shelf, a room or a box.
- Position: Free text. Can be used for marking position within current location, e.g. row & col in box.
Storage Hierarchy Information
The StorageLocation entity class has the same LocationID, and Position
fields, used for specifying the hierarchy of locations.
The StorageHierarchy field contains the entire hierarchy (Example data).
The HierarchyTag field contains the data used in building the StorageHierarchy content.
PLEASE NOTE: It's critical for the storage management functionality that the StorageHierarchy information is maintained correctly; we, therefore, strongly recommend that you only manipulate storage records using the Storage API functions.
Storage Transactions
A storage transaction entity represents the processing of checking-in or checking-out one or more plates and samples from a single storage location.