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Feature suggestion: Support directly opening state (session) file #1815

@odoublewen

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@odoublewen

I have an in-house web app that will allow users to download an IGV state (session) XML file. They can then open the XML file with IGV to automatically open alignments and annotations.

It would be nice if users could double-click on the state file, and have IGV open and automatically restore the session. But this doesn't seem possible. I can associate XML files with IGV, and when I double-click on the XML file, IGV opens. But it does not restore the state -- it just openes to a blank alignment (same as if I just opened IGV). I can open the XML state file by using the "File -> Open Session" IGV dialog.

Also, I wonder if anyone has ever considered creating an IGV-specific file extension for state files. .igv would be my suggestion! ;) This could just be an unofficial thing that people like me do, to associate state files with IGV, but seems like it would be better if it was blessed/encouraged/organized by the project. But, this part of my suggestion is not relevant, unless IGV supports opening state files directly from the operating system.

I am using IGV_2.16.2.app on Mac 26.2 (Tahoe). I don't know if what I wrote above is true on Windows or other platforms.

PS. I know I can use igv.js to display the genome browser directly in our app, and indeed we already do this. But some users perfer to use the java implementation for better responsiveness.

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