IGV data loading errors

[mccalluc]

Steps to reproduce

1. Reference http genome data in an upload
2. Load IGV from a https server

(May have a similar problem when the server does not provide CORS headers: Our S3 bucket does, but others may not.)

Observed behavior

• Browser security will prevent the data from loading

(@jkmarx has also seen this locally on http, which may be CORS, but I'm not sure: There could be something else in here.)

Expected behavior

Not sure. Assuming the diagnosis is correct:

• Warn during upload?
• Copy to server during upload?
• Copy to server when IGV is requested?
• Our https server could proxy http files w/o long term storage?
• More human-readable error message in IGV?

[ngehlenborg]

Let's try to get the IGV.js maintainer to provide a meaningful error message when tracks can't be loaded.

[mccalluc]

I think it would be feasible to monkey patch IGV, or something like that, to add a more informative message. (For a generic user, the existing error messages are really all that can be expected.)

I'll be doing this work in refinery-platform/igv-wrapper-for-refinery#6: It doesn't make sense to maintain both versions.

[hackdna]

Contributing this code to the IGV.js project would be even better.