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CWL Release 1.0: Why having both default and valueFrom fields on WorkflowStepInput?

Hi, I am working on an implementation of CWL and I don't understand, why would WorkflowStepInput have 2 fields simultaneously: valueFrom and default: http://www.commonwl.org/v1.0/Workflow.html#WorkflowStepInput.

I understand that valueFromallows us to hard-code the value, supplied to a step input, or make it a dynamically evaluatable expression (if we don't want this step to take its input value from workflow input or output of another step). But why would I need default field then, except that it is a legacy field from the times of draft-2?

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updated by Michael R. Crusoe Michael R. Crusoe • written by Boris Burkov • Boris Burkov

I have seen several CWL posts now, could somebody explain the relation to bioinformatics of the questions? I see that it is a very useful tool also for bioinformatics but not only, but some questions seem to be very much about the details of its implementation that are not at all bioinformatics specific.

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written by Michael Dondrup Michael Dondrup

1 answer

This was answered on GitHub: https://github.com/common-workflow-language/common-workflow-language/issues/358#issuecomment-267011066

Your hypothesis that this is left over from draft-2 makes the most sense. I'll let @tetron and @ntijanic chime in with their perspectives.

I support marking as deprecated the use of valueFrom with a constant string (which should have been Any or CWLType) and for removal in v2.0 of this usage altogether..

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written by Michael R. Crusoe Michael R. Crusoe

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