Custom Track Storage

Users can add their own tracks to the genome browser. The preferred system for doing this is called "track hubs", stored on user's own webserver. The older system for adding tracks is called "custom tracks" and the data is stored at UCSC, in the directory "trash/ct".

• sessions with custom tracks have an entry "ctfile_<db>" for every database with at least one custom track in the cart, e.g. "ctfile_hg19". An example file name is "ctfile_hg19 ../trash/ct/ct_hgwdev_1e21a_910820.bed" (these values are actually urlencoded in the cart)
• the ctfile has one line per custom track. Each line starts with "track". It contains a list of key-value entries.
• the entries contain at least these keys:
  • dbTrackType
  • dbTableName
  • db
• special case: for named sessions, the ctfile files are moved to /userdata/ct/rr at some point

How to find the ctfiles:

• remember that you can use /cgi-bin/cartDump to show the cart = the genome browser session information.
• each cart (=hgsid) has a list of key=value entries
• the session carts are stored in the "session" table in hgcentral