Adding Consumables in iExperiment

In the video tutorial below, we demonstrate how to add and delete consumables to and from a record in our enterprise electronic notebook, iExperiment. Consumables are one of the five material types that are supported in iExperiment. The others are Samples, Reagents, Equipment and Animals. Consumables are the simplest material, since they do not have components like reagents and equipment do.

In addition, we will show how to add and delete properties of materials. A property is a datum associated with a material, such as the number of items in a box.

A transcript of the video can be found below.

Tutorial Transcript: Adding Consumables in the Enterprise Electronic Notebooki Experiment

Hi, and welcome to Colabrativ’s demonstration on how to add and delete consumables to and from a record in iExperiment.
We will start our demonstration logged in as our fictitious user, Tes Turing, viewing an in-progress record.
In order to add materials to a record, we must first add a Materials section.
Open the part in the navigation tree that you would like to add the materials to, and click on the green add “Materials” button.
The Materials section is not displayed in the record until a subsection, such as Consumables, is added to it.
iExperiment currently supports five types of Materials: Samples, Reagents, Equipment, Consumables and Animals.

Let’s start by creating the simplest of materials, a Consumable. First we need to add a Consumables subsection in the Materials section. Click on the green add Consumables button in the navigation tree.
To add a consumable to the Consumables subsection, open a Consumables add-content panel by clicking on the green arrow on the right-hand side of the record, below the Consumables banner.
The Consumables add-content panel allows you to “Add Text” or “Add Consumable”.
A text section can be added to any of the Materials subsections. To add a comment, click on the “Add Text” button.
Double-click on the text section to open the editor.
Add your comment, and then click outside of the comment box to close its editor.

To add a consumable, open a Consumables add-content panel, click on the “Add Consumable” button, and fill in the information on the consumable.
The only information required for a consumable is its name and supplier.
If the consumable’s URL is supplied, then a link to this URL will be added to the consumable’s name.
Supplier information is shared in iExperiment.net. Therefore, if you start typing a supplier’s name that already exists, iExperiment will display the matching supplier records to you.
If a supplier’s URL is added, it will be used to link the supplier’s name to the supplier’s web-site.
Consumables have an optional expiration date.
After you have completed filling in the consumable information, click the “Add” button.
You will notice that both the consumable’s name and the supplier’s name are linked to information on the consumable and supplier, respectively.
Each consumable can be deleted by clicking on the red delete button in the upper right hand corner of the consumable box.
As the warning states, “Once the Consumable is deleted, it’s gone forever.”

Material properties associate specific data with a particular material. In iExperiment, materials are shared between experiments.
Clicking on the green add “Properties” button will display the “Add Property” dialog box.
If a property header is supplied, then it is displayed instead of the property name. This is useful when the property has a long name.
Click on the “Okay” button to add the property.
Note that the property name is displayed if you mouse over the property header.
A property can be deleted by clicking on the red “delete” button next to it.
As the warning states, “Once the Consumable Property is deleted, it’s gone forever.”
Click on the “Delete” button, and the property is removed.

Please visit our companion web pages with accompanying videos for instructions on adding other materials, such as samples, reagents or equipment.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us at www.colabrativ.com.

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