Projects

The project card on the Workbench

Your projects live on the Workbench, in a responsive grid on the Projects tab. That tab is the default landing view, so a member who opens ResearchOS sees their projects first, not a flat task list. Each project is a single card. From top to bottom, a card carries four things.

• A “Shared by” pill at the very top, but only on cards for projects a labmate shared with you. Your own cards skip it.
• Color dot and name. A small filled dot in the project's chosen color sits next to the project name. A project you never picked a color for falls back to one from a built-in palette, and you can change it any time from the Edit dialog.
• Completion bar. A thin bar showing the percentage of this project's tasks that are complete, with an N of M complete label and a percentage above it. A project with no tasks yet reads No tasks yet at 0 percent.
• Count chips. A row of small chips at the bottom counting experiments, list tasks, and (when the project has any) sequences.

Clicking anywhere on the card opens the project's ProjectDetailPopup. There is no navigation to a separate full-page route. Project-level actions (version history, edit, share, deposit, archive, delete) are accessible from within the popup via a kebab menu in the popup top bar.

The ProjectDetailPopup

The popup opens with a color stripe across the top edge. A sticky top bar carries the project name, a View timeline → link that jumps to the Gantt prefiltered to this project, and a kebab menu (three-dot icon) on the right that holds all project-level actions.

Below the top bar sits a row of tabs. These are real tabs backed by app state, not scroll anchors, so only the active section's content renders at a time. The full tab set is Overview, Results, Methods, Sequences, Goals, and Activity. A tab only appears when it has something to show. Overview and Results always show. Methods, Sequences, Goals, and Activity auto-hide when they are empty, so a brand-new project with just a hypothesis shows close to a single Overview tab, never a tab that leads nowhere.

Funding context (always visible, not a tab)

Funding information sits above the tab body, not as a tab of its own. It is always-visible context that frames whichever section is active. It shows two things.

• Primary grant. The single funding account you linked to the project in the Edit dialog. When nothing is linked, this area reads No primary grant linked.
• Grants charged in this project. The distinct set of grants that purchases inside the project were actually charged to, derived live from each purchase's funding line. This can differ from the primary grant, which is the whole point.

The funding area self-hides when a project has no primary link and no charged grants, so an unfunded project stays uncluttered. For how the grant metadata flows into a deposit and a compliant report, see NIH data-management compliance.

Overview

The Overview is where you write the project's hypothesis, motivation, and big-picture context. It is a plain resizable textarea with no toolbar, no image-paste, and no drag-drop file attachment.

Edits autosave 1.5 seconds after the last keystroke. A small Saving… / Saved indicator near the section title tells you when the write has landed. The text lives in a sidecar file at users/<owner>/projects/<id>-overview.md, so it is portable, greppable, and editable outside the app.

Results

The Results tab pulls every image from every Results tab on every experiment that belongs to this project, then groups them by experiment. Each group has a collapsible header with the experiment name and the image count. Within a group, thumbnails are sorted newest-first. Click a thumbnail to open the full-size image with its caption.

Experiments hosted into this project by labmates appear in their own groups with a Shared by <owner> chip. Hosted groups are suppressed on archived projects.

Methods

The Methods tab is a flat, deduplicated inventory of every method attached to an experiment in this project. Each row carries the method name, a type pill (Markdown, PDF, PCR), and a used in N experiments badge so you can see which protocols this project actually leans on.

Rows are sorted by usage count descending, with the method name as an alphabetical tiebreaker. Click any row to jump to the full method in the Method Library. If the same method appears on hosted experiments (from labmates), you'll see a via <owner> chip next to the row.

Sequences

The Sequences tab lists the plasmids and sequences from your sequence library that are linked to this project. Each row shows the sequence name, its length in base pairs, and a type pill (DNA, RNA, or Protein). The tab appears only when at least one sequence is linked, so a project with no constructs never shows it.

This is a read-only roll-up, not the editor. Clicking a row, or the Manage in the sequence library → link in the section header, takes you to the full sequence library where you map, annotate, and edit. To link a sequence to a project, set its project membership in that library.

Goals (opt-in)

If you turned Goals on during the Welcome Wizard, a Goals tab appears just before Activity. It lists every high-level goal whose project_id matches this project, with active goals on top and completed ones below. Each row shows the goal's color dot, name, date range, and SMART sub-goal progress.

Click a row to open the goal editor. If you skipped Goals during the wizard, the tab is hidden entirely. You can opt in later from Settings.

Activity

Activity is a newest-first feed of events scoped to this project. The feed picks up task completions, image drops on any of the project's experiments, methods attached or removed, overview edits, share events, and archive flips. Each row carries an icon, a one-line summary, and a relative timestamp on the right. Hover the timestamp to see the exact ISO string.

Events live in a sidecar at users/<owner>/projects/<id>-activity.json, which means every collaborator on a shared project sees the same feed. Events older than 90 days are lazily pruned the next time the file is written.

Molecules doorway

When a project has linked molecules (from the Chemistry library), a Molecules doorway appears in the popup's Go to section. Clicking it opens a read-only roll-up of all molecules linked to this project, without leaving the popup. The doorway is only shown when the Chemistry feature is enabled and the project has at least one linked molecule.

Top-bar kebab menu

The popup's sticky top bar holds a kebab menu (three-dot icon) on the right. Opening it reveals the project-level actions.

• Version history opens a side panel of saved versions. Pick one to preview a read-only diff, and (when you can write the project) restore it. After a restore an Undo restore button appears for a 24-hour window.
• Edit opens the edit dialog, where you can rename the project, change its color, edit tags, toggle the 7-day schedule, and link a funding account. Disabled for view-only receivers.
• Share opens the share dialog so you can grant a labmate access. Hidden entirely on projects shared to you, since only the original owner can grant access.
• Deposit to a repository opens the deposit dialog for publishing the project's outputs to a data repository.
• Archive / Unarchive triggers an amber confirmation before archiving. Archived projects keep all their tasks but drop out of the active grid and the Gantt. Unarchive from the same item. Disabled for view-only receivers.
• Delete is owner-only. It is disabled for any receiver, view or edit permission. Only the original owner can destroy the project file.

Sharing and shared projects

When a labmate shares a project with you, the deep-link URL gains an ?owner=<username> query parameter so the app knows which user's files to read.

How much you can change depends on the permission you were granted.

• View permission. The Edit and Archive items in the kebab menu render disabled, and the Share item is omitted entirely. The popup still loads, and you can read the overview, browse the results gallery, scan the methods and sequences inventories, and read the activity feed.
• Edit permission. The Edit and Archive actions are live. Your writes route back to the owner's directory, so they reflect on their copy too. Delete is still owner-only.

A small Shared by <owner> chip sits next to the project name in the popup so you always know whose namespace you're reading from.

Getting around

1. Open the Projects tab on the Workbench (it's where you land by default) to see the grid of project cards.
2. Click a card to open the ProjectDetailPopup. Use the tabs (Overview, Results, Methods, Sequences, Goals, Activity) to move between sections.
3. Use the kebab menu in the popup top bar for project-level actions (version history, edit, share, deposit, archive, delete).
4. Close the popup with the close button or press Escape to return to the grid.