Support for display of regions on maps with float coords

[ekcannon]

Storing coordinates for features on maps with float coordinates is awkward. featurepos+featureposprop to indicate start and stop coordinates can work, but feels unnecessarily convoluted.

Some thoughts and discussion:

• Change featureloc.fmin and featureloc.fmax to a float? Float fields are problematic, but so is representing a float as an int and divided by X, for example representing 3.6 cM with 36 and dividing by 10.
• Add a type field to the featurepos table to indicate the “type” of the position (e.g. start or end).
• Add a new ‘featureinterval’ table
  • with these fields:
    • featureinterval_id
    • featuremap_id (map set, to get coordinate units)
    • feature_id (object feature being placed)
    • srcfeature_id (target feature)
    • startpos (double precision)
    • endpos (double precision)
  • Stephen Ficklin (1/14/15): In the email it says this would help newbies but duplicates some information already in the featurepos table. Not sure if we should add tables that duplicate info. I got slapped around once for suggesting such a thing.
  • Scott Cain (1/14/15): As well you should! Perhaps featureinterval should be a view?