 | Overview
Businesses today have very diverse sets of requirements and laboratory operating procedures. Even within the same industry sector, we find that no two businesses are alike. If you compound this with the trend that laboratories are being asked to tackle more and more difficult analytical tasks and use increasingly more sophisticated instrumentation, it places many challenges upon the LIMS to be able to properly adapt to all of the requirements for the system and keep pace with changing business needs.
Traditional approaches to LIMS have been to customize the system by changing the product's core source code to achieve the needs of the business. This creates many difficulties for the customer longer term and makes it very difficult to upgrade the LIMS when the vendor brings out a new version of the software. LabWare LIMS is often purchased to replace an existing LIMS because it is more work to upgrade the current LIMS than it is to install and configure a LabWare LIMS system. Recognizing all of the difficulties associated with customization, LabWare brings a fresh approach to solving the customer's need to being able to adapt LIMS to meet all the requirements of your business. The LabWare approach is to offer a product that is highly configurable out of the box and that is infinitely extensible using our powerful scripting language called LIMS Basic.
LIMS Basic is a simple to learn and use macro language that allows you to invoke functions in order to force LabWare LIMS to behave exactly as your business requires when a particular action occurs in LIMS. For example, if the standard out of the box behavior does not meet your needs completely, or you would like to have additional steps take place when a user performs a given task in the software, you can attach a LIMS Basic script to override the LIMS native behavior or force additional automated actions to occur in the proper sequence. A common example would be to respond to an Out of Specification (OOS) result by automatically creating an electronic Investigation in LIMS and notifying the appropriate supervisors of the situation using electronic mail.
Upgrade Protection
Using LIMS Basic scripts when necessary does not impact your ability to upgrade LIMS from one version to the next. This is because all LIMS Basic scripts you write are stored in special fields in the LIMS database. LabWare designs LIMS Basic commands to be backwards compatible with previous versions of the software. The benefit of this is that the system is much easier to upgrade, in fact upgrading LIMS is performed using automated tool from LabWare that provides a "Push Button Upgrade" process.
An additional benefit to storing all LIMS Basic scripts in the database is that you can document your system configuration using built-in standard reporting tools that come with LIMS. LabWare even provide a mechanism in the product to do this called "Document DB". Document DB is written in LIMS Basic and goes through the entire LIMS Configuration and prints out the entire LIMS Configuration that includes every configuration setting and the attributes of all static data records in the LIMS.
Built-In LIMS Basic Development Environment
LabWare LIMS provides all of the necessary editors, tools, and debugging environment for LIMS Basic. You do not need to use any development tools outside of the LIMS environment. The benefit to this approach is several fold. First, all Advanced Configuration you do in LIMS Basic is audited by the system and can be traced to the individual who created or edited the configuration. Secondly, you have the ability to immediately test any LIMS Basic you write directly in the software without having to do any additional work. Just press the "Test" button on the LIMS Basic Editor's toolbar to run the code and test it. And finally, the LabWare LIMS Basic development environment provides much of the code for you using automatic code generators. For example, if you want log a new sample using a LIMS Basic command, you simply locate the LogSample function in the list of commands, select it, then when you press the OK button, LabWare LIMS generates most of the code for you.
Examples of Categorized Lists of LIMS Basic Commands
 
LIMS Basic Formula Editor - Showing How A Sample Can Be Automatically Logged In
Before you click OK in the LIMS Basic Formula dialog, LabWare LIMS checks your code to make sure you haven't made a mistake typing or modifying it. It will warn you that you have a mistake and will highlight the problem area in the editor.
In the following example, I took out the required parentheses needed after the Message Box LIMS Basic command to illustrate how it checks for errors.
Common Uses for LIMS Basic Scripts
During a typical LIMS implementation, LabWare LIMS provides approximately 85% to 90% of the functionality you need out of the box. The remaining 10% to 15% is typically unique requirements that are specific to your business. These are excellent candidates for applying advanced configuration using LIMS Basic. The LabWare LIMS product offers numerous places where you can attach LIMS Basic commands to achieve a particular requirement you may have.
Some examples of situations where our customers have used LIMS Basic to solve a business problem include:
- Interfacing to external information systems and databases to import or export data between LIMS and another application.
- Complex analytical calculations.
- Invoking a series of automatic LIMS actions when the user performs a particular command or presses a custom menu or toolbar command.
- Handling complex workflows in the laboratory.
- Providing additional prompting to the user when they are about to perform an action in LIMS such as saving or modifying a record.
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