Config for "visualization plugin" missing for type like bam and others: loss of functionality

[jennaj]

Describe the bug
Preview via eye icon on datasets can offer an enriched visualization view re #20190. But when not configured, it is showing up as a dependency problem in the UI. Can we do better? I'm not sure what should be happening in that view but the message makes it seem like the server has a problem.

Galaxy Version and/or server at which you observed the bug
UseGalaxy.org This Galaxy server version is 25.0.rc1, and the web client was built on Wednesday May 21st 11:15:45 2025 GMT-7 .

Browser and Operating System
Operating System: Windows, Linux, macOS
Browser: Firefox, Chrome, Chrome-based, Safari

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to a bam dataset
2. Click on the eye icon
3. See message in the tab view

Expected behavior
If not available (on purpose, and local IGV is needed as before) maybe display no fail message, or at least the uncompressed version of the BAM. That view was used quite a bit before -- to inspect the headers -- so this is more like functionality loss than anything else for this file type.

The h5 viewer is great. I didn't check all data types at https://github.com/galaxyproject/galaxy/blob/dev/lib/galaxy/config/sample/datatypes_conf.xml.sample with "visualization plugin". The request is: show the display or fall back to whatever we did before, not lose that original functionality.

Screenshots
If applicable, add screenshots to help explain your problem.

Additional context
Add any other context about the problem here.

[mvdbeek]

I agree that we need to review the default visualization and make sure that if there are any that they are in fact available and we should either offer the backend rendering or implement a visualization that offers the same functionality. For the bam case that was simply samtools view ... I'm very happy we don't have to run this on the backend anymore, but I don't know if there is something offering the same functionality. chatgpt suggests using Galaxy for the task 😆 :

3. Galaxy Web Environment
   If you're using Galaxy, it provides built-in BAM text viewers.

Load a BAM file and use the "View data as text" option.

May not be embeddable in your own site directly.

[mvdbeek]

https://github.com/GMOD/bam-js could be a replacement for the backend rendering

[dannon]

bam-js will be a nice option for clientside rendering; here's a screenshot of a prototype viz. working out kinks, but it's promising as a nice textual display of bam contents.