Blast.NCBIWWW.qblast should return the rid of the submitted query to the caller

[kamurani]

When using qblast to automate blast searches on NCBI, the RID of the submitted request is not returned to the user. The RID is also not accessible anywhere within the xml-formatted output.

The RID may be useful for later retrieval from NCBI, using the URL https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?RID={{rid}}&CMD=Get, especially for submitted jobs that take a while to perform, and where the user may wish to revisit the results in the more accessible webpage view.

Within qblast, the RID is already accessed using

rid, rtoe = _parse_qblast_ref_page(handle)

At the moment, I am using a modified version of the qblast function that returns a dictionary of values, as a workaround:

https://github.com/kamurani/biopython/blob/c58c401b7a94bf06e13fadc4f41d5076dd1c78f4/Bio/Blast/NCBIWWW.py#L302-L307

kamurani@c58c401

Is this something that I could modify further to be a useful feature? Would appreciate any advice, and if so happy to make a PR.

[peterjc]

Duplicate of #4263. Your suggested change is an API break (so not acceptable), see also the proposal on #3342 was backward compatible which could be worth reconsidering.

[mdehoon]

@kamurani Have a look at the new qblast function in Bio/Blast/__init__.py. It contains a new qblast function that solves some of the issues of the old qblast function in Bio/Blast/NCBIWWW.py. As it has not yet been released, its API can still be changed.