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Open the sharded merge gate to non-std extended tabular outfmt layouts

Motivation

Issue #29 items #2/#3. The std-first canonical layout (7 std staxids sscinames) already shipped and was verified live. But the gate still required parts[1] == "std", so a hand-written extended layout that leads with field codes (7 qseqid sseqid staxids sstrand pident evalue bitscore) was rejected at submit even though the runtime merge (terminal/merge-sharded-results.sh) is fully field-aware — it resolves the group/rank/oracle columns BY NAME from the full -outfmt specifier and only hard-requires evalue + bitscore (it raises a clear ValueError otherwise). The submit gate now mirrors that exact rule.

User-facing change

  • A sharded BLAST submit accepts any tabular outfmt 6/7 layout whose field list (with std expanded) includes both evalue and bitscore — including non-std-leading and reordered layouts. qseqid is optional (a missing query column makes the merge treat every hit as one query group, correct for a single-query search), matching the runtime merge.
  • A tabular layout missing evalue or bitscore is now rejected at submit time with an actionable message ("The merge re-ranks shard hits by evalue/bitscore, so both columns are required.") instead of failing minutes later in the finalizer.
  • outfmt 5 (XML) still rejects extended fields. Single-token 5/6/7 and the std layouts are unchanged.

API / IaC diff summary

  • api/services/sharding_precision.py — merge_format_for_outfmt expands the field list (new _expand_outfmt_field_codes, mirroring the merge script's _STD_TABULAR_FIELDS) and accepts a tabular layout iff it carries evalue + bitscore; new outfmt_spec_value returns the FULL -outfmt specifier (not just the leading code).
  • api/services/blast/config.py — the sharding gate uses outfmt_spec_value (full specifier) and a clearer error message.
  • terminal/patch_elastic_blast.py — patch_partitioned_outfmt_gate drops the per-code startswith('std') restriction so the elastic-blast partitioned gate allows any tabular 6/7 layout on both the internal and OpenAPI planes. Baked into elb-openapi:4.23.
  • api/services/image_tags.py — IMAGE_TAGS["elb-openapi"] 4.22 → 4.23.

Validation evidence

  • uv run pytest -q api/tests/test_sharding_precision.py api/tests/test_blast_config_sharding.py api/tests/test_terminal_patch_elastic_blast.py — passing. New tests: test_merge_format_accepts_extended_non_std_layout_with_evalue_bitscore, test_merge_format_blocks_layout_missing_rank_columns, test_outfmt_spec_value_rejoins_unquoted_multi_token, test_sharded_accepts_non_std_extended_layout_with_rank_columns, test_sharded_rejects_tabular_layout_missing_rank_columns, and the widened test_patch_partitioned_outfmt_gate_allows_outfmt7.
  • elb-openapi:4.23 rebuilt from the patched sibling context (ACR run deg7) and redeployed; the partitioned gate widening verified live in the pod.