Sam’s Greenstone Blog 20/5/2011

admin. Friday, May 20th, 2011.

This week has been a very productive one for us, our list of tickets is down to only a few and soon we will be able to begin testing in preparation for release.

The Internet Explorer issue I mentioned last week turned out to be much more confusing that I had anticipated. Despite the fact that the servlet seemed to be getting the message to add a berry to the Berry Basket it would then report that there were no berries. After some debugging we eventually tracked the problem down to caching. The first time Berry Baskets is enabled it performs a call to the servlet asking how many berries there are (and of course there are none). Internet Explorer then cached this response so that the next time Berry Baskets asks what berries are in the basket it returns the same response without even asking the servlet, resulting in no berries showing up in the basket.

To fix this caching problem we decided to introduce a new parameter that can be used in a Greenstone URL to specify custom response headers. This parameter is specified in JSON and can take a list of header values. So to disable caching of the response we would use hhf=[{“name”:”Cache-Control”, “value”:”no-cache”}] in the URL of the page we request.

Another pair of tickets we closed were to do with changing various parts of the interface when a collection uses the Lucene indexer. For example, Lucene does not search for terms if they are too common (e.g. “the”, “a”, “of” etc.) so we need a message to show up on the search page informing the user that one or more of their search terms were too common and therefore were ignored.

Another minor ticket that was closed was allowing <store_metadata_coverage value=”true”/> to be placed in the collectionConfig.xml file to enable metadata coverage information to be stored at build-time. This feature already exists in Greenstone 2 and was not possible in Greenstone 3 until now.

Next week I will be working on the remaining outstanding tickets. If we manage to close them all we will move onto testing to make sure that there isn’t anything that we’ve missed.

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