admin. Monday, October 17th, 2011
Progress on the Document Structure Editor (the name is still undecided) is going well. It now actually makes the changes and then builds the collection, which results in the changes actually showing up in the documents, which is quite satisfying to see!
The building process takes a reasonable amount of time (especially if multiple collections need to be built) so we needed a way to inform the user of what is currently happening on the server. We originally had the code to trigger the collection building on the server, as it made sense to build the collections straight after the archive files had been modified (which is essentially what this system does). This approach hit a road-block however as it has difficulty if multiple collections are to be built sequentially and we want to be able to inform the user of what’s happening on the web interface. Basically once each build is complete the collection must be activated (the building -> index step you may know about if you’ve ever build a collection using the command line rather than GLI) and these things became very tricky to order correctly without requiring a lot more code. So we decided to make the process simpler and move the code that decides when and what collections to build to the client-side.
This week I will be continuing to work on this system, most likely focusing on editing metadata or document text.
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admin. Friday, October 7th, 2011
This week work has continued on the Document Basket/Document Maker/Document Structure Editor (we’re still deciding on the final name). The move and duplicate operations have been implemented and are successfully being mirrored on the server, so it is now very easy to move sections around and duplicate them. Unfortunately these changes do not yet show up in the regular interface as the collection will need to be built after each save and this has yet to be implemented.
I have also been able to get the undo functionality up and running. So now you will be able to undo all your operations up until the point where you choose to save. The client-side interface keeps a list of all the transactions you have made (moves, duplicate, create, delete etc.) and is able to undo any operations you make on the client by removing them from the list of transactions (and updating the interface), once you choose to save however the list of transactions is sent to the server to be executed so undoing is no longer as simple to implement. It may be implemented some time in the future but at this stage it would take more time than we can spare for something that is not essential.
We have also begun implementing a way to modify metadata (such as document/section title, author or subject metadata) as part of the system. Allowing a way to modify metadata more directly instead of having to use GLI, which collection designers may find quite useful. At the moment it is only working on the client-side and we have yet to connect it back to the server.
Next week I will continue to connect the missing operations to the server and add collection building as part of the save feature so the changes can be viewed.
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admin. Monday, October 3rd, 2011
Those who are eagerly awaiting the release of the final version of 2.85 will not have to wait much longer. Anu has been working hard testing it on each of the platforms we support and for the most part things are looking good. Any assistance in testing is always greatly appreciated and if you would like to help us out then please download the 2.85 release candidate which is available here. If you find any problems then join the mailing list to email us at <greenstone-users @ list.waikato.ac.nz> and let us know. The more you can tell us about the issue the better.
Work on the Document Basket functionality continues to go well. I am in the initial stages of connecting the front-end Javascript to the Java back-end. To transmit the operations we are using JSON (rather than XML) as it is a very simple to write in Javascript and we have found a good Java library (gson) that converts JSON back into an object. So hopefully this week we will start seeing some promising results.
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admin. Monday, September 26th, 2011
Hello again, sorry about the big delay between posts, things have been pretty busy here recently and remembering to write this often slips my mind.
We’ve released our first release candidate for 2.85 so please try it out and let us know if there are any issues. You can find it at http://www.greenstone.org/snapshots.
The front-end for the Document Basket (formerly the Document Maker) is looking really good now, sections can be added, moved around, duplicated and removed. The text of each section can also be easily edited thanks to Brook Novak’s Seaweed (Seamless Web Editing) technology which was developed here at the University of Waikato. For those of you who haven’t seen this yet, it basically allows you to click text on a web page and start editing it right there without the need for any complicated text boxes/buttons etc. Very cool.
We have yet to connect the front-end Document Basket interface to the back-end yet and we are still working on features such as undo, so that is what I will be working on this for this week.
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ak19. Friday, August 26th, 2011
It’s been about 4 weeks since I wrote an entry. In the meantime we’ve been tidying up the last of the To Do list items for the upcoming GS2 release and several of the To Do list items for the GS3 release. Sam is now hard working on the GS3 interface alongside his other work on the Document Maker. It now looks like GS3 may be released separately, after GS2.
Some of the more involved things that required doing were:
- testing OAI (dc.Resource Identifier issues) and downloading over OAI
- The extracted embedded metadata, ex.*.metadata (e.g. ex.dc.* prefixes), needed to be handled different from ex.metadata. This required some changes in various files and a lot of testing.
- Conflicts between EmbeddedMetadataPlugin and some of the existing Plugins in the pipeline (OAI, DSpace, PDF plugins). Fortunately, Dr Bainbridge came up with fixes. After some testing, the known problems with these plugins no longer exist. With the tutorials we will continue to investigate how well other plugins interact with the EmbeddedMetaPlugin.
- The OAI validator at openarchives now had a test where GS2’s OAI server failed and a different one where the GS3 OAI server failed. These have been fixed up.
- The GS3 installer needed to have an admin page, like the GS2 installer does, where the user can enable admin pages and provide a password.
- wvware.pl is a new intermediary script to launch wvware in its own particular environment. This script is necessary in order for wvware’s required environment not to be set globally (thereby tampering with Linux’ windowing/GUI libraries)
- At the moment, after John Rose’s request, we’re in the process of merging the two server configuration files (glisite.cfg and llssite.cfg), so we can have just one, with some properties qualified by a “gli” prefix. The Server.jar code, the GS2 C++ code, the startup scripts and config files have been sufficiently modified to work with the work-in-progress on the GLI code, while still working with the stable GLI. Changing the GLI code was tricky two years ago, and made the code’s behaviour rather complex. Now that I’m in the process of testing the latest overhaul to it, the changes I’ve just made to what was stable are still very buggy and reproducing the bugs takes some time. Fortunately, without the changes to the GLI code, everything else committed is able to work as accurately as before, which is fortunate since if I break anything, it will be just the LocalLibraryServer.java GLI code that once committed needs to be reverted.
- The above task has now been completely resolved, and changes committed after being tested thoroughly on both Windows and Linux.
Minor issues also kept popping up over the last month.
- There was a Z3950 “issue”that sidetracked me and which turned out not to be an issue after all: The Library of Congress’ Z3950 address seems to return SRU data. The fix is simply for the user to use the right module of the download pane.
- A bug in starting and stopping GS3 via GLI on windows
- One Greenstone member encountered a unicode issue that I wasn’t able to reproduce after initial investigations.
- Minor but frustrating bugs with the GLI for GS3 have been resolved (an extra nested <format/> tag appearing when all format statements have been removed, and the preview button activating itself when editing format statements in an unbuilt GS3 collection)
- Fixed GS3’s way of handling the port in the GSI application, so that it is no longer arbitrarily modified. The Do Not Modify port is still available.
- Some requests on the mailing list like porting indexed databases from one GS2 version to the next, since changes had been made to the name of an ex.metadata
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admin. Monday, August 22nd, 2011
Since the last time I wrote I have mostly been continuing work on the Document Maker. The back-end (the part that does all the hard work) is around 80% complete and is ready enough for me to start working more on the front-end (the part that makes the back-end easier to use).
I have also been tidying up some of the Format Manager work that the other Sam did before he left. He had modified the JQuery UI source code so that it allowed multiple nested lists of items (basically lists inside lists, which the original code did not allow for). The only problem with this approach (directly modifying the source code) is that it does not allow us to easily upgrade our version of JQuery UI in the future. To remedy this problem we downloaded the original JQuery UI source code and worked out what parts of the modified code we needed to keep. We then took these parts and put them into a different Javascript file and used the prototype functionality of Javascript to make sure that the modified code would overwrite the original code.
We originally tried contacting the JQuery UI developers to see if we could get Sam’s changes included in the official source code but they responded saying that this new list-inside-list functionality was outside the scope of what the original lists were intended for.
The Format Manager is still very much a work in progress and, although it will be included in the next release of Greenstone 3, we will be still recommending that people make their format statement modifications through editing the collectionConfig.xml file at this point.
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admin. Monday, August 8th, 2011
Since my last post I have been working hard on the new Document Maker functionality that is planned for a future version of Greenstone. So far I have implemented the ability to create new documents, create new document sections, delete documents, delete document sections, copy documents, turn a document into a section of another document, turn a section of a document into a document and the ability to copy a section from one document into another document. Also planned is the ability to move documents and sections (basically the same as the copying operations except the original document or section is deleted afterwards); the ability to merge sections together or to split them apart; various document manipulations such as the ability to get and set metadata and the ability to get and set the document content.
The plan is that this Document Maker functionality will be presented to the users via a web interface, allowing users to modify their documents on the fly. We imagine that this functionality will be very useful to people who want to be able to create organised collections out of large, unorganised sets of text and images. One such example of this is the Pei Jones collection which is made up of many individual letters, photos and articles that have been OCRed.
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ak19. Monday, August 1st, 2011
Last week started off with requiring fixes to a bug introduced during recent GS3 code changes: suddenly metadata and titles were no longer being retrieved for normal search and browse operations. Then Sam’s recent improvement to GS3’s GLI by starting the tomcat server upon GLI startup was expanded to also stop the tomcat server on GLI’s exit.
Then it was time to move back to GS3 XSLT files once more. Recently, changes were made to GS3’s old standard skin (gs3library) XSLT files, so that the features exhibited in the DSpace Tutorial would work for GS3 as well. These changes needed to still be ported over to the new standard skin for GS3, currently called “oran” (its servlet is called “dev”). However, in trying to make sense of how to do this, it was discovered that the default dev servlet was not set to use Sam’s excellent default GS3 interface for dev. Because GS3’s format features need to be customisable, having any format statements in a collection’s configuration file would bypass Sam’s interface to show up a default one. However, this default one was not working at this stage. This was therefore fixed up to get back some rudimentary behaviour not unlike what GS2’s interface offers for hierarchical browsing and search results. To use Sam’s interface, all users would need to do is use GLI to delete any format statements in a collection’s config file.
In looking into this matter, a further minor bug was discovered in classifier.xsl that was also fixed.
Porting the GS3 changes made for DSpace tutorial into the new default skin later had to be continued later, since there was some incomplete work awaiting finishing: the week ended with continuing work to do with working with embedded metadata (such as of the form ex.dc.*).
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admin. Wednesday, July 27th, 2011
It’s been a while since I last wrote, so I’ll fill you all in on what has been happening.
We have been working fairly solidly on some improvements for 2.85. One thing we have been aiming to do is improve the use of PDF files with complex embedded metadata. We have added several options to the EmbeddedMetadataPlugin that allows more advanced manipulation of metadata arrays (metadata values that have multiple entries like ex.PDF.Keywords).
We have also fixed several issues that arise when 2 similar documents (for example if two identical PDF documents are put into Greenstone but have different embedded metadata) are put into Greenstone.
In other news, we are currently taking another look at the way we encode PDF files. As some of you may know we introduced the PDFBox extension along with 2.84 as a way of converting the latest PDF formats to HTML (pdftohtml only allows conversion of the earlier PDF formats). PDFBox works well except that it does not also get the images out of the PDF like pdftohtml does, it also is fairly large which is why we need to keep it as an extension rather than bundle it with Greenstone. Unfortunately for us, the pdftohtml utility has not been in active development for quite a while now so it has not been upgraded to deal with the more recent PDF versions. However the Xpdf library that pdftohtml uses is still in active development so we have been exploring the viability of upgrading pdftohtml ourselves.
Alongside this I am continuing to work on the Document Maker for Greenstone 3. I have a skeleton of the program in place and have starting filling it out.
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ak19. Friday, July 22nd, 2011
- Week starting 11 July: Closed ticket 770 to do with multiple pieces of metadata for the same metadata name in GS3. GS3 was previously not consulting the mdoffset field in the index database to work out which of multiple assigned metadata values to display for a particular metadata field. When browsing on that metadata field, it used to display only the first each time, but now displays all values in turn.
- For the rest of that week and the start of the week thereafter, worked on some items discovered by John Rose and Luigi. They found a bug in the GS2 OAI server that manifested when a GS2 client tried to download docs from it over OAI. The bug had to do with an incorrect URL being generated for the dc.Resource Identifier field. They also requested a minor improvement to the button layout in GLI’s OAI download panel and needed some clarifications on the GS2 OAI server’s behaviour.
- Continuing on in the week of 18 July: On GLI startup, an information dialog box will show up if the user does not have the PDFBox extension installed (telling them how to get it if they want newer PDF versions processed). A dialog will also appear on startup if the user’s collect home was set to be somewhere outside its default location inside the GS2 installation.
- In implementing the last, a bug was discovered that had been introduced when implementing the reset-gsdlhome target of the gsicontrol script. The bug interfered with the proper behaviour of setting and loading a custom collecthome when using GLI. It’s now been fixed in such a manner that there’s the added advantage that the intensive operations of the reset-gsdlhome task will not be carried out anymore each time the GS2-server is launched. Instead, the relocation-specific operations are only performed when GSDLHOME has in fact changed since the previous time the GS2-server was launched.
- The pdfbox-app.jar executable file was changed again: it was returned to being the plain, official 1.5.0 release, without the Greenstone-specific changes regarding the line-separator that had thereafter been committed. Instead, the line.separator is now set as a command-line property when launching the pdfbox-app.jar, as suggested by Dr. Bainbridge, since it was no more than a Java System property that needed to be adjusted for GS’ customisation of PDFBox anyway.
- Changes have been made to modelcol’s config.cfg (and related changes in runtime-src) to deal with embedded metadata, so that it will now handle the “ex.” prefix of metadata already qualified by a set name, such as ex.dc.something. Further changes were made to runtime-src’s code to not always remove the ex. prefix, since this should be retained for embedded metadata. The handling of embedded metadata by the DSpacePlugin was also slightly modified so that DC metadata in the dublin_core.xml files of DSpace documents get prefixed with “ex.”. This allows these metadata fields to be visible in GLI, while yet being unmodifiable, as they are still extracted (ex) metadata.
- Tried to reproduce some issues noticed by members of the mailing list.
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