Release date: January 24th, 2017

We are proud to announce the release of Fedora 4.7.1.

Resources

• This release requires Java 8
• Downloads
• Javadocs

Team

Release Manager

• Bethany Seeger, Amherst College
• Andrew Woods, Duraspace

Developers

• Andrew Woods, Duraspace
• Unknown User (acoburn), Amherst College
• Aaron Birkland, Johns Hopkins University
• Ben Cail, Brown University
• Bethany Seeger, Amherst College
• Danny Bernstein, Duraspace
• Diego Pino Navarro, Metropolitan New York Library Council
• Elliot Metsger, Johns Hopkins University
• Esmé Cowles, Princeton University
• Jared Whiklo, University of Manitoba
• Osman Din, Yale University
• Yinlin Chen, Virginia Tech

Issue Reporters

• Andrew Woods
• Unknown User (acoburn)
• Aaron Birkland
• A. Soroka
• Corey Hinshaw
• Diego Pino Navarro
• Esmé Cowles
• Jared Whiklo
• Justin Coyne
• Kevin Ford
• Michael Durbin
• Osman Din
• Ralf Claussnitzer
• Rob Sanderson
• Scott Prater
• Stefano Cossu

Summary

The Fedora 4.7.1 release is a backwards compatible refinement of the previous release, focused on improvements and bug fixes to the REST-API and the core code base.

Changes

Application Programming Interface

Much of the application programming interface updates in this release relate to correcting response headers.

Support for JSON-LD profiles have also been improved. It has always been possible to retrieve JSON-LD from Fedora using content negotiation. In previous releases, it was possible to retrieve expanded (the default) and compacted JSON-LD profiles. This release adds support for flattened profiles. Users familiar with the JSON-LD serialization will note a change from the "pretty printed" serialization to one that that produces a JSON response without extraneous spaces. Retrieving JSON-LD with an expanded/compacted/flattened profile can be done by adding the following header to the request (replace compacted with flattened or expanded for those other profiles):

Accept: application/ld+json; profile="http://www.w3.org/ns/json-ld#compacted"

Additionally, with the help of community input, iteration on the Fedora API Specification continues: http://fedora.info/spec/

Deprecations

• Support for the previously deprecated File System Federation capability has discontinued and the module has been removed from the fcrepo-webapp-plus project.
• The /fcr:backup and /fcr:restore endpoints have been deprecated and will be moving to an extension module in a future release of Fedora. This capability will continue to be available until the Import/Export functionality fully supports backup/restore use cases.

Messaging

There is no change to the default behavior of message publication by the fcrepo-webapp and fcrepo-webapp-plus: they continue to be produced by an embedded ActiveMQ broker on a topic called "fedora". However, for any applications that are consuming these messages, it is usually better to consume messages from a queue, since there are many circumstances under which messages published on topics can be missed by consumers. This release includes an example for configuring the message publishing machinery to use a queue instead of a topic. Making this change will require customizing the Spring configuration via the system property:

-Dfcrepo.spring.jms.configuration=file://path/to/spring/jms.xml

..and using a Spring file such as (noting the highlighted configuration): https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/blob/fcrepo-4.7.1/fcrepo-jms/src/test/resources/spring-test/jms-queue.xml#L16-L19

It is worth noting that it is also now possible to set the name of the topic or queue as shown in the example above. The default value remains "fedora".

HTML View

For those who use the provided HTML view of Fedora for basic administrative operations, a feature has been added that now allows for including the RDF body of new "container" resources during the creation step. Previously, it was necessary to create an empty "container", followed by a second step of updating the properties of that "container" with a sparql-update request.

Housekeeping, Refactoring, Tests, Documentation and Bugs

Numerous refactorings, bugfixes, and clean-up tasks were addressed in this release, including:

• Upgrading the backend ModeShape version to 5.2.0-FINAL
• Resolving the issue where references to child resources of a deleted container were not being deleted
• Prohibiting the use of whitespace in the names of version identifiers

Complete Listing of Resolved Tickets