Page History

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1. Submission & Workflow UI / backend
2. Configurable Entities (from DSpace 7 Entities Working Group (2018-19))
3. Upgrading Solr Server for DSpace (not required for Preview, as there's no user facing features. However, the earlier we feel comfortable merging this effort the better)

Notes

• Updates to PRs captured above.
• Discussion Topics
  • Edit Homepage News.  No updates, and lower priority. Delayed for next week
  • Concurrency in DSpace 7 (multiple editors at the same time).  
    • Art gave a brief summary of Etags vs. Patch "test" method.  Summary captured above
    • All agree that ETags seems like the best direction. However, this is low priority right now, and no one has time prior to Preview Release.  Tim will move this to the "Delayed" category so we can pick it back up again later.
  • What do we want to call the Spring Boot Webapp (now that all webapps are merged into one, see PR#2265)?
    
    • No strong opinions expressed
    • Andrea & Paulo like "dspace-server" webapp.  Tim does too
    • Mark likes "dspace-web-services"
    • Art notes no strong preferences.  "server" is OK, but we need to be clear that this isn't the only thing on the server-side...the Angular UI also has a server-side component (to support Angular Universal / SEO and to serve up the Angular app).
    • Tim offers to put to vote.
    • Others say "server" is fine. Just go with it.
  • Search as you type capability for discovery.
    • Already similar feature in the Collection selection in the Submission UI.  Currently this doesn't us a REST endpoint, but performs searching within Angular (by prefetching everything)
    • Suggestion is to have an REST endpoint for this feature.
    • All agree this is a nice feature for DSpace.  Art said the need for this will also become more evident as we review Lotte's new PR
    • Tim however notes that he'd like to see an implementation estimate for this feature.  Wants to know when to schedule this, and whether we should do it now or later
  • Browse by Date / Starts With PR (PR#364 on Angular)
    
    • This current implementation is missing the "Now showing..." line that exists in the current UIs, e.g. http://demo.dspace.org/xmlui/browse?rpp=20&etal=-1&sort_by=1&type=title&starts_with=D&order=ASC
    • Tim is concerned about usability.  Without the "Now showing" contextual information, the "starts with" functionality is a bit "jarring" as it doesn't tell you how many Items are in the list (and approximately where you are in the list – e.g. how many pages exist, etc).
    • Art notes this information is missing as it isn't provided by the REST API.  So, this is as good as we can do until the REST API is updated
    • Tim will log a bug ticket about this, and move the PR forward.  It's "good enough" for now, but this seems like a bug we'll hear complaints about from users.
  • Workflow & MyDSpace PRs discussion (PR#2312)
    • Discussion on this topic went in the weeds. It was moved to post-meeting. Below is the summary for the post-meeting discussion:
    • Ben has concerns about storing non-DSpaceObjects in Solr (as Solr Documents). Should this only use WorkspaceItem/WorkflowItem in Solr?  Why do we need to index Steps/Tasks in Solr?
    • Andrea notes that this is needed because some WorkspaceItem/WorkflowItem objects have multiple tasks (i.e. one to many association between Workspace items and number of tasks).  If we don't index Tasks separately, we'll have difficulty telling them apart.  
      • Notes this is similar to how we currently don't index Bitstreams separately in Solr, and we have difficulty (currently) matching search results to a specific bitstream (as each Item in Solr has only one bitstream's content made searchable).  Andrea wants to avoid this same issue immediately.
    • Ben also notes that implementation may not be ideal.  It's odd to have new "types" of objects listed here: https://github.com/4Science/DSpace/blob/DS-3851_workflow_new/dspace-api/src/main/java/org/dspace/core/Constants.java#L61  These new objects are not actual DSpaceObjects, but are almost implied to be so.
    • Ben also had concerns on whether objects are indexed multiple times in Solr.  E.g. Does a task have all info about the Item it relates to?  Does a WorkspaceItem have all info about the Item it relates to?
      • Andrea says Items are not indexed multiple times.
    • Ben asked Andrea for more examples of how this works
    • TODO: Ben Bosmanwill pull down the code & test it more locally.  Wants to see what is indexed in Solr for each object type.
    • TODO: Andrea Bollini (4Science) will create a new PR to REST Contract providing more examples of how to interact with WorkspaceItems & WorkflowItems.  This should help clarify how this all works
• Next week's meeting
  • We'll keep these meetings at 15UTC until the end of March (when daylight savings time starts for Europe).  Then we'll move them to 14UTC.