2017-02-23 DSpace 7 UI Working Group Meeting notes

Date

23 Feb 2017

Angular meeting

Attendees

• Andrea Bollini (4Science)

• Tim Donohue

• James Silas Creel

• William Welling
• Terrence W Brady
• Hardy Pottinger
• Giuseppe Digilio (4Science)

Notes

• Art Lowel's updates: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/art-notes/51dc9e97f768aa3a/dspace7%20progress%20summary.html

  • Yarn (instead of NPM): https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/pull/66

  • Rest Services: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/pull/62

• Discussion:

  • Questions about what the benefits of the (already committed) HALSerializer are vs. what Typescript gives us in its inherent ability to parse JSON responses. Could we clarify why the HALSerializer helps? We probably should revisit this code and ensure it is a necessary complexity.
    • HALSerializer PR (already merged): https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/pull/61
    • William Welling will create a discussion ticket with his questions
  • Angular Universal Cache
    • William Welling noted that it seems like our current caching code may be skipping using Universal Cache. He will create an issue ticket for this.
  • ImmutableJS: https://facebook.github.io/immutable-js/
    • William Welling noted we may want to look at this library. He will create a new discussion ticket about it.

• Waffleboard of Angular Tasks (please claim a ticket or help review a PR): https://waffle.io/DSpace/dspace-angular

• Upcoming Events:

  • DSpace 7 Webinar: Tues, Feb 28 at 11am EST - Just an update on latest status, how we got here
  • OR2017 (Brisbane, Australia) - There will be an Angular UI Development workshop/training (led by Art & Tim).

REST meeting

Attendees

• Andrea Bollini (4Science)

• Tim Donohue

• James Silas Creel

• William Welling
• Terrence W Brady

• Hardy Pottinger

Notes

• Resources:
  • REST Tickets/Tasks are all subtickets of  Unable to locate Jira server for this macro. It may be due to Application Link configuration.
  • Source code: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/tree/rest7/dspace-spring-rest
  • REST Contract repo: https://github.com/DSpace-Labs/Rest7Contract
  • REST Response mockups (JSON HAL) repo: https://github.com/DSpace-Labs/hal-jsonapi-comparison/tree/master/hal
• Discussion:
  • PR to improve REST API building/installing: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/pull/1646
    • Has helped both Terry & James see the HAL output
    • Approved. Tim has merged
  • Generated some actual HAL JSON responses from our (in progress) new REST API
    • See https://github.com/DSpace-Labs/hal-jsonapi-comparison/tree/master/hal/generated
  • Based on those generated responses, some discussion started in tickets under REST Contract repo:https://github.com/DSpace-Labs/Rest7Contract
    • Use of UUIDs in REST: https://github.com/DSpace-Labs/Rest7Contract/issues/1
      • Andrea Bollini (4Science) will create a new PR to "solve" this ticket by proposing how we should deal with identifiers in our REST Contract
    • Duplicative content in REST Responses: https://github.com/DSpace-Labs/Rest7Contract/issues/2
      • All discussed. We aren't sure this is an issue yet, as it may not occur frequently in the final application. If we later find it is occurring frequently (and making our REST responses much larger than ideal), we can revisit
      • Tim will add a comment on this ticket to describe that
  • Andrea is working on a way to expose metadata in a more RESTful fashion (PR in the works).
    • So, rather than something like the HAL examples: https://github.com/DSpace-Labs/hal-jsonapi-comparison/blob/master/hal/generated/bitstreams.json#L8
    • We'd expose individual metadata endpoints, e.g. /items/metadata/dc/title or /items/:uuid/metadata/dc/title
    • Discussion Question: Shouldn't often used metadata fields appear in responses by default? (e.g. authors / titles, etc)
      • Yes, definitely. This already happens in the REST API for titles (appearing as "names"), etc
      • Goal would be to have these fields coming from Solr as well (so that no additional DB queries need to be run). They likely mostly are already.
  • NEEDS VOLUNTEER: We are looking for a volunteer to start investigating Spring REST Docs, see  Unable to locate Jira server for this macro. It may be due to Application Link configuration.
• Feedback on the meeting format is welcome. Contact Tim Donohue
• Next Meeting: Thurs, March 2 at 16:00UTC via Slack