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developers_call:minutes20120110

VuFind Developers Call Minutes: January 10, 2012

Attending: Anoop Atre, Filipe Bento, Lutz Biedinger, Demian Katz, David Lacy, Eoghan Ó Carragáin, Luke O'Sullivan, Sean Purcell, Ernie Simuro

Agenda

1. New/Updated JIRA Tickets

  • VUFIND-224 / VUFIND-228 / VUFIND-250 - Several WorldCat issues have been resolved during VuFind 2.0 development; since these problems are unlikely to be resolved in 1.x, the tickets have been closed and marked as fixed in 2.0RC1.
  • VUFIND-279 - The addition of a user phone number field to the database was proposed here.
  • VUFIND-421 / VUFIND-441 - Some updated files have been attached to these tickets, which deal with hierarchical navigation of VuFind records.
  • VUFIND-427 - Upgrade tools for the 1.3 release are complete, so this ticket has been closed.
  • VUFIND-480 - Demian has submitted patches proposing schema additions for Solr dynamic fields; he will commit these in time for the 1.3 release.
  • VUFIND-485 - This minor Unicorn driver improvement has been committed.
  • VUFIND-486 - This minor Voyager driver bug fix (involving character encoding in the volume field) has been committed.
  • VUFIND-487 - This tool exports MARC records from the VuFind index. Demian will try to find time to polish it and add it to the trunk eventually.
  • VUFIND-488 - The Summon API has a new parameter for dealing with user language preferences; this ticket is a reminder to implement support in VuFind.
  • VUFIND-489 - Certain characters in the marc_error field of the Solr index would occasionally cause RSS fields to fail to generate; this ticket includes a patch to fix the problem (which has been committed to the trunk).
  • VUFIND-490 - If a user created a list without naming it, it was always called “My Favorites” regardless of language setting; this ticket proposes a fix, which has been committed to the trunk.
  • VUFIND-491 - The marc.properties file does not include a “first” specifier to limit the number of editions values sent to the Solr index. Since the Solr schema's edition field is not multi-valued, this can cause fatal errors. A similar issue exists for the author-related fields. Since the MARC fields involved are never supposed to be multi-valued, this shouldn't be a problem in theory… but bad MARC records exist in reality. Do we want to make VuFind more fault-tolerant, or do we want to retain the current configuration to help users identify potential problem records?
  • VUFIND-492 - It appears that VuFind's .DEB package does not work under Debian (it was developed/tested under Ubuntu).
  • VUFIND-493 - This ticket proposes some XSLT code for breaking up comma-separated values in XML fields.
  • VUFIND-494 - The “hide_holdings” setting in config.ini now applies to search results as well as record views; this ticket includes a patch (which has been committed to the trunk). Note that this also improves the behavior when holdings information is unavailable – search results will now hide the “Location:” and “Call Number:” fields rather than leaving them blank/Unknown.

2. VuFind 2.0 Update

We will have to raise the base requirement to PHP 5.3 in order to take advantage of late static bindings; this requirement will also probably exist if we decide to upgrade to the soon-to-be-released Zend Framework 2.0.

Demian has once again refactored the search code in an effort to make the organization more logical. To test the latest arrangement, he has begun implementing non-standard search modules (Authority, Reserves, WorldCat). So far the new system works well – it is much easier to implement a whole new search interface than it used to be. Record views have also been refactored to complement the refactored Search functionality. Next search-related tasks: implementing the Summon module and some across-the-board functionality that has not been ported yet (citations, reviews, etc.).

The MyResearch area is also coming along nicely, with most of the list-related functionality now complete (apart from the need to add some fields to the database to allow sorting across multiple record sources).

More unit tests have been built, and code coverage should be improving; however, there are currently problems on the continuous integration server that are preventing PHPUnit from generating coverage reports correctly; Demian is investigating.

Demian has figured out how to use namespaces in the Wiki, so he will begin documenting VuFind 2.0 in its own namespace as time permits.

3. Hierarchical / Archival Data in VuFind

Eoghan and Luke are planning to meet up to work on VUFIND-421 and VUFIND-441 in February. These patches are designed to add support to VuFind for hierarchical relationships between records.

Hierarchical data needs to be pulled from different sources in different situations – i.e. National Library of Ireland uses their ILS for the data via the driver, while other situations will need to pull from external files or other software packages.

Development of this functionality for VuFind 1.x will continue, but it should also be ported to 2.0.

More links and updated code will be posted to the tickets; please take a look and add your thoughts and comments there.

There was some discussion about possibly adding a “hierarchy level” field to the Solr index to allow filtering based on granularity during searching, though this requires more thought since hierarchical levels are not necessarily equivalent across hierarchies.

There was also discussion of the difficulty of working with EAD due to different best practices; perhaps a SolrEAD tool is needed to configure indexing differently for different record sets.

Luke and Eoghan sense a need for better display of records in the archival community, so once this is all working, it may open a whole new market for VuFind.

4. New Mobile Theme

Demian improved the real-time location/call number behavior in the jquerymobile theme as part of his work with VUFIND-494.

Luke will put cart support for the jquerymobile theme on his long-term to-do list, but it is not a high priority.

Luke also suggested using CSS media queries in place of (or in complement to) browser sniffing for the mobile experience – he recommends this article for an introduction to the concept.

Also on the medium-term to-do list: add mobile support to VuFind 2.0.

5. Other Topics?

No additional topics this week.

Next Call

The next call will be Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 11am Eastern Standard Time (GMT - 5:00).

developers_call/minutes20120110.txt · Last modified: 2015/12/14 20:08 by demiankatz