Release announcement: AtoM 2.2 release now available!

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Dan Gillean

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Jul 10, 2015, 7:06:16 PM7/10/15
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Greeting AtoM community!

We're proud to announce that the 2.2 release is now available.

This release includes several new features, including:
  • The ability to generate PDF or RTF finding aids from archival descriptions,
  • The ability to make PREMIS rights actionable on digital objects and manage rights inheritance in a descriptive hierarchy
  • A new asynchronous job scheduler to manage these tasks

Dozens of usability enhancements, including:

  • Top-level description filter for archival description search and browse
  • "Part of" links included in search and browse results for lower-level descriptions
  • Usability fixes to the global search box and browse button
  • Improved holdings widget on the archival institution page
  • Settings page redesign

And plenty more!

To see further details, please see the full release announcement on our new AtoM wiki!

Please note that the new wiki is a work in progress - we're still adding new content, migrating old content, and working on getting new user registration set up so that you can add content as well. We'll be posting more about the new wiki in separate threads in the coming weeks. For now, feel free to explore and let us know what you think!


NOTE: there are several important considerations before you upgrade.

The first is that there are several new dependencies in the 2.2 release - most notably the Gearman job scheduler, which supports the finding aid generation, PREMIS rights inheritance, Jobs page, and DIP upload from Archivematica. Please make sure you follow the upgrade and installation docs closely - note that there is a new section, Asynchronous jobs and worker management.

Second, note that one of the new security features in AtoM 2.2 is the addition of entity escaping to prevent XSS exploits. While these fixes will make AtoM much more secure, one consequence is that if you've been adding in-line HTML in the edit fields of your descriptions, the HTML will now be escaped, and will display as plain text. AtoM edit fields were never designed for in-line HTML in the first place - now it will not work at all, even as a workaround. Note that HTML added to static pages will be unaffected by this change, based on the default settings included in the 2.2 release.

To assist users who have added HTML via the edit templates, Artefactual will be preparing a script that will remove this content from the database, and making it available to our user community in the coming weeks. This script will also be built into the 2.3 release. Expect more information soon!


We've closed over 175 issue tickets in the 2.2 release, you can see them all here:

We also held a free webinar a while back, offering a sneak peek of some of the 2.2 features. If you're curious to see what you'll get with the 2.2 release prior to downloading, check out the recording, here:

We've also got a lot of new translation files added to 2.2, provided by our dynamic group of volunteer translators. ​Thank you so much to all of our translators for helping to make AtoM a truly multi-lingual application. Check out the top interface translations in AtoM 2.2!



Let us know what you think of the 2.2 release! And as ever, let us know if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Product Manager / Systems Analyst,
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056
@accesstomemory

Adele T

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Dec 3, 2015, 11:06:04 AM12/3/15
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Hi Dan and AtoM Community,

I'm looking forward to updating to 2.2, but I do have links in many of my descriptions.  I think this is "in-line html."  Please correct me if I've misunderstood! I do indeed understand this a necessary security fix, but are there any ideas circulating about how else to create more navigation possibilities through description fields? 

Here are two examples where the links in the text made for easier reading:

1) I tend to have a lot of relationships that are also referred to in the text of my administrative histories in authority records, so the list in the relationships area is rather long for a researcher to scroll down to if they want to open up a related entity to find out more upon reading about it in the administrative history.

2) Related units of description field is a text field.  A link prevents researchers having to actually search again for the related records by the reference codes or information provided in this field...

I'd be happy to hear any ideas or information about what others are doing!

Best,
Adele

UNESCO Archives

Dan Gillean

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Dec 3, 2015, 7:02:45 PM12/3/15
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Hi Adele,

It does sound like your descriptive practices will be affected by an upgrade to 2.2.0. If you've used HTML to style the links, rather than just adding a raw URL, it will look like this after an upgrade:


​

Fortunately, I have good news for you.

Some time ago, the World Bank Group Archives sponsored a 2.3 feature that will add support for a custom syntax to add links. It works like this:
Here is an example used in an AtoM text field:


​
So an alternative to using HTML will be available in 2.3. However, recently another institution has approached us about backporting this new feature to the 2.2.1 release, and making the HTML scrub script we prepared work with this syntax - so when it is run, instead of removing HTML links entirely and leaving only the raw link, now the task will replace those HTML links with the custom syntax.

This work is definitely going to be available in the 2.3 release, and we already have some initial documentation for it. See:

I'm still working out the details internally, but my hope is that this will actually be backported in the public 2.2.1 release, so everyone who wants to use it can take advantage of the scrub script and the new syntax without having to wait for the 2.3 release.

When I have further details about the backporting work and our expected release timeline for 2.2.1, I will update the thread. We are currently aiming for a 2.3 release in the first or second quarter of 2016.


Regarding your second use case:

2) Related units of description field is a text field.  A link prevents researchers having to actually search again for the related records by the reference codes or information provided in this field...

Have you checked out the Related descriptions field If you are creating links to other descriptions held in the same AtoM instance, this autcomplete lookup field, place just below the "Related units of description" free-text field, will allow you to find and link descriptions together. See:

In the meantime - if you run the HTML scrub script in its current 2.2.0 form, it will remove the HTML, but leave the raw link, in brackets, like so:


​
This way you will still have working links - a raw URL will still be accessible as a clickable hyperlink when seen in the view page of a description. Since the task is not included in 2.2.0 natively, we have included instructions on how to download it as a patch and run it in 2.2.0 on this thread:
Finally, as an Artefactual hosted client, please feel free to contact me off-list, so we can discuss how Artefactual might best assist you with these options.

Cheers,


Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056
@accesstomemory

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Adele T

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Dec 7, 2015, 4:16:39 AM12/7/15
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Hi Dan,

Thanks for the detailed response.  I hadn't noticed the change before to the Related Descriptions field!  That is a great development and I'll be using that now. 

For all the in-text links, I will contact sup...@artefactual.com to see about the patches while we wait for 2.2.1 or 2.3, but I think your plans already show that the solution has been found and it is on its way.  Good work!

Best regards,
Adele

Dan Gillean

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Dec 11, 2015, 6:31:14 PM12/11/15
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For anyone following this thread, the custom linking syntax, and the updates to the HTML scrub task, have now both been backported to the 2.2.x branch - meaning they will be included in our 2.2.1 release. I expect that we will not have time to package the release until early 2016, but for developers or system administrators comfortable working with git, you can checkout the latest code from the stable/2.2.x branch of our GitHub repository if you don't want to wait.

Regards,

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056
@accesstomemory

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Rafael Antonio

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Dec 20, 2015, 2:56:30 PM12/20/15
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 The job scheduler will allow for large-scale and bulk operations to be performed via the user interface, such as bulk or large delete, move, import, export, publish, and edit requests.
How do you plan such bulk operations being coded throught the user interface? Are they available for administrators to write some scripts? 

Sarah Romkey

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Dec 21, 2015, 11:44:56 AM12/21/15
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Hello Rafael,

Currently the job scheduler is being used for generating finding aids and managing rights inheritance. The operations you mention above would be great additions to the job scheduler that we would be able to undertake with sponsored development, or if you are a developer interested in developing the necessary code we could look at a community pull request. Let me know if you are interested in that and I can have a developer point you to the right area of the code.

I'm not sure what you mean by coding bulk operations through the user interface- at the moment it's a back-end functionality. Users can see the status of jobs through the manage jobs page though.

Cheers,

Sarah

Sarah Romkey, MAS,MLIS
Archivematica Program Manager
Artefactual Systems
604-527-2056
@archivematica / @accesstomemory



On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 11:56 AM, Rafael Antonio <jrafael...@gmail.com> wrote:
 The job scheduler will allow for large-scale and bulk operations to be performed via the user interface, such as bulk or large delete, move, import, export, publish, and edit requests.
How do you plan such bulk operations being coded throught the user interface? Are they available for administrators to write some scripts? 

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