Follow-up questions/answers from April 9th DCAT Meeting

[Chapman, Kimberly A - (kimberlychapman)]

Hello everyone,

 

Thanks to all who attended Tuesday’s DCAT Meeting that focused on the DSpace 8 Testathon. I reached out to Tim Donohue (Lyrasis) after the meeting and below are answers to the questions asked during the meeting. Let me know if you have additional questions.

 

All best,

 

Kimberly, DCAT Chair

-----------------------------------

 

QUESTION: FYI, three testers using the sandbox reported system lag sufficient to impact testing; e.g. got stuck when creating a collection because the system was continually saving and/or didn’t seem to be doing anything at all, returned later to find out that multiple collections had been created. Testers also reported caching issues, where a page needed to be refreshed in order to see results. A suggestion was made that this behavior was due to the caching solution developed to improve latency issues. The example that was described was visiting a collection, then adding an item, the item doesn’t show up in the collection you already visited until you refresh the page. I’m turning these into “Tips” – e.g. you may experience system lag while testing, and you may need to refresh the page if you don’t see results; however, this does cause frustration for testers and we may lose people during testing because of system performance issues.

 

ANSWER: The Collection creation issue was a bug​ discovered yesterday & today.  See this ticket: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/2914

 

It's now been fixed on the sandbox site (and also on the demo site, as it also was happening there).

 

 

Questions related to the above:

 

• Is there any way to improve system performance during testing? Is there any parameter for “normal” lag time that people can expect?
• ANSWER: The main system performance issue that I'm aware of was that Collection creation bug (this is now fixed).  If other performance becomes a problem, please report it as a bug ticket & we'll get someone to investigate it.  But, I had worked with the DSpaceDirect team to ensure that sandbox.dspace.org should have good performance this week.
• Caching issues may also be reported as bugs if the testers feel they are bugs.  That said, it is correct that some caching is necessary​ for better performance in the UI.  So, while I still encourage DCAT members to report caching issues, some of them may not be "fixable" in 8.0.
• How often will the system be refreshed (set back to start?) This may impact how people want to test; e.g. if people are building collections they want to use later in the test, a refresh/set back to zero (sorry, I don’t remember the technical term) could impact them, so I just want to make sure we’re clear if there is a daily refresh or not.
• ANSWER: The plan is to only reset the content once per week (middle of the night on Sunday).   That said, if we have a very large amount of testers & find that content is growing at an enormous rate, we may need to reset earlier.  (I doubt that will occur, but if content is so large that it impacts performance, then obviously we'll need to do a reset)

 Additional questions:

• Entities: There was concern about entities impacting testing, and concern that people could not test without using entities. It was demonstrated that people can choose not to use entities and still test because selecting entities was optional. There were concerns that this might work for the user doing the testing but cause some bugs behind-the-scenes. Because we have a broad user community, it seems important to me that people can test both with and without entities. I do not have the expertise to evaluate  concerns about the entities being enabled during testing creating bugs if people create collections and submit items without using entities – do you have an answer for this? There was also a question about the magnifying glass icon – is that associated only with Entities? (I have to dig into this, if it’s not clear what I’m talking about I can follow up with a screenshot.)
• ANSWER: This was mentioned in the developer meeting last week as well.  Overall, I agree that it'd be nice if there were two test sites...one with Entities and one without.  But we didn't plan for that.  The "Sandbox" site has Entities enabled because most new features require​ Entities.  Before Testathon is over, I won't have enough time to setup a secondary testing site without Entities.    I'd welcome testers interested in non-Entities experience to use a local Docker setup as described in the new "Try out DSpace 8" page.  In the future, maybe we could consider having two sandbox sites, but that would also double the amount of work that testers would need to do (as some features would need to be tested on both sites). For simplicity, I just went with one site for this 8.0 Testathon. (Kimberly agrees with this practical solution.)
• I don't understand the question about the "magnifying glass icon".  The only place I'm aware of that icon being used is the Search box/button in the header...and that works for both Entities & non-Entities (regular Items). (Note: Kimberly will look into this.)
• REST API: One repository manager had been asked by their local developer if the DSpace 8.0 REST API was Open API compliant, referencing this URL: https://www.openapis.org/. Can you answer this question?
• ANSWER: OpenAPI is one way of documenting REST APIs. The DSpace REST API currently does not have OpenAPI documentation.  Currently, we maintain our documentation manually in our REST Contract.  That said, we do align with all the REST best practices established by Spring, including HATEOAS and the HAL data format. It's these standards that make our REST API "browsable" via the Spring HAL Browser when you visit https://sandbox.dspace.org/server/
• Longer term, I know developers would love to have more automated documentation via OpenAPI or Spring REST Docs.  However, no one has volunteered to help out with that yet, so there are no immediate plans in that direction. All DSpace development is volunteer-based these days, so we need to find someone passionate about OpenAPI or Spring REST Docs to help move this forward.