DSpace 1.5.2 – What’s in it for me?
You may have seen the recent announcement saying that DSpace 1.5.2 is now released. When it comes to upgrading software, especially something as large and possibly critical as repository software, there is always a decision to be made about whether to upgrade or not. As one of the DSpace committers, I’ve worked on some of the changes in 1.5.2 so understand quite well what it contains. This blog post lists some of the more important changes in 1.5.2 (compared to 1.5.1) to hopefully help you decide whether to upgrade or not. The changes are split into broad categories to make the list easier to follow. The full list of changes can be seen here.
Features
- SWORD support has been upgraded to the new 1.3 version of SWORD.
- Sitemaps.org sitemaps, and robots.txt files have been added to the XML (Manakin) user interface.
- DOI links can now be rendered in the JSP user interface.
- The uketd_dc OAI-PMH metadata format is now included as standard. This is required by UK institutions who want to expose their electronic theses to the EThOS service. No additional code is now required.
- A new statistics collection sub-system has been written to help collect statistics in a better fashion.
- A better PDF extraction utility (xpdf) can now be used to extract the fulltext out of some files where the current system (pdfbox) fails, or uses too much memory.
- The exporter tools will now export nested files correctly (e.g. where you have archived a website). It also now exports file descriptions that you may have set.
- The exporter tool has a new option (-m or -migrate) which strips out any per-repository-specifics which would get re-created when re-ingested. This is useful if you pre-load content into a test repository, and then want to move them into a production repository without taking with them items their temporary handle, provenance information and deposit dates etc.
Security
- Prior to 1.5.2 items that were restricted (anonymous access disabled) were still accessible via OAI-PMH, RSS feeds, and daily subscription emails. There are now configuration options to disable each of these.
- Provenance information used to be included in the metadata that was exposed in the <head> element of the item web pages (for consumption by search engines and tools such as Zotero). The provenance information is not needed, and has been removed.
Authentication
- Shibboleth support has been added.
- Support for Hierarchical LDAP servers has been added (where users are spread across branches of an LDAP tree, rather than existing all in the same branch).
- Automatic groups for all LDAP and Password users have been added, allowing to create groups for all authenticated users, without having to add them to a group manually.
- IP authentication now works for users who are not logged in, as well as for users who are logged in. Prior to 1.5.2, users had to first log in, before they could access collections or items that were protected by IP address. It now works in a better fashion so that, for example, internal users can access such materials without having to have an account.
Internationalisation
- New or updated translations of the software have been added for Thai, Italian, Ukrainian and Greek.
Bug fixes
There have been many bug fixes, but of note are:
- SWORD deposits are now a lot faster. For example a deposit of a 10MB PDF file on my development server used to take about a minute, it now takes 9 seconds.
- Statistics now work correctly in the xml user interface. Prior to 1.5.2 they did work, but unfortunately looked in the wrong directory for the reports, so the reports did not show.
- If you have multiple authentication methods available (e.g. LDAP and Password Authentication) you won’t suffer any more database connection leaks.
- The handling of UTF-8 has been standardized throughout the xml user interface.
- When non-admin users deposit items using the xml user interface, the admin menu options no longer appear immediately following a deposit. Non-admin users could never use these links, but they shouldn’t have appeared.
For a neat little overview of the changes in 1.5.2, see this Wordle made using the CHANGES file from DSpace:
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: dspace, repositories, sword
on April 16, 2009 at 9:20 am
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Hi Stuart,
First of all congrats with your move!! New Zealand sounds very exciting!!
As for 1.5.2 I’ve heard rumours that it would also contain embargo support. It is not mentioned in your list though, do you know anything about this?
Best wishes,
Elin
on April 16, 2009 at 8:51 pm
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Hi Elin,
No support for embargoes in 1.5.2 I’m afraid. However we have decided that we should now stop developing the 1.5.x line, and start on 1.6. This means we can make more drastic changes to the database, which are required for features such as embargoes. We’ll shortly release a survey to allow the community to vote on the top three features they’d like to see in 1.6, so hopefully embargoes will get voted for a lot!
Cheers,
Stuart
on April 21, 2009 at 4:30 am
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[...] recent emails, the DSpace community has now released version 1.5.2 of the DSpace software. It has many new features, some enhancements to current features, and some bug fixes. Many of you will also know that a small team of developers have been working on DSpace version 2.0 [...]
on June 9, 2009 at 6:03 pm
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Hi Stuart,
Thanks for sharing some info about Dspace new version 1.5.2.
We are implementing here in Brazil a repository using DSpace 1.5.1 (xmlui). I have some questions regarding dc.description.provenance. The dc.description.provenance is displayed in the full record item. Doesn’t seem that dc. description.provenance should be displayed in the full record item because it shows some kind of private information, like checksums and email address. For public display doesn’t make any sense having the dc.description.provenance available. Seems that this issue doesn’t happen with Dspace 1.5.1 (jspui).
Have you notice that? I have already report this issue to dspace.org. But no luck so far. I am not sure if we are doing something wrong or if this is a bug. I’m wondering if there is any chance to hide the dc.description.provenance for the public. Any help?
Many thanks.
Janice Silveira
on June 17, 2009 at 9:32 pm
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Hi Janice,
You’ve seen the response at http://www.mail-archive.com/dspace-tech@lists.sourceforge.net/msg08111.html
Thanks for also adding it into our bug tracking system to ensure it gets fixed in the next version.
Thanks,
Stuart
on June 18, 2009 at 9:55 pm
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Hi
Please help me to figure it out. I am going to hookup stats on 1.5 for our Dspace xmlui interface. but once I ran the stat-initial script it gave me an error as follows:
Exception in thread “main” org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: invalid input syntax for type timestamp: ” 2006″
at org.postgresql.core.v3.QueryExecutorImpl.receiveErrorResponse(QueryExecutorImpl.java:1531)
at org.postgresql.core.v3.QueryExecutorImpl.processResults(QueryExecutorImpl.java:1313)
at org.postgresql.core.v3.QueryExecutorImpl.execute(QueryExecutorImpl.java:188)
at org.postgresql.jdbc2.AbstractJdbc2Statement.execute(AbstractJdbc2Statement.java:452)
at org.postgresql.jdbc2.AbstractJdbc2Statement.executeWithFlags(AbstractJdbc2Statement.java:354)
at org.postgresql.jdbc2.AbstractJdbc2Statement.executeQuery(AbstractJdbc2Statement.java:258)
at org.apache.commons.dbcp.DelegatingPreparedStatement.executeQuery(DelegatingPreparedStatement.java:93 )
at org.apache.commons.dbcp.DelegatingPreparedStatement.executeQuery(DelegatingPreparedStatement.java:93 )
at org.dspace.storage.rdbms.DatabaseManager.query(DatabaseManager.java:221)
at org.dspace.storage.rdbms.DatabaseManager.querySingle(DatabaseManager.java:302)
at org.dspace.app.statistics.LogAnalyser.getNumItems(LogAnalyser.java:1274)
at org.dspace.app.statistics.LogAnalyser.getNumItems(LogAnalyser.java:1303)
at org.dspace.app.statistics.LogAnalyser.processLogs(LogAnalyser.java:543)
at org.dspace.app.statistics.CreateStatReport.statInitial(CreateStatReport.java:291)
at org.dspace.app.statistics.CreateStatReport.main(CreateStatReport.java:162)
Also, i’ve done some research on this error and I’ve found
you probably know how to fix this error. So please help me if you can.
Many thanks in advance
Wu liu
on June 18, 2009 at 10:39 pm
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Hi Wu liu,
I’d try two things:
– Check out [dspace]/config/dstat.cfg, and look for what setting you have for ’start.year’
– Turn on debug level logging, and see what query is being run in the database.
I’m not sure how the date is getting mis-interpreted as it should all be trimmed and parsed automatically for you.
Thanks,
Stuart
on June 19, 2009 at 3:20 pm
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Thanks stuart for replying. In my dstat.cfg, i set start.year=2008, but how come the error massage showed “ERROR: invalid input syntax for type timestamp: ” 2006″”?
Also, how can I turn on debug level logging, and see what query is being run in the database?
Thanks again for your help
on June 19, 2009 at 8:17 pm
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Take a look at: http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php//TechnicalFaq#Setting_logging_level_up_to_DEBUG
Thanks,
Stuart
on June 23, 2009 at 5:53 am
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Thanks again. All got solved. However our instituition needs to have something like top 10 download to be displayed in our dspace home page, and this stats in fact doesnt help at all. So do you have any suggestions about how to implement this?
Thanks
on June 23, 2009 at 6:30 pm
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You’ll need to write a different type of ‘report’ from the aggregated ‘.dat’ files. See [dspace-src]/dspace-api/src/main/java/org/dspace/app/statistics/ReportGenerator.java for an example which shows how the standard report is written.
Alternatively you may wish to try one of the third-party statistics modules such as the Minho stats (http://wiki.dspace.org/StatisticsAddOn) as it might be able to do this for you.
on June 24, 2009 at 2:53 am
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but as far as i know, Minho stats module does not have an interface to XMLUI. so can i just plug it in and give a shot? Also how can i install that patch?
on June 29, 2009 at 7:14 pm
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Yes, I think there is not an xmlui version of the Minho stats module. If you can wait for 1.6, then there should be a new stats module integrated with that.
on June 30, 2009 at 3:49 am
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thanks stuart. when 1.6 will be released?
on June 30, 2009 at 9:48 am
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The date is not finalised, but it will probably be Q4 this year, maybe late November / early December.
on February 10, 2010 at 11:07 am
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[...] after the release of DSpace 1.5.2 in April 2009 I wrote a blog article ‘DSpace 1.5.2: What’s in it for me?’. The final release of DSpace 1.6 is due shortly, and as the release co-ordinator I thought it [...]