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InvenioRDM v9.1

2022-07-11

We are happy to announce the release of InvenioRDM v9.1. The is a minor release, which will be maintained as a part of v9.0 LTS.

Try it

What's new?

InvenioRDM v9.1 adds many user experience improvements as well as bug fixes.

A new drop-down in the search bar allows users to control the scope of their search - for example the entire repository or the current community. The options are configurable via your instance's Jinja templates.

IIIF

Preview of images attached to a record is now powered by IIIF. Preview with IIIF has 2 main advantages:

  • Improves user experience by delivering images optimised for the preview window, meaning less bandwidth and faster page loads.
  • Preview of TIFF and JPEG2000 attachments is now possible. These widely used archive formats have limited browser support, which is overcome by conversion to JPEG when previewing.

For example, a 20MB TIFF file attached to a record is previewed as a JPEG under 250kB:

The IIIF previewer configuration options are shown below:

PREVIEWER_PREFERENCE = [
    "csv_dthreejs",
    "iiif_simple", # Enables IIIF preview.
    "simple_image",
    "json_prismjs",
    "xml_prismjs",
    "mistune",
    "pdfjs",
    "ipynb",
    "zip",
    "txt",
]
"""Preferred previewers."""

IIIF_SIMPLE_PREVIEWER_NATIVE_EXTENSIONS = ["gif", "png"]
"""Images are converted to JPEG for preview, unless listed here."""

IIIF_SIMPLE_PREVIEWER_SIZE = "!800,800"
"""Size of image in IIIF preview window. Must be a valid IIIF Image API size parameter."""

Requests

  • Request searching has been redesigned providing more information on the requests in a cleaner style, mirroring the style of the records search page.

When a comment is deleted, the user will see a specific timeline event replacing the comment message.

Communities

The community search view has been redesigned to improve the user experience with more detail shown when searching, helping users find the right community.

Theme improvements

Version 9.1 introduces "context" coded theme elements (labels, buttons and icons), simplifying theme customisation. It also is easier to replace the default InvenioRDM colors (.negative, .positive, .warning, .neutral, .danger) with custom color variants. Below is an example from the upload form with custom colours for each action button:

Limitations

While this release includes many improvements related to communities, it does not resolve all known limitations:

  • E-mail notifications: There is no notification mechanism for requests. No e-mail or other notification is sent for new requests. Users will need to check for new requests and messages via their dashboard / community requests pages.

  • Add to community after publishing: If you publish a record without adding it to a community, it cannot currently be added to a community at a later time.

  • Removal from a community: Once a record is accepted into a community, there is no user interface for removing the record from the community. This can however be achieved programatically by an administrator.

  • Featured communities: A REST API exists for managing featured communities however there is no user interface on top of it yet.

  • Community logos and avatars: The current implementation of community logos requires additional work to improve the presentation of a the community.

Upgrading to v9.1

To upgrade from version 9.0 to 9.1 you need to update your instance's dependencies and assets:

  • In your Pipfile, change:
- allow_prereleases = true
+ allow_prereleases = false
  • delete Pipfile.lock

run:

invenio-cli install

Maintenance policy

InvenioRDM v9.x is a long-term support (LTS) release which is supported until the next LTS release + 6 months and for minimum 1 year. See our Maintenance Policy.

Requirements

InvenioRDM v9.x supports:

  • Python 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9
  • PostgreSQL 10+
  • Elasticsearch 7

Note that Python 3.6, Elasticsearch 6 and PostgreSQL 9 have all reached end of life and are no longer supported by their respective organisations.