DocDB / News: Recent posts

DocDB 8.5.7 has been released. These are the rather minor changes that have gone into the last few versions (which were not all announced).

8.5.7

Fix problem with multiple version 0 entries when updating v0 via XML
Check modification permission with XMLUpload
Set new event permissions the same way as documents (not always public)

8.5.6

Add "Actually Modified" to document summary, wrote some new date routines.... read more

Version 8.5.0 is now current. This adds two fixes/features you may notice, but I would like some feedback on how they are implemented:

1) There is a new check-box you will see when updating a document. You must check this if your new version will have fewer files than the latest version. Apparently a common (or costly) mistake by users was to just update one file of several so that information was lost. If people object, I can make this optional.... read more

8.4.5

Fix bug where some people watching documents would not be notified. Those
users should re-visit the Personal Account page, check it, and re-submit their
notification preferences. Add back any watched documents that are missing.

Add in the capability to update the DB info of documents via XML. The
signature of AddDocument has changed, now must be called with
({ -version => 1, document => 2 )}, etc. New documents should be created with version="bump"
or version="new"... read more

MySQL added a reserved word Separator and DocDB versions < 8.2.1 and >= 8.0.0 use this word. If you upgraded to DocDB version 8 before version 8.2.1 your database is probably not compatible with recent versions of MySQL. This is easy to fix, just issue connect to MySQL for your DocDB database and issue the commands
"alter table Moderator drop key Separator",
"alter table Moderator add key SepKey (SessionSeparatorID)",
"alter table EventTopic drop key Separator",
"alter table EventTopic add key SepKey (SessionSeparatorID)",... read more

DocDB now supports additional meta-information for events and sessions. A 2nd
location (Alternate Location) field has been added for things like video
conferencing numbers, virtual rooms, etc. Also, moderators (from the author
list) and topics can be attached to both events and sessions and lists of
events and sessions moderated by an author or on a topic can be retrieved. All
of this information is shown on the event page if present.... read more

Reminder, you must follow the Version 8.0 upgrade instructions at
https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=605893 before updating from
version 7.x. You can upgrade directly to any 8.x version, you needn't upgrade
to 8.0.

You can now specify the order of authors on a document. This is done by
switching the author entry widget from a selectable list to the existing
text-entry box. The method can be selected by user preferences, the advanced
entry form, or by clicking to switch from one method to the other on the
document entry form (requires Javascript). If a document with an ordered
author list is modified, the text form is the default since the selectable list
would destroy the list. ... read more

Fixed crash when "Change Display" is chosen with Public interface

Restore document table for orphaned event documents for single session events
Add # of documents orphaned to "Simple List" text

Matched but unconfirmed session talks get italics again

Fixed display of root level topics with no sub-topics

Small change to CSS files, so update those as well

This is a very easy migration:

1) Run scripts/CheckModules to see if you need any more Perl modules.
CGI::Untaint is the only thing added in this release.

2) Optional: Make sure your topics subtopics are all unique and descriptive
enough that they can be distinguished from eachother without knowing what
the parent topic is. Optional because even if you have two topics named
"Software" DocDB knows the difference even if the users don't and you can
adjust later. Also, the long topic names are more visible, so you may
want to recheck those.... read more

DocDB version 8.0 is now available. There are two major additions to this version: The ability to turn of view permissions for a group and the ability to have sub-sub-....-topics to whatever level you like.

There is now a CanView option that you can set for a group to disable their
access even if they are marked as a group that can view a particular
document. Groups without CanView set can still access DocDB, it will just
show publicly accessible documents. Groups that cannot View are prohibited
from creating or modifying documents too. This seems logical, but if there is
a good reason to change it, we can. This feature was thought to be useful
for disabling reviewer accounts between reviews.
The user can still use DocDB, but can only see publicly accessible documents.... read more

Most of what was discussed in the stakeholders' meeting will be put into future versions of DocDB. These means that development of version 7 is basically done, but small changes can be accommodated.

Version 8.0 will have

* The ability to turn off a groups ability to view documents (e.g. Review)
* Arbitrary levels of topics instead of the current 2

Future 8.x versions will have
* More fields (convener, remote location) for events and sessions. (If you have others you want, please let me know or comment at https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1468636&group_id=164024&atid=830064 ASAP.
* Arbitrary author order (designate first, second, etc.)
* The ability to add topics to events and sessions... read more

Hi all,

Version 7.7.0 of DocDB is out. The main change is that the new 3-column display for events is included. I heard only positive comments on this, so we are going with the basic idea. If there are further tweaks, they can be easily accommodated.

7.7.0
Reorganized the output of DisplayMeeting to look more like ShowDocument and
to present things in a clearer manner.

Add a routine in scripts to help find obsolete code. Remove a bunch of
uncalled routines.... read more

7.6.1
New file: ListGroups Should be placed in public scripts directory too.

Added a new script, ListGroups which lists the various security groups and allows the user to get a list of the documents viewable by that group. This will NOT list public documents nor documents which the group is allowed to read because it is over another group in the hierarchy. Turned security list in ShowDocument into links to ListBy. ListBy also takes ListBy?group=blah which will translate blah into a group number. ... read more

7.6.0
New perl modules are required since 7.5.1. Use the scripts/CheckModules
script to see if you need new ones.

DocDB 7.6.0 now adds a cross-search feature that will search other DocDB
installations as long as you have them defined as External DocDBs (see the
admin pages). Additionally, we will be supplying a DocDB instance that knows
about as many other instances as possible. So, you may choose not to define
every other DocDB, just somewhat related ones, but users will still have a
single place to go if they really want to search everything. The minimum
version of an external DocDB for this to work is 7.5.1... read more

7.5.1
Two new perl modules are required for this release:
"XML::Twig" and "HTML::TreeBuilder"
Use the "CheckModules" script to verify installation.

Added the quick search to the homepage instead of the link to "Search" Link is
also there as "Advanced"

Added an XML output version of Search which will be used in the meta-search to
be added in the version 7.6.0... read more

New in this release:

7.5.0
A new, simpler way to search. Just type in one or more words and DocDB will
search for them in topics, authors, events, doctypes, and all the text fields.
Results are ranked by how many matches are found.

Also on the search form you can type in author names rather than having to
select them.

Can now get notification of documents associated with events (just like
topics, authors, keywords)... read more

A new minor release of DocDB is available. The changes are:

Put list of events and "notes" in notification e-mail as well as say whether document was updated, meta-info updated, files added, document created or reserved.

Remove bolding from authors when there are none in meeting view

Make sorting order on document update matches order on document view

Fix bug where user was not reported as being verified after they were

What's new:

1. Changes in the API to allow updating documents and the DB info

2. Fix for some edge conditions in the calendar and displaying events

3. Users are allowed to rename files that are fetched with wget

4. Addition of document notes to fields that can be displayed

5. In table view of document, abbreviate filenames longer than 20 characters

6. Change first author to first alphabetically and change sort to work on it.... read more