This is a top level page for documentation related to web applications ("webapps") that UC Berkeley has developed for its CollectionSpace deployments. As of version 4.4 of CollectionSpace, these webapps are a (loosely integrated) part of CollectionSpace.
The UC Berkeley CollectionSpace deployment team has extended the functionality of CollectionSpace using lightweight web applications built within the Python-based Django framework. Berkeley has created a reusable Django project that authenticates against CollectionSpace, providing a starting point for further app development. With this code, available in GitHub, Berkeley has simplified the creation of custom CollectionSpace webapps.
At this point, UC Berkeley has produced a dozen such webapps. Screenshots for a few of them are shown below:
The search portals query a Solr datastore that holds a nightly export of data from CollectionSpace. The speed of Solr and the denormalized nature of the datastore allow the portal to return 1,000s of records in under a second.
Included within the search portal is a second webapp called imageserver
. The Imageserver
makes authenticated requests to the UCJEPS CSpace instance to access specimen images. For each search result returned, i.e, for each specimen (cataloging) record that matches the query parameters, A REST Services call retrieves images from related media handling records.
The Botanical Garden's iReports webapp provides a means to access the iReports installed on a CSpace server which require parameters that CSpace proper cannot provide (i.e. non-CSID values such as text input).
The "Bulk Media Upload" webapp addresses a long-standing need to be able to upload batches of image files and connect them to collection objects. While the approach taken for the implementation supporting PAHMA requires adhere to specific conventions (e.g. the image files must be named using the exact value for the Museum Number of the object), the actual application is tiny and has been applied to (and customized for) other deployments.
John Lowe developed a set of applications in 2012-2013 in Python using CGI for PAHMA in order to meet some rapidly evolving needs related to the major move that museum is conducting. In about March 2013, the UCB team decided that it was time to select a more enabling framework for web applications and build an environment that would provide an excellent platform for web applications that connect to our CollectionSpace instances. The framework selected was Django. Richard Millet then built a project using Django's "authentication backend" to permit apps to authenticate with CollectionSpace servers. That project is called cspace_django_project
.
The cspace_django_project
serves as the starter project for local, custom CSpace-Django projects. Using Git and GitHub, local CollectionSpace instances can fork the code to their own repository, clone it, and create a custom project – containing one or more web applications – by making modifications to the clone. The cspace_django_project
, a fork of which will reside unchanged in each deployer's repository, can serve as the conduit for general bug fixes and enhancements.
A set of wiki pages, linked to in the next section, documents the procedures involved in extending a CollectionSpace instance using Django webapps.
imageserver
supports limited constraints on image access (e.g. different derivatives may be restricted to authenticated users or hidden altogether.)imageserver
supports file-based cacheing, which can reduce the load on CSpace servers (which are slow to render images).imageserver
, of course, to access images and other media; the suggest
apps for obtain term-matching / autosuggest values, and so on.The following links illustrate some of the efforts to implement Django-based webapps that support CSpace deployments