Release 4.3

Owned by Megan Forbes
Last updated: Jun 10, 2019

Overview

Areas of work for CollectionSpace Release 4.3 are listed below.

  • Continued work on the community of practice profiles, including:
  • Refactoring and acceptance of a Django-based community-contributed framework for web applications, that uses CollectionSpace data and APIs.  CSPACE-6758
  • Exploring the possible use of a fast index-based technology (Elasticsearch) to potentially speed up several types of searches.  CSPACE-6760
  • Add support for Amazon S3 backend storage.  CSPACE-6761
  • Upgrade Service API to latest version of RESTEasy.  CSPACE-6281
  • Expanding the number of automated tests for quality assurance.  CSPACE-6754
  • Updates to the reporting software and documentation.  CSPACE-6792
    • Update Jasper Reports library to latest stable version:  CSPACE-6223
    • Improve end user documentation pertaining to reporting.
  • Improvements to data migration tools, including:
    • Development of an import / migration service that does not require the deployment user to manage IDs during an import
    • Improving the robustness of the migration endpoint by simplifying the datasource XML schema
  • Development of a Culture Object provider for CollectionSpace.
  • Other bug fixes as prioritized by the CollectionSpace community.

For the list of resolved issues - bug fixes, feature enhancements, and more, please see the 4.3 issues filter in the project's issue tracker.

Release Notes

INSTALLER

We've update the automated installer for performing an unattended installation of a CollectionSpace 4.3 server on selected Linux systems. 

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES 

An additional environment variable named JEE_PORT is required to build and deploy CollectionSpace v4.3.

ELASTICSEARCH

Beginning with version v4.3, you can configure CollectionSpace to work with an Elasticsearch cluster. To learn more about Elasticsearch follow this link: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.7/getting-started.html

To use CollectionSpace with Elasticsearch, you'll first need to download and install Elasticsearch 1.7.x.  As of v4.3, CollectionSpace works with Elasticsearch v1.7.x (does not work yet with v2.x of Elasticsearch).  You can download it here: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/past-releases/elasticsearch-1-7-4 You can learn how to setup an Elasticsearch cluster by following this link:https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.7/setup.html.  The default configuration will create a cluster named "elasticsearch" which is the cluster CollectionSpace will attempt to work with by default.

By default, CollectionSpace will attempt to connect to an Elasticsearch cluster named "elasticsearch" running on the same server.  You can point CollectionSpace to a different cluster by changing the configuration file at '$CSPACE_JEESERVER_HOME/cspace/config/services/proto-elasticsearch-config.xml' and restarting the CollectionSpace server.
Be sure your Elasticsearch cluster is running before you start the CollectionSpace server.  This will ensure that all your CollectionSpace collection data will be indexed by Elasticsearch.