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Refactoring Admin console

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François Prunayre edited this page Oct 30, 2013 · 6 revisions
Date 2013-06-06 Contacts Francois Prunayre
Status Motion passed - Done Release 2.12
Resources Available for the refactoring of the admin interface (see Overview)
Source code https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/tree/refactor_ui
Funding Mainly supported by Metawal project

Overview

Due to different issues (eg. Ext.JS 4 update would require a major rewrite of the widgets, OpenLayers 3 and GeoExt future, legacy UI based on XSLT hard to customize), this proposal aims to propose a major cleaning and refactoring of the GeoNetwork user interface and services.

Main goals:

  • Provide one user interface easier to customize with HTML templating for most of the application (ie. probably not for the editing form)
  • Reduce JS size and number of libraries used
  • Clean configuration
  • Simplify XSLT
  • Support search engine indexing
  • Provide basic functionnalities (search) if no JS available

Tasks:

This proposal focus on a complete review of the admin interface.

Proposal Type

  • Type: User interface
  • App: GeoNetwork client / Admin

Voting History

  • CFV 2013/10/22 : results are
  • +1 from PSC members: Emanuele, Jeroen, Patrizia, Simon, Francois
  • +1 from Committers: Mathieu

Proposal

The basic idea is like the widgets, rely on a JS client communicating with GeoNetwork services. Only the editor will remain based on services using XSL transformations.

The GeoNetwork services produce JSON output when "@json" flag is added to the service name. Jeeves takes care of the XML to JSON conversion.

Library use

Client side user interface

Demo

A demo website is available here: http://apps.titellus.net/geonetwork Test the administration by sign in using admin/admin.

Currently supported features:

Authentification

  • User authentification
  • Reset/Remind password
  • Self registration

Administration

  • Metadata and template
  • Load samples & templates
  • Sort template: simple implementation, could use dnd later on
  • Settings
  • System settings
  • Logo configuration
  • CSW configuration
  • Virtual CSW configuration
  • CSW element set name
  • Users & groups management
  • Classification system
  • Category (Thanks Arnaud)
  • Thesaurus & keywords
  • Statistics & status
  • Catalog status
  • Search statisitcs
  • catalog content statistics
  • Harvesting
  • protocol supported: GeoNetwork, Old GeoNetwork, OGCWxS, CSW, Thredds, GeoPREST, WFSGetFeature, OAI, ArcSDE, OAI, WebDav
  • Tools
  • Index
  • Batch update
  • Standard
  • Import > link to widget app with the import form.
  • i18n: English and French

On going task:

  • Transfert ownership
  • i18n: Other languages

Future improvements:

Administration

  • Harvesting
  • Z39.50 - work on it as soon as this bug is fixed https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/issues/186 before
  • Formatter - do we need admin for that ?
  • Remote notification - do we need admin for that ?
  • Directory admin - related to metadata editing (will be part of future proposal)

Search

  • Basic search support for presenting search results.

Search UI will be part of future proposal.

Edit

Editor UI will be part of future proposal.

Java

No changes was made in the GeoNetwork Java code (to easily merge with JPA branch). Only JSON output was added to Jeeves.

Javascript

A new "web-ui" module is added.

Closure utilities needs to be installed. See https://developers.google.com/closure/utilities/docs/linter_howto for installation

Maven take care of checking JS

Standards

  • HTML5

Browser support

Tested:

  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • IE8+

References:

Search engine indexing strategy

Search engine could index Angular app - This is more important for the search app:

Build

Build depends now on closure and python.

Install closure:

cd /path/to/closure-library-parent-dir
git clone http://code.google.com/p/closure-library/
cd closure-library
wget http://closure-compiler.googlecode.com/files/compiler-latest.zip
unzip compiler-latest.zip

Build GeoNetwork:

mvn clean install -Dclosure.path=/path/to/closure-library -DskipTests -Pui
cd web
mvn jetty:run -Pui

Service refactoring

Service configuration in WEB-INF

Service configuration is defined in WEB-INF/config/config-.xml to reduce the number of config files in WEB-INF that the end-user never change.

WEB-INF/config.xml include service configuration using (https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/tree/refactor_ui/web/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/config.xml#L1490). Example:

    <include>config/config-services-*.xml</include>
    <include>config/config-ui.xml</include>
    <include>config/config-ui-search.xml</include>
    <include>config/config-ui-metadata.xml</include>
    <include>config/config-ui-admin.xml</include>

Old services are preserved and mark as deprecated when a equivalent service is created.

 <service name="virtualcsw.config.edit" deprecated="true">

A list of deprecated services and related classes will be created and removed after the UI is complete.

The user interface use JSON service using the "@json" flag after service name.

Service return JSON error using the following configuration:

        <service name="admin.user.remove">
            <documentation>Remove a user.</documentation>
            <class name=".services.user.Remove" />
            <error sheet="../xslt/error/error-json.xsl"/>
        </service>

During cleaning, a documentation tag should be added to the service in order to improve service documentation. This is the opportunity to list parameters for each services. It sounds more relevant to add the documentation here than in the Javadoc as some parameters may be used only in the output XSLT (eg. using /root/request/someparameters).

Example:

<service name="statistics-search-ip">
      <documentation><![CDATA[
              Service statistics-search-ip
              
              Return unique IP address with number of searches.
              
              URL: http://localhost:8080/geonetwork/srv/eng/statistics-search-ip
              
              Response:
              
              <response>
                <record>
                  <ip>127.0.0.1</ip>
                  <sumhit>1058</sumhit>
                </record>
              </response>
              ]]></documentation>
      <class name="jeeves.services.db.Select">

XSLT folder

During review all XSLTs are moved from the xsl folder to the xslt one (https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/tree/refactor_ui/web/src/main/webapp/xslt).

XSLT refactoring

User Interface

  • xslt/base-layout.xsl: The main entry point for all user interface generated from XSLT
  • xslt/base-layout-cssjs-loader.xsl: Template to load CSS and Javascript
  • xslt/layout-core.xsl: Rendering templates for creating HTML elements.
  • xslt/common/base-variables.xsl: Global XSL variables about the catalog and user session.
  • xslt/common/base-variables-metadata.xsl: Global XSL variables about the metadata record. This should be included for service dealing with one metadata record (eg. viewing, editing).
  • xslt/common/base-variables-metadata-editor.xsl: Global XSL variables for metadata editing.
  • xslt/common/profiles-loader*.xsl: The profile loader using the oasis-catalog to load layout/core.xsl or some other schema XSLT in each activated schema plugins. One profile loader file is created per types of output in order to not to mix all XSLT templates in one file. For example RDF and FOP templates are not used at the same time.

See https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/tree/refactor_ui/web/src/main/webapp/xslt

Note

That change do not affect legacy UI or widget apps and is done in parallel.

After refactoring, we should be able to safely remove :

  • images/* (not harvesting, category, logo)
  • loc///* (not i18n.xml)
  • scripts
  • WEB-INF/config-* (not config-lucene.xml, config-db.xml, config-summary.xml)
  • xsl
  • apps
  • java dependency
  • jfreechart (used by old statistic pages)

Dev rules

The following dev rules have been applied.

Screenshots

web-ui dev branch

Bolsena codesprint experiments

Future improvements

It could be relevant to address the following items in the near future:

  • UI testing (experiments made using Karma and Angular scenario - to be continued)
  • Category / Add icon upload (#237)
  • Add map configuration (#137)
  • Languages / Add language configuration page to define GUI language to keep translation page simple and list only the languages used in the current node
  • Status / Manage validation status
  • Privileges / Provide configuration for the privileges strategy - to be able to keep it simple by default
  • Basic: Public/Private strategy
  • ByGroup: Define privileges by group / which is the current one
  • other ?
  • Privileges / Remove interactiveMap and Featured options ? - interactiveMap could be manage at URL level using gco:nilReason withHeld.
  • Add keyboard navigation
  • Registration / translate email (https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/issues/269)

Participants

  • François Prunayre
  • Arnaud De Groof
  • Vincent Bombaerts
  • Florent Gravin

This work was mainly supported by Metawal project.

If you have some comments, start a discussion, raise an issue or use one of our other communication channels to talk to us.

Welcome to the GeoNetwork project!

Project Steering Committee

How to contribute

GeoNetwork cheat sheet

GeoNetwork website (external)

GN3 public implementations

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