August

Goobi viewer Digest for August 2020

Coming soon

Expansion of crowdsourcing campaigns
Adjustments to the IIIF interfaces
Data sets without images on the reading lists

Announcement

In September, the Goobi viewer team will only be available to a limited extent due to parental leave and annual leave.

Developments

Extended PDF download access restriction

For some time now, the Goobi viewer has been able to control PDF download functions via access restrictions. Until now, there have been three options:

Completely block the PDF download
Restrict the PDF download together with a condition to certain structural elements
Allow downloading of single page PDF only

From now on, it is also possible to limit the PDF download to a percentage of the record. The exact number must be stored in the metadata of the record and indexed in the field ACCESSCONDITION_PDF_PERCENTAGE_QUOTA. In this way, application scenarios can be realized that restrict the download to, for example, 10% of the record within a user session. If the user tries to download more, an error message is displayed.

Maps

If indexed geocoordinates are available for a record, a widget with the map in the sidebar is automatically displayed on this basis in the record view.

Reading lists

Records without images can now be saved to reading lists again. This was dropped with the introduction of extended support for records without images in April. The functionality is now available at the known position in the search results. In addition, it is also displayed on the metadata page for these records.

Resolver

The Goobi viewer has various options for resolving a record. One of the resolvers is the so-called user-defined resolver. A field name and a value can be specified in the URL. If exactly one record matches this combination, it is automatically forwarded to that work.

This user-defined resolver has been extended to pass any other field names and value combinations to further restrict a result. Now it is possible to link to an exact newspaper issue, even if it is not an independent record. For example:

https://viewer.example.org/viewer/resolver?field=PI_ANCHOR&identifier=000141932&field2=YEARMONTHDAY&value2=19630221&field3=DC&value3=newspaper

See also chapter 2.22 in the documentation.

The two widgets for displaying an RSS feed and the browse menu in the sidebar can now be turned on and off via a button in the configuration. This means that the last two remaining widgets can now also be controlled via the configuration file.

See also chapter 2.23 in the documentation.

Java 11

The Goobi viewer is now fully prepared for Java 11, which took about a year to prepare and implement. They are a good example of necessary developments and work that is not visible on the interface via new features, but is necessary for a solid foundation.

In step 1 we updated the dependencies used by the Goobi viewer core, indexer and connector to current versions. This is a prerequisite for preventing problems in the runtime environment (Unsupported major.minor version).

In step 2, the developers changed the development environment to Java 11 and ensured that everything continued to work and compile. In this step, some dependencies were added, which have been removed between Java 8 and Java 11 and now have to be explicitly included.

In step 3, the environment was adapted in our CI and build platform so that all Goobi viewer jobs run with Java 11. There the next points that needed to be adjusted appeared, because the automatic unit and integration tests as well as the frameworks used for them were not fully compatible.

In step 4 and, for the time being, the last step, we started and observed the Goobi viewer on customer systems in a pure Java 11 runtime environment. The core, indexer and connector have now been running in stable operation there for several months and are working without any problems.

So we can say with a clear conscience: Prepared for Java 11

The next steps will take some time again. As soon as about two thirds of the installations known to us have been updated, we will discontinue Java 8 compatibility and be able to make use of the new features in Java 11 in the source code as well.

Miscellaneous

The Goobi viewer indexer has become more flexible when downloading ALTO files referenced in METS files.
The dependence on the Java library Joda has been removed and replaced by native Java methods.
The logic of the subthemes has been simplified. Only the attributes mainTheme and discriminatorField are now evaluated in the configuration file.
The Apidocs can now be found again on Github:

Overview (Goobi viewer - Core 21.12 API)

Version numbers

The versions that must be entered in the pom.xml of the theme in order to get the functions described in this digest are:

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.goobi.viewer</groupId>
    <artifactId>viewer-core</artifactId>
    <version>4.10.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>io.goobi.viewer</groupId>
    <artifactId>viewer-core-config</artifactId>
    <version>4.10.0</version>
</dependency>