12 7 2020 Tech Team Report

12-07-2020

Logged Tasks

Date	Task	Hours (Main)	Hours (EOLS)	Hours (PII)
30-Nov-2020	Report, mtg, parse DataCite html	5
4-Dec-2020	Deploy D8 core 8.9.11 update to dev/stage, investigate preview/explore/5.2 style issues	2
5-Dec-2020	Fix multiple 5.2 issues, investigate pg backups, create prod backup	4

Summary

Drupal

• Yet another minor Drupal core update to 8.9.11, deployed to dev, stage

Dataverse

• Fixed several 5.2 update issues:
  • 5.2 has a pop-up menu in the dataset page files table now. Using that on files near the end of the list creates a popup that is 'under' the 'powered by Dataverse' text/logo. Hoped that this was just a matter of z-index, but it was related to the theme's use of overflow settings on the table. I eventually found that making the footer 'position:relative' resolves the issue and, as far as I have seen, doesn't introduce other style errors.
  • The 5.2 file page display allows you to switch between multiple previewers, but there was no way to determine which previewer you were currently viewing (since the in-page preview removes the previewer header/title). I added tracking/styling so that the current previewer is highlighted in the selection menu.
  • 5.2 makes the decision to only show one previewer option in the dataset page files table (simply the first one registered in the database) and used the 'eye' icon and a generic 'Preview' label in the hover-over pop-up. Since most of our file types only have one previewer, this doesn't seem to be a big limitation, but I thought it would make sense to use the title of the previewer in the pop-up label, e.g. 'Play Video' rather than 'Preview'. I implemented that change.
  • The file page has a dynamic choice either showing an 'open in new window' or 'Explore on ' (if the previewer is also listed as an explore tool) button to launch the current preview in a second window. Because the 'open in new window' doesn't tell you what tool you're using, and because 'Explore on Play Video' doesn't read well, I changed these to say ' in new Window' and 'Explore Using '. The former is likely to be what we see most often, since there's no reason to list most tools as previewers and explore tools (the latter an attempt to indicate some interactivity in the tool. Nominally tools like the image preview, where you can pan/zoom, and video where you can play/rewind, etc. could be explore tools, but the category is more for things like TwoRavens). (It still seems like a minor confusing point that the only explore tools you can get to through these buttons are ones that are dual listed as previewers. Explore-only tools only show in the download/access menus. Unlikely to be an issue for QDR though since we have no explore tools now.)
  • The inclusion of previews within an iframe appears to inactivate the video player 'full-screen' option. I made a change to re-enable this, so one can now get a full-screen video without having to open the preview in a new window. (FWIW: As far as I can tell, the full-screen option appears when we enable 'controls' which shows the play, volume, and other buttons at the bottom. It can't be removed without removing all controls, so the alternative is to leave it visible but disabled.)
  • The default logic only showed the preview option for unrestricted files. I altered the logic to show the preview button on the dataset page if you have access (pubic, or restricted and you have permissions to view/download the file due to your account or a privateURL.) Similar logic changes were needed to display the preview tab on the file page itself for restricted files. (FWIW: IN doing this, I found two very similar functions in Dataverse that differ only by support for privateURLs - I'm guessing its a mistake to have the one that ignores privateURLs.)
  • Similarly, the download menu shows for a file in the dataset page file list, even when you don't have download permissions. The download menu includes both explore tools and download itself. This was a known issue in Dataverse, and I was able to grab a solution from a PR under review (probably a 5.3+ addition in the community version.)

Operations:

• Created python script to retrieve monthly DataCite statistics reports and 'screen-scrape' to find the list of top 10 resolution failures. Discussed possibility of automating adding secret email username/pass but will manually add them for now to set up a cron job to start this reporting.

##Discussion

• In working on dev, I made a database change for the preview/explore tools and wanted to check the backup of postgres to compare. These don't exist in the same /backup dir as the drupal backups and I didn't find any postgres backup before moving on. I think I knew where they were at one point but something good to prioritize in documentation.
• As far as I know, 5.2 should now be deployable, so it is probably a good time to have the team test/review to find issues and to consider whether the fixes above are sufficient/further changes are desired. (FYI: 5.3 should be out before the Holidays. It has some ~significant configuration changes under the hood, and requires a minor version update for payara, but doesn't have as significant UI changes as 5.2 with the kebab menus and preview changes.)
• There are two options to get pid resolution logging on prod - do another 5.1.1 minor update or deploy 5.2. It's not much work to add the logging change to 5.1.1 so that would be a very quick option of we want that out now.

Plans

• Deploy pid logging to prod
• Issue Queue

Still TBD:

• Drupal 9/composer 2/3