I suggest we produce a quick Markdown cheat-sheet page, showing the key runes: e.g. create a title and quote some text. This page can link to the full Markdown docs for advanced users.

A user going to the Markdown docs that we link will have to read a couple of pages of the raison-d'etre of Markdown before he gets to the syntax. And it's not very easy to read, and being white on black it looks like proper geek stuff.

This needs more analysis, but the GEMINI2 attribute "metadata point of contact" must be reconciled with the registered publisher (or agent).

This might also be used to filter records harvested from a CSW source, but filtering also needs more analysis, as does distinction between agent and provider.

Rationale

The package edit form is restricted to three extra fields. To enter more than three fields, one has to save the package and hit edit again (or hit preview).

Implementation

A mechanism similar to the one for resources (where you can add lines as you go) would solve this. So, have a button that adds more extra field rows via JS. (Extra fields don't need up/down buttons that the Resource table has)

Nice to have: a blank field is added when you tab from the last filled-in field in the table.

The widget for tag autocompletion is broken in various ways.

For example, if I edit a package that is tagged "music", and just tab through the form fields to get to the Author field, then the widget changes to "industrial-music" as I tab through it.

Or if the tag is "foo bar" and I hit alt-right to jump to the end of the text field (with the intent of adding a third tag), then the contents change to "foo barbecue".

Updates to css after a new deploy don't come through without a hard refresh. Adding the version number to the include urls will solve this e.g.

mycssfile.css?v=12345678

The search box at the top-right of CKAN's page doesn't have a 'go' button. I feel that a larger percentage of users expect a 'go' or 'search' button on the right-hand side of the box to press to start searching. Techies tend to know the keyboard shortcut of pressing 'carriage-return' but it might be better to follow standard practise on this.

Examples with 'search' button: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google, Amazon, trac Examples without: ?

second part of #908

Need instructions on the group page to tell people they need to login to create a group. Someone must have deleted this.

For example, I will document the following:

• A specific guide on using mercurial when working with our branching and merging policy
  • DONE - ​http://wiki.ckan.net/Becoming_a_CKAN_Developer
• Policy document on how we use tickets, plan sprints and make releases
  • DONE - ​http://wiki.ckan.net/Becoming_a_CKAN_Developer
• How to package software as .deb file for project deployment

I'd love if someone else would write:

• An authorisation tutorial covering the core model, the command line tools and examples of every possible way of using the system
• A HOWTO guide with screenshots for adding a package

Option 1: 'Changeset' Model

See ticket:1135 for vdm ticket. This would involve a) moving to changeset in vdm b) doing the migration in ckan to support this.

Have developed a new "changeset" based model for revisioning in vdm.

Implementation

• The main challenge with this change is schema and data migration

Every revisioned object has a revision_id and revision attribute.

Approximate algorithm:

Revision -> Changeset

for revtype in [PackageRevision, ...]:
    for pkgrev in package_revision:
        changeset = lookupchangeset(package_revision)
        ChangeObject(cset, (table, id), dictize(pkgrev))

Question:

• does pkg include tags attributes or not? or we have to dictize, pkgrev, pkg2tagrev, and tag. Probably the latter.

Option 2: Simplify Revision Object Model

Just use a simpler vdm, see ticket:1136 (move to SessionExtension) and ticket:1137 (remove need for statefulness in vdm).

Discussion

Advantage of Option 1 versus 2:

• Easier support for pending state and similar behaviour
• No need to introduce new tables (and hence migrations) when making something revisioned (or not).

Disadvantages

• Migration is required
• More difficult to query revision history.
  • Could be addressed by having ChangeObject have separate cols for table name and id but would likely be more difficult.
• Performance (?)
  • Have one big ChangeObject table to query when looking at changed objects rather than many revision tables.
    • Not sure this is a biggie as even with Revision model biggest revision object tables are probably on the order of the ChangeObject table

Conclusion

Implement Option 2 and leave Option 1 for present.

Option 1 includes Option 2 so it seems that that is required in either case (so we may as well with Option 2).

Option 1 requires significant effort (esp migration) so leave for present and then review the situation at some later date.

Tags could/should have an Atom feed. This would mean that every edit to relevant packages could be easily monitored. See [1].

[1] ​http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ckan-discuss/2011-May/001162.html

Proposer: Adrià Mercader

Abstract

The new harvester interface allows to create harvesters for different sources, but right now harvesters don't have many ways to describe and configure themselves. We need a way of allowing them to:

• Expose their type and other details so they can be used internally and on the UI.
• Define configuration settings for particular harvester instances.

The Problem

Harvester description

The current UI for adding and editing harvest sources is the same used in ckanext-dgu, and thus the 3 harvester types used in DGU to harvest various GEMINI realted sources are hardcoded in the form. The form will be migrated to a DGU-independent one, so we need the harvesters to provide all the necessary data. There is a current get_type method that returns the harvester type, but for make it compatible with the DGU forms, it returns a machine-readable string (e.g. "CSW Server"), making it error prone.

Arbitrary configuration

In the current implementation, when the harvest process is started, ckanext-harvest looks for all the available plugins that implement the IHarvester interface and calls the appropiate methods for the current stage (gather_stage,fetch_stage,import_stage). At these stages, harvesters have no way of applying arbitrary configuration options, so all harvesters of the same type behave on the same way. For instance, the CKAN harvester needs a way to define the API version to use when harvesting remote instances (Right now, the version 2 is hardcoded on the code).

Specification

Harvester description

Harvesters will need to provide the following information so the UI form can be built:

• name: machine-readable name (e.g. "waf"). This will be the value stored in the database, and the one used by ckanext-harvest to call the appropiate harvester.
• title: human-readable name (e.g. "Web Accessible Folder (WAF)"). This will appear in the form's select box.
• description: a description of what the harvester does (e.g. "A Web Accessible Folder (WAF) displaying a list of GEMINI 2.1 documents"). This will appear on the form as a guidance to the user.

The way to provide it will be an info method that all harvesters must implement, which will return a dictionary with the previous elements:

    {
        'name': 'csw',
        'title': 'CSW Server',
        'description': 'A server that implements OGC's Catalog Service 
                        for the Web (CSW) standard'
    }

Arbitrary configuration

As different harvesters will have very different needs, we need to provide a way to persist arbitrary configuration flags for each harvest source. The more flexible way given the current architecture in my opinion would be to store the configuration options as a JSON encoded object as a property of the harvest source (There already is an unused DB field called config in the database) (Maybe using JsonType??).

This will mean adding an extra field in the harvest source form to allow entering the configuration. This could be just a simple text field where users enter the JSON encoded object or a more clever mechanism (i.e an "Add a configuration flag" link that adds two new text fields for the key and value for each flag, and a mechanism to later build the JSON object). In any case, this should probably be hidden in an "Advance options" section.

Why do it this way

Harvester description

The info method would provide a single point to get all the information related to the harvester, and future properties could be added to the dictionary returned without having to modify the interface.

Arbitrary configuration

There is an already existing config field in the database, so we won't need to change the model. Harvesters could access the config object at any of the stages. Of course they could provide default values in their implementations so users don't need to enter them everytime.

Implementation plan

Deliverables

Risks and mitigations

The highest risk on the harvesters info method side is that harvester implementation don't offer one of the necessary properties (namely name and title). This could fire a warning when showing the UI form or using the CLI.

Participants

Adrià Mercader to do it.

Progress

None yet.

Proposer: John Glover
Seconder: James Gardner

Abstract

We are trying to achieve these goals:

• To get people involved with making edits to CKAN metadata.
• To have an ownership model as to who can moderate and validate these changes
• To not put too huge a burden on these owners.

This feature allows anyone to edit a package and create a new revision, but requires an owner/moderator to approve a revision before it is are made "official".

There have been a lot of discussions around the revisioning system side of this ticket (CREP 0002) and I think these are now largely resolved. We now want to discuss the user interface.

The Problem

We require the following functionality:

• Allow a group of changes to be stored as a new revision.
• Allow a linear stack of "community" revisions.
• Provide a way for the editor and moderator to compare previous revisions to the current one.
• When a moderator approves a change it creates a new revision flagged "moderated" (this is analogous to a merge commit)
• Provide a way for the editor and moderator comment on revisions if necessary.

Extra features:

• Need a way to summarise the changes (as part of the preview perhaps)
• Sysadmin needs to purge a revision completely

Specification

UI/UX

UI Mockup:

Revisions:

• Revisions are per package rather than per field.
• Internally CKAN has separate revisions for resources, extras and package metadata. From a user's point of view this could be confusing to expose, so everything that they see on a package form when they hit save is a single revision.

On the Edit page:

• We have a panel on the right, listing all the revisions with the current moderated one selected. Moderated revisions are highligted in some way (red and bold?).
• The values displayed in the form are by default populated from the latest revision (whether community or moderated)
• Under each field is a "shadow", showing the value of the field in the revision selected in the panel, if it is different from the value in the field. By default the shadow values are populated from the latest moderated revision which is the one selected in the revision panel by default too.
• When you change the value of a field, a shadow may appear or disappear accordingly. If they disappear a box saying that they are the same replaces it
• If you want to edit values from a previous revision, you first select that revision to get the shadows populated. There is a button named "Replace fields with values from this revision" under the revision list. You click this, a warning pops up and then you say "Yes". You then select the moderated revision again.
• We also allow package comments the same way as the todo extension works at the moment. Additionally, we need to be able to differentiate between what the moderator wrote and what a community member wrote, and so we may need to make a small change to the todo extension to facilitate this.
• In addition to package comments, each revision will have a revision log (analogous to a commit message).

Technical Details

• This CREP will result in a new CKAN extension.
• It depends heavily on the new revisioning system (CREP0002), some of the details of which are yet to be finalised.
• This CREP therefore requires working closely with David Raznick to come up with an API that the UI AJAX calls can use.
• We will then use suitable test data to mimic these API calls until CREP0002 is ready.

Why do it this way

This hopefully provides a clear and consistent mechanism allowing both a community member to make new revisions and a moderator to view and approve revisions, with largely the same UI/UX.

Implementation plan

Deliverables

A new CKAN extension, consisting of:

• Code: Python, HTML, CSS, Javascript
• Unit tests
• Localization
• Documentation

Participants

John Glover to do it.

Progress

John has implemented the bulk of this UI. Just some things to tidy up before it is complete:

• Genshi stream filters to be updated with CKAN 1.5 / 1.5.1 templates
• history_ajax / read_ajax to be replaced with calls to Action API (or Util REST API)

I've split these two off into a new ticket #1604.

Related Progress

The Todo extension is written and available at: ​https://bitbucket.org/johnglover/ckanext-todo.

In the section 'The Problem', under extra features, we mention a need for the sysadmin to be able to purge a revision already. This is already done.

See also

#1129 Backend work

The Handle System is an initiative to provide persistent references for resources. That is, it's basically a proxy system for preventing link rot.

Its documentation is here: ​http://www.handle.net/. Servers running CKAN could host a "Local Handle Service", which redirects a hash of a resource to an actual URL.

Some suggested use cases:

• Researcher would like to cite where data came from
• Agencies would like to have a way to prevent vendor lock-in from CKAN if they decide to move to another platform

Update CKAN wiki front page - a la OpenSpending?: ​http://wiki.openspending.org/Main_Page

Sections should relate to different types of people using the site:

Developers, Users etc..

Get buildbot to:

• build the deb packages
• install them into a fresh virtual machine
• run smoke tests on the installed ckan

When a package has been deleted, say for spam moderation, comments still appear in the recent comments section.

This is a problem because non-admin users will be shown a warning that they're not authorised to view the package if they click on the link.

At CKAN.net currently, this affects the most recent comment.

Administrators have "View", "Edit" and "History" tabs. However, I can't see a way to delete a package from the web UI.

Version: CKAN.net as of today

A new library, ​guiders.js, has been open sourced that seems to be great at unobtrusively introducing new users to features of websites.

The library drives Optimizely's website. The GitHub repo is here: ​https://github.com/jeff-optimizely/Guiders-JS

Some examples:

Simplify the logic in the atom feed an make all feeds use logic layer to return lists.

In when displaying search results, it would be useful to also display the tags of a package. Sometimes it's difficult to infer the scope of what the package does from the title and the first sentence of the description. Tags are quite concise way to display rich information.

ENV=datacatalos.org, with CKAN 1.4.2a

Child tickets:

• #1194 "Welcome back" message for newly registered user
• #1202 Links to datapkg utility don't lead to info about it
• #925 Change the search box icon to remove the down arrow
• #923 Search box doesn't work in leaderboard page in stats extension
• #1034 Flash message cached
• #737 Markdown syntax summary page
• #811 Extra field editing form layout breaks when there are long field names

(Just creating this ticket as somewhere to keep notes)

• Decide on REST api versus action API
  • Do we want to support both?
• Tidying
  • Unify on /api/v{version num}/... structure (do we want a default option that points to current default? e.g. /api/default/ ...)
  • extras merged into normal field list in package
  • Get rid of /rest/ so just have api/v1/package
  • Get rid of separation of search api from 'rest' api
    • Propose that GET on REST index is search e.g. /package/?q=...
      • This is also resolves issue whereby GET at root returns whole package set (a *bad* idea) as this would now become the matchall search query (with a default limit on items returned)
• Resource read/write in API (separate from package)
  • Does this need authorization work?
• user/account API - read/write
• Remove autocomplete -- can just use search
  • Do not worry about backwards compat as should only be used in our js (if others using it too bad!)

Make a robust way to make sure the drupal database is consistent with the ckan data.

The default package form offers 4 empty extras fields. Like the resource section, it should have an "add more" button to add another row.

It seems that searching for extras_foo:value works with solr, but extras_foo.bar:value doesn't. No theory on why.

This overlaps with Sean's follow support (for activity streams) and so will be dealt with there.

There are some functions that still use the Auhtorizer().authorized_query method:

./ckan/controllers/authorization_group.py:24:        query = ckan.authz.Authorizer().authorized_query(c.user, model.AuthorizationGroup)
./ckan/lib/base.py:237:        groups = ckan.authz.Authorizer.authorized_query(c.user, model.Group, 
./ckan/lib/search/sql.py:55:        q = authz.Authorizer().authorized_query(username, model.Group)
./ckan/lib/search/sql.py:118:        q = authz.Authorizer().authorized_query(self.options.get('username'), model.Package)
./ckan/logic/action/get.py:154:    query = Authorizer().authorized_query(user, model.Group, model.Action.EDIT)

./ckan/tests/test_authz.py:158:        q = self.authorizer.authorized_query(self.notadmin.name, model.Package)
./ckan/tests/test_authz.py:353:        q = self.authorizer.authorized_query(self.notmember.name, model.Package)
./ckan/tests/test_authz.py:357:        q = self.authorizer.authorized_query(self.member.name, model.Package)
./ckan/tests/functional/test_authorization_group.py:44:        group_count = Authorizer.authorized_query(u'russianfan', model.AuthorizationGroup).count()

A package in deleted state doesn't show to general users, but admins DO see them. The idea is that they can resurrect them if they want. But now we have the trash can that lists deleted packages. So we don't want admins to see the deleted packages anywhere else.

(But an admin should still be able to READ and EDIT a deleted package, so if he clicks on it in the trash list he can see it to decide whether to resurrect and actually be able to change its state.)

Same in the Web interface and API.

This ticket ties in with #948 highlighting a package being deleted (when viewing or editing) and follows on from the introduction of the trash can #1076.

When you create a package, but specify a key that is not allowed (e.g. 'relationships') then you get error message:

{"__junk": ["The input field __junk was not expected."]}

It should mention the actual key which is not expected. e.g.

{"relationships": ["The input field 'relationships' was not expected."]}

Kindly said that James' version of NAVL was better in this respect, so this might be best solved by moving to that.

Abstract

Package Relationships have not taken off in the 18 months we've had them in the API. There are some issues with them and we need to spend more time improving them or consider getting rid of them.

The Problem

Original use cases are expressed here: #253 Here are comments about how we could handle these specific examples better:

1. groups of packages - maybe better with a custom tag?
2. fragment resources - soon to be covered by 'kind' resource field #957

3&5. derived resource - better to have some sort of resource relationship perhaps?

4. linked resource - again better to have some sort of resource relationship perhaps?

Outstanding issues needing serious effort to fix:

• #256 Editing them in Web UI (not done yet)
• #1288 Package edit/creation can't include 'relationships' field

Specification

Remove relationships from model, API, tests, Web UI. Data migration to remove from db.

Why do it this way

Getting frustrated having problems with the code, when it's not used much. Often asked about what it's for, but rarely used. Seems an overly complicated design.

Backwards Compatibility

n/a

Implementation plan

Deliverables

See Specification

Risks and mitigations

Risk: a customer suddenly wants this, and the new ways to relate resources are not in place yet.

Mitigation: discuss this decision thoroughly to make sure we are confident the use cases are not important. Discuss with team, ckan-discuss and specifically the LOD people who have some related packages on thedatahub.org.

Participants

David Read

Progress

Not yet.

The email sending functionality (e.g for password reset) does not work on thedatahub.org and IATI (and probably some other instances) when using an address which is not a okfn.org one.

Could not send reset link: SMTPRecipientsRefused({u'amercadero@…': (550, 'relay not permitted')},)

As I said, adria.mercader@… works fine. The SMTP server used mail.okfn.org

Subticket of: #1294

Rather than having to visit a dedicated page it would be good if registration and login could be done from a modal form (separate or combined ...).

Why

• It could be used from dataset creation page in situations where user needs to be registered / logged in to create a dataset (so we could allow someone to start creating a dataset and only get them to login at the end ...)
• It allows for quicker and easier logging in

Implementation

• See Friedrich's work on the datahub

In password reset, it gets confused if you have two similar users. This is because with the string the user provides, it searches several fields, not just name but also fullname and email address, allowing you to search for these. But only name is unique.

Specific problem: Ira searches for "Irina" then it finds both: <User name=irina fullname=Irina [email protected] ] and <User name=shevski fullname=Ira email=> (I think)

Maybe need to choose which field it searches?

test_authz.py appears to test in great detail some very specific additional authz (related to total site lock-down it seems -- introduced I think for hri project).

I think there are simpler ways to get total site lockdown (use external auth!) and this test is slow and delicate (e.g. depends on specific words in templates). Suggest removing. If we don't remove we should at least refactor tests for access to certain pages to use a proper method of testing (e.g. agreed html comments in each page) rather than being depending on the presence of absence of specific wording.

I ran into a bug with the size field on resources.

• It would not accept an empty value from form (IMO this clearly equates to null/None)
• This could be fixed via using ignore_empty instead of ignore_missing
• However using this means there was no way to empty the field (e.g. i may just want to set the size field back to null not just change to another value)
• similar issues could arise around other fields (such as last_modified ...)
  • cf cset:645031d07b60

To solve this (cset:58acdcfe6d4e) i created an int_converter temporarily in logic/schema.py (this is almost certainly the wrong place). But I think it raises a bigger issue about the conversion layer and how it works.

• Disallow account creation via openid - #1386
• Require email field - #1319
  • Require email confirmation to be activated (?)
• Improvements to user page (e.g. show activity and more info about user) - #1396
• Modal user login - #1311

The extras in the package object sent to the extensions after editing (​https://bitbucket.org/okfn/ckan/src/01efd5649c10/ckan/logic/action/update.py#cl-226) do not include the newly added.

Perhaps the importer deletes them before re-importing. We shouldn't have deleted resources, so let's investigate.

Needs to update on:

1. language - It's broken on thedatahub.org if you change to German and then click on the CKAN icon top-left to go to thedatahub.org again.

AND

2. whether signed in or not - #1373

BUT not latest revisions (which is what it was)

Or get rid of etag caching on this page and others?

Groups are listed alphabetically with paging - not an ideal user experience. We would like to list groups in order of 'popularity': The number of datasets they contain.

Following this chain of thought, then, it would be nice to rearrange the groups table by clicking on column headers and having it sort by that column.

Furthermore, then, we'd like to implement a full-fledged groups search feature (if this is at all feasible).

The forthcoming groups refactor will probably have some bearing on this task.

Format should be lowercase. Automatically lower case (for extra points have a bit of javascript to force lower case when entering).

• Even more points: do a update on thedatahub repo to make all format lower case (or script this as an update?)

Set up tracking for user logins so that we have stats about how many active users of thedatahub exist want to be able to see who logged in the the last x months

ckan-discuss discussion suggests changes to the 'openness' indicator ( ​http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/ckan-discuss/2011-October/001786.html )

Dataset view page:

• If there is an explicit but non-OKD compliant license, such as CC-BY-NC, then this should be stated explicitly, perhaps: “This dataset is Not Open. License: Creative Commons Attribution Noncommerical. This is not an open license as it does not meet the Open Knowledge Definition.”
• If the license is marked as “Other::License Not Specified”, then this should be stated explicitly, perhaps: “This dataset is Not Open. It is published without an explicit license, the publisher reserves all rights to the dataset.”
• 3. If the license field was left empty by the contributor of the Data Hub record, then again this should be stated explicitly, perhaps: “This dataset is Not Open. The license of this dataset is unknown or unspecified. Start an enquiry on IsItOpenData? »
• There is a bug so that non-open licenses doesn't have an openness notice.
• If downloadable resources are not available, this should not affect 'openness' - check this has been removed.

Super ticket: #1190

A data processing system which utilizes the Webstore. One could get a long way with simple javascript running in the browser for development with this javascript then run offline using something like nodejs. Alternatively one could allow one to specify a url to e.g. a python file which would then be run in a sandbox (with access to some specified set of python modules)

Periodically we see some CKAN servers fall over because they run out of disk space. We need to find out if there is a common cause and fix it.

One problem in the past has been file handles running out when creating lots of tiny files in the data directory.

Another problem has been several enourmous backups being created every day - pdeu on eu25.

Group edit dataset add form needs some work

• Dataset name is not cleared when you add
• No way to remove item from list of datasets to be added if I make a mistake
• (2nd Apr 2012) It now seems that option to add multiple datasets at once has disappeared (perhaps during the CSS/HTML refactor ...)