Another 27 patches have made their way into the master branch since the previous update.

Some highlights from last week include:

• Documentation patches arising from the DIG Hackfest
• Bug 1257915: Make Evergreen automatically mark a purchase order received when all of its line items have been either received or permanently cancelled. This one is a good example of how patches can evolve; Chris Sharp came up with the initial implementation, but Bill Erickson ran with Chris’ starting point and brought it past the goal line.
• Bug 1685840: Rewriting the Google Books Preview feature in the OPAC to not require Dojo; this is part of an overall project by Dan Scott to drop Dojo as a requirement in the public catalog.
• Bug 1427392: allow deletion of hard due date values, written by Michele Morgan.

For the upcoming week, I would like to call out a couple bugs with active pull requests that are in tricky areas of the code and could benefit from many eyes:

• Bug 1686194: make fine generation factor adjustments into max fines calculation
• Bug 1677661: fixes to the Mark II hold targeter that was introduced in 2.12.

Duck trivia

Rubber ducks are typically not ocean-going, but when they do venture about, they can be a very useful tool for tracing ocean currents. The “Friendly Floatees” incident also inspired a children’s book by Eric Carle.

Submissions

Updates on the progress to Evergreen 3.0 will be published every Friday until general release of 3.0.0. If you have material to contribute to the updates, please get them to Galen Charlton by Thursday morning.

As of this writing, 21 patches have been committed to the master branch since the previous development update.

One set of patches I’d like to highlight are the ones by Dan Scott for bug 1681009, which merge the main RTL (right-to-left) CSS stylesheet for the public catalog into the LTR (left-to-right). The RTL stylesheet was introduced in 2.12.0 so that the public catalog, when translated to languages such as Arabic that use right-to-left scripts, would align display elements correctly. However, having a separate stylesheet breaks the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) guidelines. Sometimes, the problem with repeating yourself isn’t when you repeat yourself, but when you forget to repeat yourself. In this case, new CSS styles that affect right or left alignment would need to be added to both the LTR and RTL stylesheets — but it’s all too easy to forget to do that, particularly if you’re a contributor who doesn’t regularly write in an RTL language.

Consequently, the main OPAC stylesheet, or rather, the Template Toolkit template that generates the stylesheet (Open-ILS/src/templates/opac/css/style.css.tt2) now looks like this:

[%-
    PROCESS "opac/parts/css/colors.tt2";
    PROCESS "opac/parts/css/fonts.tt2";
    rtl = ctx.get_i18n_l(ctx.eg_locale).rtl;
%]

...

#dash_wrapper {
    [% IF rtl == 't' -%]
    margin-right: 0.5em;
    [%- ELSE %]
    margin-left: 0.5em;
    [%- END %]
}

The rtl template variable is set based on the user’s active locale and is used to generate left- or right-aligned styles as needed.

Moving forward, some guidelines that folks contributing to the public catalog CSS should be aware of include:

• Avoid the use of inline styles in favor of defining CSS classes. This is a good idea in general, but it’s particularly important in the case of margin-right/margin-left and so forth. If anybody wants a small bug to work on, bug 1687031 identifies some places where cleanup is needed.
• When you add new styles to style.css.tt2, remember to add a conditional for styles that touch left/right display.

If you cannot read Arabic, a little trick you can use on occasion is mark your home locale as an RTL one, e.g., by doing update config.i18n_locale set rtl = true where code ~ '^en'; and reloading Apache.

In this case, the “Messages” heading is still aligned to the left when, were English an RTL language, it more commonly would be expected to be on the right.

Duck trivia

The Eurasian Teal duck (Anas crecca) had its Linnaean name assigned by Linnaeus himself. As Avibase reveals, in Jordan that duck can be referred to as .

Submissions

Updates on the progress to Evergreen 3.0 will be published every Friday until general release of 3.0.0. If you have material to contribute to the updates, please get them to Galen Charlton by Thursday morning.

As of this writing, 34 patches have been committed to the master since the previous development update. Many of them were bugfixes in support of the 2.10.11, 2.11.4, and 2.12.1 releases.

The 3.0 road map can be considered complete at this point, although as folks come up with additional feature ideas — and more importantly for the purposes of the road map, working code — entries can and should be added.

One of the latest road map additions I’d like to highlight in this update is bug 1682923, where Kathy Lussier proposes to add links in the public catalog to allow users to easily share records via social media. This is an example of a case where the expedient way of doing it — putting in whatever JavaScript Twitter or Facebook recommends — would be the wrong way of doing it. Why? Because it’s up to the user to decide what they share; using the stock social media share JavaScript could instead expose users to involuntary surveillance of their habits browsing an Evergreen catalog. Fortunately, we can have our cake and eat it too by building old-fashioned share links.

Another highlight for this week is offline mode… using only the web browser. This is something that would have been essentially impossible to implement back when Evergreen was getting off the ground, as short of writing a bespoke plugin, there was no way to store either the offline transactions or the block list. Nowadays it’s much easier; we can put pretty much whatever we like in a browser’s IndexedDB. IndexedDB’s API is pretty low-level, so Mike Rylander is working on using Google’s Lovefield, which offers a “relational database for web apps that can be serialized to IndexedDB. Here’s a snippet of how Mike propose’s to wrap Lovefield for use by the offline module:

/**
 * Core Service - egLovefield
 *
 * Lovefield wrapper factory for low level offline stuff
 *
 */
angular.module('egCoreMod')

.factory('egLovefield', ['$q','$rootScope','egCore', 
                 function($q , $rootScope , egCore) { 
    
    var osb = lf.schema.create('offline', 1);

    osb.createTable('Object').
        addColumn('type', lf.Type.STRING).         // class hint
        addColumn('id', lf.Type.STRING).           // obj id
        addColumn('object', lf.Type.OBJECT).
        addPrimaryKey(['type','id']);

Duck trivia

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology operates the All About Birds website, a great resource for birders. If you find yourself waiting for the test suite to finish running, you can pass the time solving one of their online jigsaw puzzles and learn how to identify some diving ducks.

Submissions

Updates on the progress to Evergreen 3.0 will be published every Friday until general release of 3.0.0. If you have material to contribute to the updates, please get them to Galen Charlton by Thursday morning.