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7.1 Release Notes

7.1 Release Notes

DSpace 7.1 provides new features, security & bug fixes to the 7.x platform.

New and improved features include:

• Request a Copy (Backend donated by Mark H. Wood of IUPUI):  Similar to v6.x, users can now ask the original author or submitter (or a help desk email) for an emailed copy of access restricted files.  This provides users with a way to privately get copies of restricted files, should the request be approved. A request can be submitted by simply clicking on an access restricted bitstream in the UI.  Approval or rejection of the request occurs by clicking the link sent in the request email.
• Item Versioning: Similar to v6.x, administrators or submitters can now create new versions of Items. A new Item version can be created by logging in & clicking the "Create new version" button (next to the "Edit this item" button) on an Item's page.  The new version is then created via the normal Item submission form (prepopulated with all existing information).  Once created, all versions of an Item are visible on the Item page in the "Version History" section. 
  • Item Versioning is enabled by default, but can be disabled via configuration.
  • Entities are not yet supported for Versioning.
• Configure Collections to harvest content via OAI-PMH (OAI Harvesting): Similar to 6.x (XMLUI), on the "Edit Collection" page's "Content Source" tab, there's an option to specify "This collection harvests its content from an external source".  When enabled for a Collection, you can configure an external OAI-PMH instance (including another DSpace site) to harvest from.  Once configured in the UI, harvesting is completed based on the configured schedule in your backend's local.cfg or oai.cfg.
• IIIF Support (Donated by Michael Spalti of Willamette University, with support & enhancements donated by 4Science): DSpace now supports the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF.io), including an embedded IIIF viewer (Mirador) in the UI. IIIF support is disabled by default, but can be easily enabled via configuration. Enabling IIIF also requires installing a IIIF image server (e.g. Cantaloupe). For more details, please see the linked documentation.
• Ability to "extend" other User Interface themes: In your environment.prod.ts, you can now specify that one theme "extends" another. This allows you to inherit all settings from the extended them by default.  See the "Entending other Themes" section of the User Interface Customization documentation.
• Configure one Entity Type per Collection (Ported by 4Science from their DSpace-CRIS project): When Configurable Entities are enabled, in the "Edit Collection" page you can select an Entity Type (e.g. Person, Project, Journal, etc) that Collection will accept. Once configured, this Collection will only accept new Submissions of that Entity Type, and will be one of the recommended Collectionsto Submitters whenever they start a new Submission of that Entity Type. See "Configure Collections for each Entity type" section of the Configurable Entities documentation.
• Support for importing Entities & Relationships via the Simple Archive Format (Donated by tysonlt):  This is achieved via a new, optional "relationships" file in the Simple Archive Format directory. See the documentation for more details.
• Support for importing Project Entities with funding information via the OpenAIRE API (Donated by Paulo Graça ): When importing a new "Research Project" Entity, a new "Funding OpenAIRE API" option is available, allowing you to import a Project from the OpenAIRE API complete with all it's funding information (Funder, Funder Identifier, Funding Stream and Funding ID). This is implemented via a new external source via Live Import from external sources.
• Command-line script to help test the connection between your UI and your REST API.  Several people who installed 7.0 early ran into issues configuring the UI and REST API properly.  A new "yarn config:check:rest" script has been added to the frontend codebase to help validate the connection with your REST API. It should also provide more descriptive errors (should they occur) which will help us to debug future issues others may encounter. See the "Frontend Installation" instructions (step 4) in Installing DSpace for more details.

Security fixes include:

• [HIGH] CVE-2021-41189: In 7.0, a Community or Collection Admin could escalate their permissions to become a full Administrator. A quick fix is also provided for sites running 7.0. (Reported by Andrea Bollini of 4Science) 

Major bug fixes include:

• Major performance improvements to UI and REST API
  • In 7.0, several UI pages (Homepage, MyDSpace, Search, etc) would respond slowly if a large number of Communities & Collections existed in the system.  Performance has been drastically improved in 7.1.
• In Submission form, the "administrator" Bitstream access condition was fixed. Previously, depending on Collection's "DEFAULT_READ" settings, the "administrator" permission limitation may not have worked properly.  See https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/pull/8013
• In Login form, some special characters in passwords were not accepted.  This was the result of an encoding error which is now fixed. See https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/1367
• In "Edit Item" on "Bitstreams" tab, the upload button was not working properly. This has been fixed. See https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/1286
• In "Edit Item" on "Relationships" tab, it was difficult to manage Entities with many relationships. This has been improved. See https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/1148
• Google Analytics reporting has been moved to an asynchronous/batch script to improve performance. See https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/pull/2248
• Numerous other minor bug fixes or accessibility improvements. See the 7.1 milestone for frontend and backend for a list of all changes applied in 7.1.

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