Page History

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• New package: The default curation task package is now org.dspace.ctask. The tasks supplied with DSpace releases are now under org.dspace.ctask.general
• New tasks in DSpace release: Some additional curation tasks have been supplied with DSpace 1.8, including a link checker and a translator
• UI task groups: Ability to assign tasks to groups whose members display together in the Administrative UI
• Task properties: Support for a site-portable system for configuration and profiling of tasks using configuration files
• New framework services: Support for context management during curation operations
• Scripted tasks: New (experimental) support for authoring and executing tasks in languages other than Java

Tasks

The goal of the curation system ('CS') is to provide a simple, extensible way to manage routine content operations on a repository. These operations are known to CS as 'tasks', and they can operate on any DSpaceObject (i.e. subclasses of DSpaceObject) - which means the entire Site, Communities, Collections, and Items - viz. core data model objects. Tasks may elect to work on only one type of DSpace object - typically an Item - and in this case they may simply ignore other data types (tasks have the ability to 'skip' objects for any reason). The DSpace core distribution will provide a number of useful tasks, but the system is designed to encourage local extension - tasks can be written for any purpose, and placed in any java package. This gives DSpace sites the ability to customize the behavior of their repository without having to alter - and therefore manage synchronization with - the DSpace source code. What sorts of activities are appropriate for tasks?

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plugin.named.org.dspace.curate.CurationTask = \
org.dspace.ctask.general.NoOpCurationTask = noop, \
org.dspace.ctask.general.ProfileFormats = profileformats, \
org.dspace.ctask.general.RequiredMetadata = requiredmetadata, \
org.dspace.ctask.general.ClamScan = vscan, \
org.dspace.ctask.general.MicrosoftTranslator = translate, \
org.dspace.ctask.general.MetadataValueLinkChecker = checklinks

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ui.statusmessages = \
    -3 = Unknown Task, \
    -2 = No Status Set, \
    -1 = Error, \
     0 = Success, \
     1 = Fail, \
     2 = Skip, \
     other = Invalid Status

As the number of tasks configured for a system grows, a simple drop-down list of all tasks may become too cluttered or large. DSpace 1.8 provides a way to address this issue, known as task groups. A task group is a simple collection of tasks that the Admin UI will display in a separate drop-down list. You may define as many or as few groups as you please. If no groups are defined, then all tasks that are listed in the ui.tasknames property will appear in a single drop-down list. If at least one group is defined, then the admin UI will display two drop-down lists. The first is the list of task groups, and the second is the list of task names associated with the selected group. A few key points to keep in mind when setting up task groups:

• a task can appear in more than one group if desired
• tasks that belong to no group are invisible to the admin UI (but of course available in other contexts of use)

The configuration of groups follows the same simple pattern as tasks, using properties in {{\[dspace\]/config/modules/curate.cfg}}. The group is assigned a simple logical name, but also a localizable name that appears in the UI. For example

# ui.taskgroups contains the list of defined groups, together with a pretty name for UI display
ui.taskgroups = \
  replication = Backup and Restoration Tasks, \
  integrity = Metadata Integrity Tasks, \
  .....
# each group membership list is a separate property, whose value is comma-separated list of logical task names
ui.taskgroup.integrity = profileformats, requiredmetadata
....

In workflow

CS provides the ability to attach any number of tasks to standard DSpace workflows. Using a configuration file {{\[dspace\]/config/workflow-curation.xml}}, you can declaratively (without coding) wire tasks to any step in a workflow. An example:

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