2.1.0

Important: MetacatUI installation and upgrade steps have changed with this release. Please read the updated installation instructions before use.

MetacatUI 2.1.0 includes three new exciting features

1. MetacatUI now speaks Highwire Press! From dataset landing pages, you should be able to use some web-based reference importers, notably Mendeley's extensions and Zotero's importer bookmarklet, to automatically import relevant dataset citations details into those reference managers. This also paves the way for Google Scholar, if Google ever decides to start indexing datasets.

2. Dataset landing pages now show the number of downloads, views, and citations for datasets in participating DataONE member repositories.

3. Navigation by real pathnames rather than hash string (e.g. /data/page/2 rather than #data/page/2) which also allows all MetacatUI views to be indexed by Google as webpages. This change depends on an Apache configuration change.

For a full list of changes, see the 2.1.0 milestone.

New installation instructions

1. New Apache configuration required

The new routing changes work because when a client navigates to a MetacatUI view via a full pathname (/data) rather than a hash (/#data), Apache will serve the MetacatUI index.html page as a fallback resource instead of returning a 404 error. The fallback resource is specified via this Apache setting:

FallbackResource /index.html

Example Apache config:

<VirtualHost  *:443>
   
    DocumentRoot /var/www/my-site.com/
    ...
   <Directory "/var/www/my-site.com/metacatui">
         FallbackResource /metacatui/index.html
  </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

The FallbackResource directive requires your Apache version to be 2.2.16 and above. If you're using the earlier versions of Apache, you'll require mod_rewrite in your configuration. Example:

  <Directory "/var/www/my-site.com/metacatui">
  ...
  ...

  <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteBase /
      RewriteRule ^index\.html$ - [L]
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
      RewriteRule . /index.html [L]
  </IfModule>
  </Directory>

2. The MetacatUI root URL needs to be specified

A MetacatUI.root variable also needs to be set in MetacatUI, now. The default MetacatUI.root is /metacatui, which is the default installation location for MetacatUI when installed with Metacat.

If your MetacatUI is located at a different URL than /metacatui (e.g. https://my-site.com or https://my-site.com/catalog), then two things needs to be changed:

1. In index.html, set the URL for the loader.js script to the absolute URL of your MetacatUI loader.js file. (e.g. /loader.js or /catalog/loader.js or https://my-site.com/loader.js).

2. Set the MetacatUI.root variable in loader.js to the MetacatUI root location. e.g. / or /catalog or /loader.js)