Toolhub/Progress reports/2022-01-28
Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2022-01-28.
Lists[edit]
Slavina has been working on patches recently towards our goal of fully implementing the lists feature from our roadmap. The core support of lists was included in our 1.0 release, but many desirable features remain to be exposed in the Toolhub user interface. Slavina is close to completing the user interface for viewing the edit history of a list including support for viewing historic revisions, diffs between revisions, and typical patrolling actions. Raymond improved the output of the GET /api/lists/{list_pk}/revisions/{id}/ endpoint so that it now returns all the information needed to render the historic revision in each result.
The team expects to prioritize additional work on lists in the coming weeks to add screens for searching/filtering across all public lists as well as new ways to add tools to lists.
Autocomplete search for tools by name[edit]
Raymond implemented a feature suggested by Husky so that the search input on the home and search screens will show a list of tools who's titles match the current input. This is quite similar to the way that MediaWiki's CirrusSearch shows matching page titles as you type a query. The current implementation of this search will be improved in the future by implementing an N-gram tokenizer so that results found are not limited to full word matches.
Author and tags now linked to search[edit]
Another feature suggestion from Husky was to link the author and keyword values for a tool back to the search system to find all tools with matching values. Raymond has added support for this functionality. Future work to support better specification of multiple authors as suggested by Samwilson will benefit this feature as well.
Initial Annotations support in development[edit]
Initial work on the data model and related backend integration for the Annotations feature set from our roadmap has begun. Bryan has been working on a "spike" to explore the needed functionality. Currently his local development environment has storage and search integration working. This work allowed the team to recognize and discuss several questions about how users should see annotations in audit logs and edit history. With new ideas of what is needed, Bryan will return to implementation with a hope of sharing a collection of related patches to the team for review in the coming week.
Wrap up[edit]
We are now a month into 2022 and the Foundation's fiscal year 2021-2022 Q3 (January-March 2022) time box. The team is revisiting it's prior plans to adjust for the places where theory and reality have diverged. Broadly we are still on track to add more features which are hoped to be used to improve both the quantity and quality of Toolhub's catalog of tool information. We are planning to focus on completing the planned feature set for lists, improving patrolling workflows, and adding new abilities for the community to document important aspects of tools.