Hydra Administrative Tool for a Fedora Repository

A Rails engine providing an administrative interface to a Fedora Commons repository built on the Hydra project framework.

Status

Build Status

This project should be considered experimental. Versions earlier than 1.0 may change API and/or UI without notice or regard for backward compatibility.

Requirements

fcrepo_admin is designed for installation on hydra-head 6.0 or higher (requires active-fedora 6.1 or higher). See https://github.com/projecthydra/hydra-head/wiki/Installation-Prerequisites.

Installation

Prerequisite

An existing Hydra head. If you are starting from scratch, see https://github.com/projecthydra/hydra-head for instructions on creating a new Hydra head.

Add to Gemfile

gem 'fcrepo_admin'

Then bundle install

Mount the engine

In config/routes.rb add this line:

mount FcrepoAdmin::Engine => '/', :as=> 'fcrepo_admin'

You may use any mount point. All routes include objects as a subpath.

Add CanCan action aliases (fcrepo_admin >= 0.4.0)

In your Ability class (app/models/ability.rb) include the FcrepoAdmin::Ability module, for example:

class Ability
  include Hydra::Ability
  include Hydra::PolicyAwareAbility
  include FcrepoAdmin::Ability
end

FcrepoAdmin::Ability defines action aliases for permissions which are enforced on ActiveFedora::Base objects. If your application defines action aliases, please check FcrepoAdmin::Ability for conflicts as aliases are global.

Customize catalog search results (optional)

If you would like catalog search results items to link to the fcrepo_admin object show view instead of the catalog show view, create app/helpers/blacklight_helper.rb with this content:

module BlacklightHelper
  include Blacklight::BlacklightHelperBehavior  # Default Blacklight behaviors
  include FcrepoAdmin::Helpers::BlacklightHelperBehavior # fcrepo_admin overrides
end

If you have an existing custom blacklight helper module, simply include FcrepoAdmin::Helpers::BlacklightHelperBehavior after Blacklight::BlacklightHelperBehavior.

Add audit trail support (optional)

To enable access to the Fedora audit trail data through the fcrepo_admin UI, include the ActiveFedora::Auditable mixin in your ActiveFedora models:

include ActiveFedora::Auditable

Overriding fcrepo_admin behaviors

Configurable settings (fcrepo_admin >= 0.5.0)

To override default configurable settings for fcrepo_admin, create an initializer at config/initializers/fcrepo_admin.rb. You should start with this content:

module YourApp
  class Application < Rails::Application
    config.before_initialize do
      # Customized settings will go here
    end
  end
end

Refer to the default configuration settings at https://github.com/projecthydra/fcrepo-admin/blob/master/lib/fcrepo_admin/configurable.rb.

All configuration options are set by module methods prefixed by FcrepoAdmin, for example:

FcrepoAdmin.read_only = true

Helpers

Override objects helpers by creating app/helpers/fcrepo_admin/objects_helper.rb with this content:

module FcrepoAdmin::ObjectsHelper
  include FcrepoAdmin::Helpers::ObjectsHelperBehavior
  # override methods here
end

In particular you may want to override object_title.

Override datastreams helpers by creating app/helpers/fcrepo_admin/datastreams_helper.rb with this content:

module FcrepoAdmin::DatastreamsHelper
  include FcrepoAdmin::Helpers::DatastreamsHelperBehavior
  # override methods here
end

Context Navigation Menus

fcrepo_admin >= 0.5.0

The configuration settings that control the items on the context menus are:

FcrepoAdmin.object_nav_items = [:pid, :summary, :datastreams, :permissions, :associations, :audit_trail, :object_xml]
FcrepoAdmin.datastream_nav_items = [:dsid, :version, :current_version, :summary, :content, :download, 
                                    :edit, :upload, :history]

Each setting takes an array of symbols representing the items. You can start by copying the default values shown above. If you simply want to rearrange or remove items, then just modify the default arrays.

To add a custom navigation item, start by adding your own symbol to the approriate array setting. Then override the appropriate helper method (see section above on overriding fcrepo_admin helpers) -- for object context nav, override custom_object_nav_item in ObjectsHelper; for datastream context nav, override custom_datastream_nav_item in DatastreamsHelper.

Each method takes a single symbol argument and should return either nil (meaning no menu item is to be added) or the content of a menu item. Do not include the <li></li> wrapper. You may want to use link_to_unless_current and/or put a condition on the menu item (i.e., so that nil is returned if the condition is not met).

fcrepo_admin < 0.5.0

The contents of the object context navigation menu can be customized by overriding the object_context_nav_items helper method, or by copying and modifying the partial fcrepo_admin/objects/context_nav_items.

The contents of the datastream context navigation menu can be customized by overriding the datastream_context_nav_items helper method, or by copying and modifying the partial fcrepo_admin/datastreams/context_nav_items.

Controllers

To override or extend controller behaviors, please consult Rails engine documentation and guides, such as http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html.

IMPORTANT: If you add a non-RESTful action to a controller, you will probably have to add a CanCan action alias to your Ability class. For this, you can use Hydra's custom_permissions callback:

class Ability
  include Hydra::Ability
  include Hydra::PolicyAwareAbility
  include FcrepoAdmin::Ability

  def custom_permissions
    alias_action :my_method, :to => :read
  end
end

Associations

Due to the way Rails resolves relative paths to partials, in order to use Blacklight's default document index view behavior on the associations show page and avoid missing template errors, fcrepo_admin provides a custom document partial at fcrepo_admin/catalog/document that renders the partial at catalog/document, for which Blacklight provides a default. If you have a custom document partial at a different path that you want to use for the document list on the associations show page, you may be able to simply copy it to app/views/fcrepo_admin/catalog/document, or you might try putting this content in that file:

<%= render :partial => 'path/to/my/document', :locals => { :document => document, :document_counter => document_counter } %>

replacing the partial path as appropriate. If anyone has a better solution or knows of a way to avoid providing the document partial in fcrepo_admin admin, please submit a pull request.

Blacklight document actions

Blacklight's default show page for a document (i.e., Solr document for, in this case, an ActiveFedora object) includes a menu of actions, including a bookmark function. In order to provide the most flexible interface with a focus on repository "administrative" functions, we have not included this content in the default fcrepo_admin views. However, since the fcrepo_admin object show view includes the Solr document in its context, you could re-add this functionality by overriding the default template at fcrepo_admin/objects/show.html.erb or by overriding the catalog show partial which that views renders.

Read-only mode

To suppress mutating behaviors (i.e, routes, nav items, etc.) regardless of user permissions, add this configuration setting:

FcrepoAdmin.read_only = true

Internationalization (i18n)

An effort has been made to support i18n on headings, menus, etc. See https://github.com/projecthydra/fcrepo-admin/blob/master/config/locales/fcrepo_admin.en.yml for the keys and consult the Rails documentation on how to provide your own translations or alternate text values.

Known Issues

Pagination

Kaminari as of version 0.14.1 does not support namespace-prefixed routes, which causes a routing error in Blacklight's paginate_rsolr_response helper when called from within fcrepo_admin. In place of paginate_rsolr_response fcrepo_admin use its own helper safe_paginate_rsolr_response which provides a basic set of pagination links without using Kaminari.

There is (as of 2013-05-24) an outstanding Kaminari pull request which resolves the routing issue (https://github.com/amatsuda/kaminari/pull/322). You can implement this solution by adding to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'kaminari', github: 'harai/kaminari', branch: 'route_prefix_prototype'

and then override the safe_paginate_rsolr_response helper with something like:

def safe_paginate_rsolr_response(response)
  paginate_rsolr_response response, :outer_window => 2, :theme => 'blacklight', :route_set => fcrepo_admin
end

the key part being the :route_set option -- note that the value is not a string -- with gets passed through to Kaminari.

If Kaminari is suitably patched in the future, we will likely remove safe_paginate_rsolr_response in favor of paginate_rsolr_response.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md in the root of the project.

License

See the LICENSE file in the root directory of the project for copyright and license information.

Licenses for code copied from other projects will be included in source files as required.