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Meeting 100 – 25 August 2016

Agenda:

  • Actions from meeting 99 (Steve)
  • Component development
    • ICAT (Steve)
    • ICAT Manager (Alex)
    • Python-icat (Rolf)
    • IDS (Steve)
      • FUSE
      • PollCat (Frazer)
      • SmartClient (Steve)
      • WebDAV (Tom Gowland)
    • TopCAT (Jody)
    • IJP (Brian R & Becky)
    • ICAT Dashboard (Tom Gowland)
    • Multi-container support (Steve)
    • Installation (Steve)
  • Face to Face meeting for 2016 and NOBUGS (Steve)
  • Issues from ICAT production deployments (Any)
  • AOB (Any)

Present: Brian R, Tom Griffin, Becky, Steve, Jeremy, Frazer, Sylvie, Andy, Peter, Alex and Tom Gowland

Apologies: Rolf and Jianguo

Action 98.1: Tom Griffin has now been removed from the action to “Publish state for STFC production deployments” leaving Kevin assigned.

Action 99.0: Tom Gowland has produced a draft of the screencast for TopCAT. He has received very useful feedback and will be producing a new draft shortly.

  • ICAT: Steve reported on the issue surrounding duplicate datafile locations. Rolf wrote in the ICAT group that because if the IDS has hash function protection of the location field then datafiles can’t be cloned. To circumvent this problem requires that ICAT and the IDS must communicate somehow.  Andy asked which facility requires duplicate datafiles and why. Steve replied that it is Octopus that require the duplication and DLS already have a huge number. Steve also reported that he is working on a Restful API client in Python. Due to the synergy between python and JSON, this is working well. Steve has also been working on the general documentation around ICAT.
  • ICAT Manager: Andy reported that there was nothing planned yet regarding the issues in GitHub and suggested that perhaps it should be something to be talked about at the face to face meeting in October.
  • IDS: Steve reported that he wants to allow to manage multiple files with the same physical location for both downloaded and deletion.
  • PollCAT: Frazer reported that there has been more development on staging to SCARF. Shirley has been writing the code for this but it still needs testing.
  • SmartClient: Steve reported that Jody has been integrating SmartClient into TopCAT and wasn’t happy about the user having to accept a self-signed certificate. Steve has now set the server of the SmartClient to run on http as the only requests will come from localhost.
  • WebDAV: Tom Gowland reported that he has been working on the WebDAV system to allow it to be more dynamic. WebDAV now works for the ISIS facility (and hierarchy) and he is planning to allow it to be more configurable such that it can work for any facility after setting values in configuration files.
  • TopCAT: Steve reported on behalf of Jody. TopCAT is now pluggable meaning that the backend can be implemented in any language or framework. Jody is also working with Frazer on a TopCAT plugin that allows for remote analysis of data with ICAT. The DOI generation has bee separated out into another plugin. Becky also reported that she had been working on external filters meaning that you can now have filters other than the ones at the top of each grid. Andy thought that TopCAT seemed to be running slowly when trying to calculate the size of many datafiles and that when the page was refreshed it tried to calculate these sizes again. Tom Griffin reported that the issue had been fixed in TopCAT 2.1 and Andy confirmed he was using version 2.0.
  • IJP: Becky reported that she has re-implemented the IJP GUI as a plugin for TopCAT. This is due to be released at the same time as the next version of TopCAT. Brian reported that he had been making minor changes to the backend including refreshing job types at regular intervals (a requirement from Octopus) and also adding miredot document generation to the server.
  • Dashboard: Tom reported that he is working on building and deploying the Dashboard as well as being able to configure it properly in preparation for the demonstration at the face to face meeting.
  • Face to face meeting: Steve reported that he has uploaded the agenda for the meeting and has updated it to give Rolf a slot to present Ingestion with Python-ICAT. He has also removed Rolf from the IDS talk and Steve may be talking about this in his stead. The steering group meeting time has been set to 17:30 and will take place at the Avenue Hotel. Steve also welcomed any proposals for site reports. Andy also reported that he had uploaded an agenda for the steering group meeting and welcomes any feedback people

have.

Item Description Assigned
98.1 Publish state for STFC production deployments Kevin
99.0 Produce a screencast for the TopCAT demo Tom Gowland
100.0 Submit a bug for adding the upgrade path for TopCAT JSON Steve