Improvements to Metadata workflow

Date	2012/09/21
Contact(s)	Heikki Doeleman, Jose García, Steven Smolders
Last edited
Status	Proposed for vote
Assigned to release	2.9
Resources	from AGIV ​http://www.agiv.be
Ticket #	TBD

Overview

The current support for workflow in GeoNetwork is somewhat limited. Metadata can be in one of a number of workflow-related states, but state transitions are not restricted. When a metadata is public, an editor who makes changes and saves, cannot prevent those changes to become visible to the public unless the metadata is made invisible to the public. This proposal introduces somewhat more strict lifecycle transitions along with a mechanism where metadata remains publicly visible even when an editor is in the process of changing it and saving his changes.

Proposal Type

• Module: ALL

Links

• Documents
• Email discussions:
• Other wiki discussions:

Voting History

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Motivations

• A well-defined workflow helps increase quality of the metadata.
• Keeping the original public version of a metadata public, while an editor is taking time to makes changes to it, helps increase quality of the catalogue.

Proposal

stricter state transitions

The only state transitions that are allowed, are:

DRAFT -> SUBMITTED

SUBMITTED -> REJECTED

SUBMITTED -> APPROVED

REJECTED -> DRAFT

APPROVED -> DRAFT

(the status RETIRED and UNKNOWN are not considered here).

Note that Administrator users are able to make any state transition anyway.

better state awareness through icons

To make immediately clear what the state is of a metadata, colourful icons (and the state name) indicate this in the search results and in the metadata view. This information is only displayed to users who are logged in to GeoNetwork.

This is a screenshot of how this looks like in search results in the classic GUI:

This is a screenshot of how this looks like in one of the Ext GUIs:

workspace

Backwards Compatibility Issues

None.

New libraries added

Nope.

Risks

Participants

Heikki Doeleman, Jose García, Steven Smolders