Loughborough Online Reading List System
Archive for November, 2010
Perl ZOOM issues
22 Nov 2010
by Jon Knight
in LUMP
We’re getting to the point at Loughborough where we’re considering “going live” early next year with LUMP, replacing the existing LORLSv5 install that we have as our current production reading list system. As such, we’ve just spun up a new virtual server today, to do a test LUMP install on it. This machine has a fresh CentOS installation on it, so needs all the Perl modules loaded. As we use Net::Z3950::ZOOM now, this was one of the modules installed (along with a current YAZ tool chain).
Once we’d got the basic LUMP/CLUMP code base installed on the machine I grabbed the existing LORLS database from the machine it resides on, plus the /usr/local/ReadingLists directory from the LORLSv5 install on there, in order to run the create_structures LUMP importer script. Which then barfed, complaining that “Net::Z3950::RecordSyntax::USMARC” was a bareword that couldn’t be used with strict subs (LUMP, and LORLS before it, makes use of Perl’s “use strict” feature to sanity check code).
Hmm… odd – this problem hadn’t arisen before, and indeed the error appeared to be in the old LORLSv5 ReadingListsItem.pm module, not any of the LUMP code. A bit of delving into the modules eventually turned up the solution: the new Net::Z3950::ZOOM doesn’t do backward compatibility too well. There was a load of code in /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/Net/Z3950.pm that appeared to implement the old pre-ZOOM Net::Z3950 subroutines, but it was all commented out. I realised that we’d not had this issue before because I’d run the importer on machines that already had LORLSv5 with an older copy of Net::Z3950 on them.
The “solution” was simply to uncomment all the sub routines under the Net::Z3950::RecordSyntax package. The create_structures script doesn’t actually use any of the LORLSv5 Z3950 stuff anyway, so its not an issue – we just need the old LORLSv5 modules to install so that we can use them to access material in the old database. I guess this goes to show the problems you can accrue when you reuse a namespace for a non-backwardly compatible API.
Adding and removing group members
15 Nov 2010
by Jon Knight
in LUMP
Jason and I have been batting code back and forth for the last couple of weeks to provide an API and CLUMP interface to adding and removing people from usergroups. We’ve gone through several iterations of designs and implementations and now have something that seems to be working OK on our development installation – hopefully soon to appear on the demo sandbox (unless Gary decides that he wants it to work in a different way! 😉 ).
With that more or less done, and some POD documentation tweaks (‘cos I’d been doing a bit too much cutting and pasting between scripts!), I can now go back to dealing with some of the backend management scripts. The first two of these will be a simple link checker and a cron-able script to (re-)populate the “held by library” information. Gary has a couple more reports that Library staff have asked for, but they might just require a couple of APIs to be produced to allow existing reporting systems to work (they weren’t part of the distributed LORLS code base – just local Loughborough reports).
Gary has presented the new system to several groups recently with mostly positive feedback. We’ve just installed a link to this blog (and thus the demo sandbox system) into the live LORLS installation’s managelist script at Loughborough so that more academics will get a heads-up that something new is around the corner.