Posts tagged AJAX

It has been a while since I posted any updates on improvements to CLUMP (the default interface to LORLS) and as we have just started testing the latest beta version, it seemed a good time to make a catch up post.  So other than the Word export option, what other features have been introduced?

Advanced sort logic

With the addition of sub-headings in version 7 of LORLS it soon become obvious that we needed to improve the logic of our list sorting routines as they were no longer intuitive.  Historically our list sorting routines have treated the list as one long list (as without sub-headings there was no consistent way to denote a subsection of a list other than using a sub-list).

The new sorting logic is to break the list into sections and then sort within each section.  In addition to keeping the ordering of the subsections any note entries at the top of a section are considered to be sticky and as such won’t be sorted.

Finally if there are any note entries within the items to be sorted the user is warned that these will be sorted with the rest of the subsections entries.

Article suggestions

Another area that we have been investigating is suggestions to list owners for items they might want to consider for their lists.  The first stage of this it the inclusion of a new question on the dashboard, “Are there any suggested items for this list?”.  When the user clicks on this question they are shown a list of suggested articles based upon ExLibris’s bX recommender service.

To generate the article suggestions current articles on the list are taken and bX queried for recommendations.  All of the returned suggestions are sorted so the at the more common recommendations are suggested first.

Default base for themes

CLUMP now has a set of basic styles and configurations that are used as the default options.  These defaults are then over-ridden by the theme in use.  This change was required to make the task of maintaining custom themes easier.  Where previously, missing entries in a customised theme would have to be identified and updated by hand before the theme could be used, now those custom themes will work as any missing entries will fall back to using the system default.

The back button

One annoyance with CLUMP has been that due to being AJAX based the back button would take users to the page they were on before they started looking at the system rather than the Department, Module, List they were looking at previously.  This annoyance has finally been removed by using the hash-ref part of the URL to identify the structural unit currently being viewed.

Every time the user views a new structural unit the hash-ref is updated with its ID.  Instead of reloading the page when the user or browser changes the hash-ref (e.g. through clicking the back button) a JavaScript event is triggered.  The handler attached to this event parses the hash-ref and extracts the structural unit ID which is used to display the relevant structural unit.