Release Date: 24 December 1999

New Features

  • A new command Refresh... (View->Refresh...) has been added to allow the latest version of the record being viewed to be fetched. If you receive the message that a newer version of a record is available when trying to edit the data, the Refresh... command allows you to get that newer version.
  • An EMu configuration file (etc/config) has been added to allow tailoring of site specific settings. When a client is upgraded this file is not overwritten. A sample configuration file (etc/config.sample) contains details of all the possible settings and their default values.
  • emuperms has been modified to read the file etc/perms to get a list of file permissions to check/set. Support has been added to allow files to be optional. If a file name starts with @ and the file does not exist then emuperms will not complain. Support has also been added to allow for a local/etc/perms file, allowing permissions to be set on local files.
  • The nga system has been renamed to the more generic title of gallery.
  • When a value referenced in another record on the screen is modified and saved, all records referencing that value will now refresh the value automatically.
  • A new Notes column has been added to the Bibliographic References table in the gallery system. This allows notes to be associated with each bibliographic reference.
  • A new Notes column has been added to the Objects Attached to Event table in the Events module. This allows notes to be associated with each object attached to the event.
  • A new field called Acquisition Identifier has been added to the Accession Lots module.
  • Added Previous Accession No field to the gallery catalogue and client.
  • The Parties module query form has been updated by adding Middle name and changing First, Last, Title and Suffix to use LinkGrids for querying.
  • The name of the client is now included on the title of the Command Centre, the task button and the login screen. It is now easy to see what clients are running on a given machine.
  • A new variable EMUHTMLSERVERS can be set in the EMu configuration file (etc/config) to specify the number of texhtmlservers that should be started. The default value is 4.
  • The EMu default web interface has been upgraded to include the client's logo at the top of each page. The EMu logo has also been included. If a record has multimedia attached, it's summary data will have an '*' appended to it.
  • Support was added to EMu for local references. A local reference is a field in the local database that contains data copied form another database via a reference. When performing queries on reference fields the local reference is used (if it exists), rather than querying the referenced database. A syncing daemon has been added to update the copied fields whenever a change is made to the referenced data. Release 418 does not contain any local references as yet. It is anticipated they will be added in release 419.

Bugs Fixed

  • The gallery client's catalogue used default precision's of 2 on measurement fields rather than allowing arbitrary precision's to be specified.
  • If a startup error occurred with the server, the resulting error message would be sent down the communication socket to the client. The client side API would get very confused over this arbitrary byte stream and generally give an out of memory error (although other errors could occur). In fact any error message output by the server would confuse the client. texserver has been modified (as of 6.1.013) to place all error message in a log file (etc/log/stderr).
  • When changing both the Prompt and Data languages via the Options... command, the prompt language would be set correctly, however the data language would always be set to show all languages, irrespective of what the user had selected.
  • emubldlinks did not create links for cgi-emu and cgi-emus. Also the html links created for the catalogue were incorrect.
  • The Parties module summary data expression has been modified to include the full middle name, rather than just the initial.
  • Selecting the Close command from the EMu task button (right click on task button) caused EMu to generate an Access Violation.
  • When querying on a nested table that is a reference, the wrong query was being generated. The referenced table was using different semantics to those of a local nested table. The querying mechanism has been modified so that the local semantics now apply to reference tables.
  • When specifying queries that contained terms in local fields and in referenced fields an incorrect query statement was being generated.
  • If a query term had a trailing language delimiter (e.g. term;:;) then EMu would generate a syntax error when performing the query evaluation. In fact the error was produced if any trailing punctuation was specified.
  • The standard Windows Whats This? help system does not allow disabled controls or controls that cannot get focus to be selected. In particular you could not get help on group boxes and labels. The help system has been rewritten to allow prompts and group boxes (and any other disabled or non-focused control) to be selected.
  • The emubldsetup script did not include the query form (qry) when making a server release. When a new installation was performed, the EMu databases were not initialised correctly since the query form did not exist. Some of the EMu scripts would not run correctly since texforms would go straight into Insertion mode.

Upgrade Notes

  • Since the format of the summary data for eparties has been modified it is necessary to perform a Data File Update on the eparties database.
  • In order for the new Refresh... command to work you will need to have at least Texpress Version 6.1.013 installed.