Arkindex 1.7.0

We are happy to announce that a new Arkindex release is available. You can explore Arkindex and try out the newest features on our demo instance, demo.arkindex.org.

Document exports

You can now export data from Arkindex as PDF or PAGE XML documents. The Export as PDF and Export as PAGE XML actions are available in any project or folder element, or from the selection.

Document export actions
Figure 1. Document export actions in the Import / Export menu

See the dedicated section in the Arkindex documentation for more information.

Tasks Time To Live (TTL)

Following the introduction of the ponos.maximum_task_ttl setting in release 1.6.6, tasks are now stopped if they reach their TTL. On the process status pages, both the duration of a task and its TTL are displayed.

Task duration and TTL
Figure 2. Task duration and TTL on the process status page

This development was supported by the pictorIA consortium-HN.

Processes

When viewing the elements of a configured process, if a classification was used to filter these elements it is now displayed.

Process elements with classification filter
Figure 3. Process elements with classification filter

If some tasks in a process have been restarted, the old tasks are no longer taken into account to compute the process status. For example, if some failed tasks were restarted and succeeded, the process is marked as successfully completed.

[Enterprise Edition] Project creation loading view

When deploying Arkindex, you can setup a database replica in order to speed up some operations. However, this can cause latency issues when creating new objects. One such issue was that sometimes, when creating a new project, you would get redirected to that project’s page before if was created in the replica database, and shown an error because the project could not be found.

Now, after creating a new project you get redirected to a project loading view until the project is found in the database.

Project creation awaiting view
Figure 4. Project creation awaiting view

Miscellaneous

Upgrade notes

To upgrade a development instance, follow this documentation.

To upgrade a production instance, you need to:

  • Deploy this release’s Docker image: registry.gitlab.teklia.com/arkindex/backend:1.7.0

  • Run the database migrations: docker exec ark-backend arkindex migrate

  • Update the system workers: docker exec ark-backend arkindex update_system_workers

The main changes impacting developers and system administrators are detailed below.

Retries for S3 requests

A new s3.max_retries setting configures how many times a failing S3 request should be retried. This defaults to 5. Only requests made by the Arkindex backend and RQ workers are affected, not those made by the frontend or by any Ponos task.

Arkindex now uses Boto3’s standard retry mode. Previous versions of Arkindex were retrying 4 times in the legacy retry mode.

New system workers

To support the new document exports feature, two new pdf_export and pagexml_export system workers have been added. To configure your instance properly for these system workers, make sure to run the update_system_workers command:

docker exec ark-backend arkindex update_system_workers

You can view or update these system workers manually through the administration interface.