EBMS Tickets

I'll record a bit of research I did in order to make an estimate of this task.

Comments about full text upload failures are recorded in a table called 'ebms_ft_unavailable'. There can only be one row in this table for a given article and only one comment recorded. I found no code in the system that allows a row in that table to be deleted or updated, though maybe I missed something.

Confusingly, I found two different places where this table is updated, in fulltext.inc and in citations.inc. Normally we would want a table to always be managed from a single place in the code, so I'm thinking this may be one of those places where two different programmers, working under the heavy time pressures imposed at the beginning of the EBMS development, each solved the problem separately, unaware of the other person's work.

Looking in the database, I found exactly two different comments in the table explaining why full text was unavailable. One was a comment created by the CMS -> EBMS conversion program. It occurred 854 times. The text of the comment is: "Converted from legacy data".

The other comment is: "PDF size 25 MB; maximum size to upload is 20 MB." It occurred once, entered by Sharon QK.

Those 855 comments account for all rows in the table.

Given that there's only one non-conversion row in the table and just one real comment, I think we should discuss the value and future of this comment type. If the value is such that work is warranted, we should also discuss whether code refactoring is desirable.

~JutheR: I see you've bumped this ticket higher in the backlog queue. Have you had a chance to discuss Alan's implied question (is it work it to do anything for a single comment?) with your colleagues?

I think we talked about this one in a CDR meeting, but Bonnie adds comments sometimes when she uploads a PDF, which isn't covered by either of the cases Alan describes above. It appears these aren't being stored at all.

It appears that Dan (and the requirements) only intended the comment field to be used in the ebms_ft_unavailable table when the "Unable To Upload" box is checked, but the form unfortunately does not make this clear. So we have three paths for addressing this ticket:

1. Modify the wording on the form to make it clear that the Comment field is only used for cases when the full text is unavailable (2 story points).

2. Add a new table to record comments for successful file uploads, modify the form submit logic to populate the new table, modify the code which populates the form for editing an existing upload action (called a "decision" here for some reason) and modify the article display software to include the new comments (at least 13 story points).

3. Add a new full text upload tag to which comments can be added (in addition to #1 above: 3 story points).

Let us know which you want and I'll plug in the LOE estimate for the ticket.

Bonnie indicated that most of the comments she's putting in at the full-text retrieved state have to do with related citations (e.g., duplicate citations or editorials). I proposed a new tag "Related citation" for issue OCEEBMS-270 with the thought that we might kill a few birds with one stone, including giving Bonnie a place to put these comments.

However, would it be possible to remove the comment field and only have it show up when "Unable to upload" is checked?

How would a user know when to use the "related citation" tag and when to use the "related article" mechanism we build for OCEEBMS-349?

Good question. We've decided to just implement the related article mechanism described in OCEEBMS-349.

This question is still applicable, though: would it be possible to remove the comment field and only have it show up when "Unable to upload" is checked?

Comment field for full text upload is now visible only when the "Unable to Upload" box is checked.

Verified on QA SG.

Verified on PROD.