Overview
Work was done on the already existing [http://www.jafer.org/ Jafer] search portlet to add functionality that had been developed for the original SPP search portlet. The Jafer search portlet provided for the search and retrieval of records from remote Z39.50 targets. The SPP changes included providing support for a search history feature and contextualised help.
History
The original SPP work included the development of a cross-searching portlet, which could search multiple remote (Z39.50 and other) targets in parallel. However, since this portlet pre-dated both the Jafer search portlet work (undertaken as part of the [http://www.hull.ac.uk/cree/ CREE] project) and the [http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168 JSR 168] portlet specification, and considering that the CREE 2 follow-up project would be working with the outputs of this current SPP work, it was decided to expend available effort on continuing the development of the Jafer search portlet. Although the original SPP cross-searching portlet is no longer being maintained its code can be found from the ["Archive"] page.
SPP Changes
The additions to the Jafer search portlet undertaken as part of the SPP work included:
- Search History. Searches are recorded upon execution and can be browsed via a UI icon. Previous searches can be re-run or edited. Works within a session only.
- Single Search Portlet. An additional portlet that displays only the results of a single saved search. The search is defined via the EDIT portlet mode. The search is run on submission from EDIT mode, and can be re-run from the VIEW mode by use of the refresh icon.
Contextual help. Depending on the user's location within the various VIEW portlet mode screens, switching to HELP mode will allow text contextualised to that VIEW mode screen to be displayed. Note that this help text would need to be supplied by the portal administrator. To do this the help xsl stylesheet must be edited. Its location is defined in WEB-INF/web.xml as the init-param named help (default: xsl/help.xsl). The stylesheet contains marked sections indicating the edits required.
[http://www.jisc.ac.uk JISC]'s [http://openurl.ac.uk/doc/ OpenURL router] is used by default in the presentation of records (see: xsl/item.xsl)
User interface edits, including the use of some [http://tango.freedesktop.org/ Tango Desktop Project] icons.
Download
The Jafer portlets incorporating the SPP changes are available from the ["Download"] page.
Installation
Unpack the jafer-spp archive.
> cd jafer-spp
> ant build-jafer-portlet
Follow your portlet container's instructions on deploying the resulting build/dist/jafer-portlets.war.