ContributorPages

Contributor Pages were introduced in Release 8 to allow a higher level grouping of information as well as distinguish contributors/institutions from individual researchers. In order to leverage information already in the registry and simplify the content management process, it was decided that contributor pages would be dynamically generated based on specially "tagged" Party records.

Example Contributor page

Once tagged (see below) pages will be rendered according to a special template, which includes canned text and statistics about the records belonging to that contributor. Statistics are aggregated using the group attribute in RIFCS.

The display of the page is generated in /rda/_xsl/rifcs2ViewInstitution.xsl.

Left-hand content is generated largely by the RIFCS content (particularly the description elements which include the new @type="researchAreas", @type="researchShowcase" & @type="researchSupport" (if defined)).

The right-hand content is generated dynamically by the initInstitutionViewPage() in /rda/js/script.js which provides a wrapper for functions in /rda/.../controllers/view_part.php.

It is expected that institutional pages will be customised by users adding their own text and formatted elements (using a subset of HTML). To accomodate this, the size limitation on the description element has been increased to 12000 characters per element.

Also included are a print-view of the institutional page (which removes the header, footer and some imagery components) and a preview of the institutional page (which provides a way for draft RIFCS records to be previewed as if they were institutional pages).

How are records "tagged"?

To be tagged as a contributor page, a data source must identify itself as the responsible owner for that institution. Although it is understood that in certain circumstances an institution may have more than one data source, at this time, the data source is the top-most element in our information model, hence this approach.

A new section has been added to the Data Source Edit screen which allows users to manage properties of their data source with respect to this new functionality. The new section will list all groups which are identified as being part of the data source (i.e. all distinct group attributes in records belonging to the data source).

The user can then choose to enable Institutional Pages. If "Automatic" is selected, a number of registry objects will be created within the data source with keys like "Institution:". If "Manual" is selected, the user can manually tag existing records to be displayed as institutional pages.

Technical Notes

• Contributor Pages have effects in the Data Source Admin screen, the Add Registry Object screen (specifically, where the "Preview in RDA" link points to a institutional page preview) and the Research Data Australia home page.
• In the future, this sort of "alternate view" would better be achieved by a plugin
• In the future, the "view_part" functionality should be handled by a generic web service (see Topic page jswidget for example)