DocFetcher Server 1.1 is out. This releases is mostly a collection of usability improvements to round out some of the rough edges of the first release. Most items on the changelog are more or less significant, so in this release announcement there isn’t really much to do except copy and paste the entire changelog:
- The application could not be run on older Linux distributions due to a glibc compatibility issue. It now runs on Linux distributions with glibc 2.17 or newer.
- Among the indexing settings, there’s now a new setting for skipping content indexing for all files that are bigger than a certain maximum file size. The filenames of these files can still be indexed. With this new setting, it’s now possible to skip large files that may cause the application to run out of memory during indexing.
- In the Admin Area in the indexes table, there’s a new column “Visible”. By ticking and unticking the checkboxes in that column, you can control which indexes are transmitted to the clients, and which indexes are kept only on the server side. This is useful if you have some very large and rarely used indexes; keeping them on the server side when they’re not needed will make the web interface load faster.
- In the result table, you can now press the arrow-up and arrow-down keys to navigate to the previous or next result, with the contents of the preview pane updated accordingly. However, for this to work properly, you need to turn off “Automatically scroll to first match in preview pane” in the user preferences.
- For tablet users, there’s now a button above the result table for downloading the first selected result. Before, downloading results was only possible via the result table’s context menu, which is difficult to open on tablets.
- For technical reasons, the users that are counted towards the application’s client limit are identified by browser session rather than by IP address. Among other things, this means accessing the web interface from multiple browsers on the same computer counts as multiple clients rather than as a single client. For some users, this can be quite inconvenient. In addition, it was also inconvenient for a single user to switch between different computers. For these use cases, there’s now a workaround called “session stealing”, which means that when the client limit is reached, new users may take over existing sessions, thus kicking their previous owners out of the web interface. The intended use is for users to kick “themselves” out in order to more easily switch between browsers and/or computers. For instances of DocFetcher Server with a client limit greater than 1, session stealing is off by default and must be enabled in the Admin Area on the Access tab.
- It’s now possible to inject custom CSS and JavaScript into the web interface, on the server side, via the files misc/custom.css and misc/custom.js. Note that no support or HTML stability guarantees for such customizations is provided, as explained in the comments in the custom.css and custom.js files.