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Customisation

We have made a variety of customisations to the base InvenioRDM app. These are potential pain points, particularly when upgrading to a new version of InvenioRDM. On upgrade all of the below should be carefully checked to ensure that they are still working as intended.

UI Updates

Layout and Styling

Changes have been made to apply Imperial College London branding to the site. Changes have been made to style sheets via overrides in the assets/less/site directory. HTML templates have also been overriden in the templates/semantic-ui directory. The layout and styling customisations shoud be carefully rechecked on upgrade (particularly of invenio-app-rdm) to ensure that they are still working as intended.

Hiding Communities Feature

InvenioRDM provides a feature for creating communities of deposits with an associated review and approval process for publication. In order to facilitate a central review process by the library for all deposits we have made use of the in-built communities feature. Under this model there is a single community to which all deposits are added and the application UI is updated to remove links and references to communities in key places.

This has been implemented by the following changes:

  • Hiding UI links to pages for creating or listing communities PR #97.
  • Updating links to create a new deposit to have the "icl" community pre-selected.
  • Hiding the communities header on the new deposit page.

Deposit Form

Some changes to the deposit form have made use of the support in InvenioRDM for overriding React components. See InvenioRDM Docs: How to override UI React components for more details. Overriden components are stored in assets/js/invenio_app_rdm/overridableRegistry/mapping.js. In summary:

  • The creators field has been customised to remove the role subfield as this was considered confusing and to provide better alignment with the Datacite metadata schema. Implemented by the custom component OptionalRoleCreatibutorsField that allows control over whether the role subfield is displayed as well as the display of clarifying help text. The implementation of OptionalRoleCreatibutorsField unfortunately required extensive copy-pasting of the original CreatibutorsField component so any updates to invenio-rdm-records should be carefully checked and any changes manually ported over.
  • The contributors field has been customised to add additional help text. This is also implemented using the custom OptionalRoleCreatibutorsField component.
  • The following fields have been hidden - resource_type, publisher, publication_date and references. This has been implemented by overriding with the custom HiddenField component. Some values have still had a default value set where we want values to be present in the metadata but not editable by the user.
  • The description field has been customised to use a standard textarea rather than a rich text editor as it was considered that plain text was more appropriate for this field.
  • The license field has been customised to provide a selection of licenses from a fixed list. Implemented by the custom component LimitedLicenseField. Similar to the OptionalRoleCreatibutorsField this required extensive copy-pasting of the original LicensesField component so the same checks and changes should be applied on update of invenio-rdm-records.

Other customisations have used the APP_RDM_DEPOSIT_FORM_DEFAULTS setting (set in site/ic_data_repo/config/settings.py). In summary:

  • resource_type has been set to "dataset".
  • publication_data is set to the current date.
  • rights is set to the CC-BY-4.0 license.
  • publisher is set to "Imperial College London".
  • creators is set to the logged in user.

Authentication

Authentication via Imperial SSO is handled by the ic_data_repo.auth.oauth module. This implements an info_handler function that extracts user information the SSO response. Relevant settings for are set in ic_data_repo.config.settings.