HCMC Blogs

Implemented GUIs for the last few tables. We decided to enable the editing of some relationships in more than one location (e.g. owners can be linked with titles in both the title and owner record, and ditto for mortgages and titles). There are more of these types of relationship which could be made visible in two places, but we'll see first if this facility is helpful or just confusing to the data entry folks.

I've now implemented and tested GUI components for the following tables:

• census_tracts
• other_docs
• owners
• props
• props_to_props
• titles (a bit more to do there)
• docs_to_titles
• joint_tenants_to_titles
• owners_to_titles
• lenders
• titles_to_titles

Remaining:

• mortgages
• lenders_to_mortgages
• mortgages_to_titles

Only the biblio remaining. Also set up XEP rendering to PDF in oXygen 11, which I'm currently using alongside 10.

Following the model used in the AdaptiveDB project, I've set up a parallel database called properties_dev, and a parallel PHP structure, so we now have site and site_dev on the server. I've also written a script to copy over the live data from the live db to the dev db (not a simple process because of all the foreign keys; everything has to be done in exactly the right order to avoid failures). I've tested this in a limited way -- there's only a tiny bit of data in two tables at the moment, because the other table definitions haven't been created yet, so it can't be fully tested. But this will give us the ability to build the remaining GUI components and test them in a separate instance, while the academics work on the existing system.

Continued working on the names file:

• finished entering spelling variants
• deleted unnecessary comments; also deleted type and subtype attributes
• started making brief entries in the notes element

I came a cross some documentation for OL that says that
"As of OpenLayers 2.7, there is no support for selecting features from more than a single vector layer at a time. The layer which is currently being used for selection is the last one on which the .activate() method of the attached select feature control was called."

So, I need to rethink the way points get drawn on the map. Using vector layers exclusively provides a certain amount of freedom in that I can build a single javascript function to create vector features on the map. Vector layers handle all needed types: points, lines and polygons. I have a static vector page that I understand here: http://hcmc.uvic.ca/grs/map/vector.html

I'll continue working on it to figure out how to drop features on it using my js function.

For some time, I've been experiencing freezes on my machine when running both Tomcat and oXygen at the same time. Today we worked hard to find a fix for this, and we seem to have a working solution:

• Restrict the memory available to Tomcat by adding this to the top of [tomcat]/bin/catalina.sh:

  JAVA_OPTS=-Xms128M" "-Xmx256M" "-XX:MaxPermSize=256m

  Tomcat had been eating up an amazing 18GB of virtual memory.
• Prevent oXygen from using its own JRE, by renaming the "jre" directory in the oXygen directory so that it can't find the local one, and falls back on the system VM. oXygen is still using lots of memory (13 GB of virtual memory), but it's not bringing the machine to its knees.

We think the heart of the problem was running two relatively unrestricted Java apps each using a different VM on the same system.

Working most of the day on the map display, and getting close to completion. I've now got the menus functioning as required -- looking pretty much like the main menu on the rest of the pages, but right-aligned; and I've got the access keys working for all the menus except for the items in the drop-downs. The site banner graphic is now included, as is the metadata (both displayed for the reader and included in Dublin Core in the header). There's a lot more tidying up to do, and I need to test on IE (it works on the other browsers), but we're pretty close now.

Nine files in 1858 require proof against their respective images, which are in CO 6/26 [on the coldesp server already in LAC scans folder: B-3009 and B-3010]:

B585HB06.scx, B585HB07.scx, B585HB09.scx, B585HB10.scx, B585HB11.scx, B585HB14.scx, B585HB35.scx, B585MI01_A.scx, B585MI02.scx.

For now, since we are scheduled to deliver up to 1857 (for our June 22nd, 2010 launch), we will put the processing of the images required for these files on hold.

Implemented the editing GUI for the first two tables, census_tracts and props. These only depend on each other, so entering of that data can begin immediately if JS-R and JM want to get going. I'll add more tables over the next few weeks.