CEDAR Release 1.8.1

May 7, 2018

CEDAR Workbench release 1.8.1 is now available. Most of the changes since the last major release provide internal plumbing, and will only become visible to users in coming releases. The two primary results of this type are initial support for provenance and versioning, and internal support for first-class fields.

Provenance and versioning

CEDAR has updated its internal model for provenance and versioning fields, to indicate where derived metadata templates come from and whether they are formally 'released' or just a draft version (and if so, which one). Much of the internal plumbing has been completed for this change, but plenty of work remains to make it cleanly visible and usable (e.g., in searches) for actual CEDAR users.

Internal support for first-class fields in the Template Designer

Right now, although CEDAR templates are built up out of many fields, CEDAR templating artifacts are limited to templates and elements—if you want a field, you have to create an element to hold it. In coming months, CEDAR will add the ability to create a field all by itself, and include that field in other elements or templates.

One of the first applications for this feature will be letting CEDAR work with Common Data Elements (CDEs)—essentially advanced definitions of fields—from the caDSR project. By representing caDSR CDEs as fields, CEDAR will provide users with access to a large number of existing field definitions that can be used in their own forms.

So far we've just made model and API changes to support these fields, but soon we'll be making stand-alone fields visible to users. Stay tuned!

Usability and Reliability Improvements

As usual, we've made a few usability improvements in this release. The most noticeable is a refined outline in the Metadata Editor, making field and element hierarchies easier to follow.

References

You may wish to reference our internal release notes for the 1.8.1 release

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Last Updated: 
Jul 4 2018 - 3:41pm