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Funnelback 15.20.0

Release notes for Funnelback 15.20.0

Released : 15 March 2019

Supported until: 15 March 2022 (Long Term Support Version)

New features

This release of Funnelback introduces:

  • New web-resources and a template editing interface with support for using local text editors via WebDAV.

Improvements

Knowledge graph is easier to implement

  • Documents lacking a node label and/or node name metadata are now ignored, which simplifies the use of single collections for knowledge graph and search.

  • The handling of quotes and spaces within node labels is now better supported.

  • Mentions relationships on any metadata field not yet declared with a relationship type are now created.

Search administration user logins have configurable session options and better auditing

  • Options to control the session lengths of search administration user logins, session refresh periods, and the ability to prevent concurrent logins are now available.

  • A dedicated log of search admin authentication attempts is now available. Repeated failures are tracked and warnings are logged if the failures in a specified time period exceed the threshold, where both the time period and threshold are configurable values.

Incorporating existing branding assets into search results pages is easier

  • To simplify the incorporation of existing branding assets into search result pages, CSS selector support for the IncludeURL template macro is now available.

Miscellaneous improvements

  • The underlying storage for accessibility auditor's historical data has been redesigned, resulting in greatly improved performance and memory usage.

  • The Twitter collection data model for HTTPS URLs has been improved and now provides more information in retweets.

  • The debounce delay for Concierge auto-completion is now configurable.

  • To minimise the impact of historically clicked search results on search results ranking, -weight_only_fields=[K] was added as the default value to query_processor_options.

  • Added an option to specify the waiting period after accessibility auditor last recorded data, before it records data again. For more information, see accessibility-auditor.min-time-between-recording-history-in-seconds.

  • Auto completion config options (auto-completion.*) are now read from profile.cfg in preference to collection.cfg within FreeMarker templates. Previously, such options set in profile.cfg would have been ignored.

Upgrades to Funnelback components

  • The default version of jQuery used in the default template has been upgraded to 3.3.1.

  • The default version of Font Awesome Free used in the knowledge graph widget has been upgraded to 5.7.2.

  • The Java JDK bundled with Funnelback was updated to OpenJDK11. This should reduce memory usage in many cases.

  • The Groovy language bundled with Funnelback was upgraded to 2.5.6.

Bug fixes

The following bugs and issues were addressed in this release:

  • The case sensitivity in the content auditor's undesirable text filter was incorrect.

  • The permissions for user management screens were incorrect. The fix results in user management screens being available by default rather than requiring sec.administer-system.

  • The CSVtoXML filter failed on URIs that have an empty host for example file:///path.

Important changes

This section contains important information you should know before upgrading to this release of Funnelback. This information relates to changes that may affect:

  • your existing installation of Funnelback, as well as
  • 3rd-party components Funnelback depends upon.

Changes to configurations

The following changes are automatically performed on all configurations during the upgrade process.

  • New permissions sec.template and sec.web-resources are assigned to users who have file-manager permission to edit either simple.ftl or *.ftl in preview-display-rules.

  • The permission sec.site-profile is assigned to users who have file-manager permission to edit site_profile.cfg.

  • References to ${SearchPrefix}thirdparty in FreeMarker templates are replaced with ${GlobalResourcesPrefix}thirdparty. This was the case prior to Funnelback 15.6 but this functionality was inadvertently removed from version 15.6.

  • All users have their version section updated, setting version=15.20.

Following the upgrade to Funnelback 15.20, configurations migrated from older versions of Funnelback (15.18 and earlier) will need update-configs.pl to be run manually to apply these changes.

Upgrade notes

  • URLs, filenames and metadata classes previously containing the abbreviation 'fkg' for Funnelback knowledge graph are now denoted 'kg'. Therefore, all implementations will need to compensate for the resulting changes to metadata class names, URL paths and file paths.

  • Knowledge graph node labels are now automatically cleaned up to ensure they are valid identifiers. Details are provided in the knowledge graph documentation. Any implementation relying on labels that do not meet the restrictions will need to be updated to account for this.

  • Directory and DB collections now write URIs with an empty authority e.g. local:///serve-db-document.tcgi instead of local://serve-db-document.tcgi. Padre now allows an authority in all URIs it can canonicalise. Previously, Padre only allowed a host in http, https and ftp URIs. With this change a slash may be added to existing URIs e.g. local://serve-db-document.tcgi > local://serve-db-document.tcgi/ as serve-db-document.tcgi is assumed to be the authority. This can be fixed by a full re-crawl in directory and DB collections. Push will do the same conversion on upgrade, although it may be necessary to empty the push collection and re-add documents in the form scheme:///path?query=part.

  • To turn off default setting of weight_only_field, set it to empty value e.g. query_processor_options=-weight_only_fields=. Note that the -sco=2[K] setting (in contrast to -sco=2[ANYTHING-ELSE]) will be considered as weight-only fields.

  • The option accessibility-auditor.min-time-between-recording-history-in-seconds defaults to 20 minutes for Push collection, previously it was effectively zero.

  • To upgrade jQuery to 3.3.1, update the path to resource in FTL forms from ${GlobalResourcesPrefix}js/jquery/jquery-1.10.2.min.js to ${GlobalResourcesPrefix}thirdparty/jquery-3.3.1/jquery.min.js. Note that previous versions of jQuery will be removed from Funnelback in a future release.

  • To upgrade Font Awesome to v5.7.2, update the path to resource in FTL forms from ${ContextPath}/${GlobalResourcesPrefix}thirdparty/font-awesome-4.7.0/css/font-awesome.min.css to ${ContextPath}/${GlobalResourcesPrefix}thirdparty/font-awesome-5.7.2/css/font-awesome.min.css.

  • Due to the bundled Groovy language upgrade to version 2.5.6, review Groovy's changelog and in particular the list of breaking changes to assess the impact on any existing Groovy scripts or classes.

  • Due to the bundled Java JRE being to version 11, any custom JVM flags provided via java_options or service files may need to be re-assessed to ensure they are compatible and still beneficial.

  • The $SEARCH_HOME\wbin\java\jre and $SEARCH_HOME/linbin/java/jre files no longer exist in the bundled Java runtime. Any references to these files should be updated to use the java.home system property. For pre and post update commands, $GROOVY_COMMAND can be used instead.

Linux version support

  • Funnelback 15.20 is the last version of Funnelback to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS version 6. Future Funnelback versions will require at least RHEL or CentOS version 7.

Known issues

Some components within Funnelback, notably the the Groovy language runtime, produce warnings under JDK11 similar to the following in their current versions.

WARNING: An illegal reflective access operation has occurred
WARNING: Illegal reflective access by (some class)
WARNING: Please consider reporting this to the maintainers of (some class)
WARNING: Use --illegal-access=warn to enable warnings of further illegal reflective access operations
WARNING: All illegal access operations will be denied in a future release

These warnings are harmless and will be removed once components such as Groovy are themselves updated.

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