Hot on the heels of Release 2.0 of the CEDAR Workbench, we are releasing CEDAR Workbench 2.1 today. This release adds to the versions, fields, and CDE handling capabilities released previously in CEDAR.
Because this feature set requires some changes to our underlying databases, we will need several hours to perform the release, during which CEDAR will not be available. To see the status of the CEDAR system, you can always visit the CEDAR StatusCake page at https://bitly.com/cedarstatus. We will remove the custom status message on this page once CEDAR is fully operational. And here's another tip: We always recommend clearing your browser cache for CEDAR when we perform a new release, to make sure all of your code suite is consistent.
CDE Features
We've added some features to the Common Data Element-based fields exported from the National Cancer Institute caDSR system. This gets us closer to importing many of caDSR's CDEs into CEDAR, so that the CDEs can be used as fields in any template or element.
Most of these features are applicable to any CEDAR field, and these improvements are listed below.
In addition, the import process can handle non-controlled terms from CDE fields (by encoding them as controlled terms). The process has also been enhanced to handle additional information soon to be added to the CDE export file.
Field Improvements
Our field improvements include these capabilities that will apply to any field:
- an attribute to hold and present an external identifier for the field, when the field has been imported from another system;
- the ability in read-only fields (all CDE fields are read-only) to look up the values that have been identified for that field;
- searching via API on additional CDE fields; and
- support in our model for alternate text for field questions (the UI ability to identify and select the preferred text for a question will come later);
Versioning Improvements
We added a number of minor improvements to make it easier and clearer to work with CEDAR versions. For example, published documents will show their version numbers in searches and when being edited. And text descriptions and menus in the application more clearly describe the template's publication status (draft or published) and what you can do with it (e.g., published templates can only be viewed, not edited).
Searching More
We are now indexing field and template attributes Name, Description, Version, and External ID for our searches. So if you enter the content that matches any of those attributes' content, you should get a match.
Note also that you can specify multiple search strings by putting AND between each word.
Under the Hood
Just a few small and behind-the-scenes changes to wrap up this big release:
- We have updated the underlying metadata model to version 1.5.0 and have documented the changes from revisions 2.0 and 2.1 in the model definition
- We fixed a few nagging behaviors in the system so that it continues to be nice to use.
- We upgraded elasticSearch to version 6.2.4 and upgraded some underlying models to support recent features.
References
All tasks completed for the 2.1 release can be found at our GitHub issues list.
You can also review the GitHub release history for 2.1 page.