JourFixe-2024-04-29

Date and place

Monday, 29 April from 13:00 – 17:05 at VC meeting in BBB.

If you like to participate at the Jour Fixe, please join our BigBlueButton-based Jour Fixe VC!
We recommend to use BBB in Chrome (or Firefox).

1 Appointments

2 Miscellaneous

2.1 UI Clinic

Our UI/UX/A11y experts Yvonne Seiler, Kristina Auerswald and Kendra Grotz are offering bi-weekly UI clinic consultation hours for UI/UX and accessibility topics. The consultation hours are open for all users that need or are interested in related help for their ILIAS development activities. The UI Clinic consultation hours take place every Tuesday before Jour Fixe from 14h30 to 15h00.

If you are interested in discussing an issue, please register here!.

2.2 Style Guide for English Language

Our expert for English language, Chris Potter, has created a Style Guide for English Language in ILIAS to help developers when writing English labels and bylines. Major aim is to improve the quality and the consistence of the English language file. We kindly please all developers to have a look at this style guide and follow its recommendations!

In addition, Chris is currently revising the entire ilias_en.lang for ILIAS 9 and corrects and streamline the texts. This already came with a couple of commits in the last weeks (and still will go on).

In case of questions to the style guide or the correct use of English language in ILIAS, please feel free to contact Chris.

2.3 Authorities

2.3.1 Authorities to be Handed Over

For the following components there are authorities to be handed over:

• Administration: Killing, Alexander [alex] and Meyer, Stefan [smeyer] would like to hand over the authorities to sign off on conceptual changes and sign off on code changes. Killing, Alexander [alex] would like to hand over the authority to (de-)assign authorities.
• Learning Module SCORM: Kohnle, Uwe [ukohnle] would like to hand over the authorities to sign off on conceptual changes, to sign off on code changes and to (de-)assign authorities.
• LTI: Kohnle, Uwe [ukohnle] would like to hand over his authorities to sign off on conceptual changes, to sign off on code changes and to (de-)assign authorities. Meyer, Stefan [smeyer] keeps authority to sign off on code changes.
  • LTI already consists of two components – LTI for the provider function and LTI consumer. According to Uwe it is possible to keep only one of both in ILIAS while the other component can be abandoned if no new developer is willing to take over the authorities for entire LTI.
• Excel: Excel service was under implicit maintainership but has currently no person that takes care of it.

Community members who are willing to take over one of the offered authorities are highly appreciated. In case of interest, please contact the Technical Board.

2.3.2 Changed Authorities

• PR7385 • Notifications: Change authority assignments: We highly appreciate this change of authorities and welcome Ingmar. Final decision will be made by TB tomorrow.
• PR7399 • Authority Change DC: We regret Timon's decision and thank him very much for his dedication and his contributions for improving the data collection. Per Pascal will take care for the component in the future.
• PR7409 • Test: Add Thomas Joussen to Maintenance.md in Test:  We highly appreciate that Thomas will take over the mentioned authority and supports the T&A team in improving this component.

3 Maintained Versions

At the time being, we are maintaining ILIAS version 7 and Version 8.

3.1 Roadmap

Lifecycles of maintained versions

• ILIAS 7 : the regular maintenance of ILIAS 7 ends in May 2024 after we have published a first stable ILIAS 9 release.
  • As there is a need in the community to use a secure ILIAS 7 at least until end of the year, ILIAS service provider Databay AG will offer a ILIAS 7 LTS release when the regular end of lifetime of ILIAS 7 has come. This ILIAS 7 LTS release will mainly contain the security fixes that are made for ILIAS 8 and higher. It is intended to maintain this security branch until December 2024. The costs will be jointly financed in a funding pool by those who have the need. Users who also have the need to use it can contact info@databay.de. The ILIAS society, its Technical Board and the Product Manager support the project and appreciate the joint solution for all users.
• ILIAS 8 : end of full maintenance at 31 DEC 2024, security bug fixes (only) until 31 DEC 2025.

3.2 Mantis Reports

The following Mantis reports have been tagged with 'Needs Jour Fixe Decision' and were therfore be discussed in detail:

1. #37979: Missing Informations in "Schneebrettchen" of TileView: We want to have information like LP in the tile view as well. Alexander will have a look at the current implementation and restore the behaviour from ILIAS 8. In case information from other services is still missing as well, please create distinct reports for each service.
2. #39258: Failed test: Datei-Bewertung im Kiosk-Modus: Discussion postponed to next JF when Fabian Schmid can attend the meeting again.
3. #41079: Problems with location metadata fields when using Google Maps - update/summary.: We set this report to funding needed. Alexander would accept to do funded PRs for fixing serious issues in the Google Maps implementation of the Maps service but also would like to abandon this option with release 10, see https://docu.ilias.de/goto_docu_wiki_wpage_7626_1357.html The existing option to use OpenStreetMaps is fully sufficient for using this feature and works as expected.
4. #:

3.3 Mantis Statistic

Current information from Mantis:

                        * … Issues with status 'open' and 'fix.acc.prio.' are recorded.

3.4 Development Issues of Maintained Versions

The following development issues concern one or more maintained versions. Issues related to upcoming versions have to be added in chapter 4.

• none

3.5 Pull Requests for Maintained Versions

The following pull requests in the ILIAS repository on GitHub were marked with 'Jour Fixe' and 'Bugfix'.

1. PR7350 • Transform all properties of symbols that are publicly accessible: Related to this PR, Richard points out that there is a need to change our templating system in the near future, as our current template engine does not recognise the context in which statements are made by the system. A new template engine needs to offer escaping functions to prevent XSS and make ILIAS more secure. Alexander supports the idea to add a second and modern template engine to the core - even before finishing the Legacy UI project. Otherwise we would loose important time. Skin developers can be expected to familiarise themselves with the syntax of the new template engine. Nico requests to add (harmless) information about the background of such fixes to the commit.

3.6 Continuous Integration

• Unit Tests:
  • For ILIAS 10 we are currently upgrading PHPUnit to version 10.x. Accordingly, the following methods are no longer available an MUST be removed from our unit tests:
    • withConsecutive
    • getInvocationCount
  • As of today, there are (executed with PHP 8.2)
    • 11660: (+31)
    • 29250 assertions (depends on the order of tests being executed / not stably determinable)
  • 4 Ignored Tests:
    • \ilSessionTest::testPasswordAssisstanceSession
      • Reason: Marked as incomplete
      • There is an open PR to solve this issue.
    • \TagInputTest::testUserCreatedNotAllowed
      • Reason: Marked as skipped
    • \ILIAS\Cache\CacheTest::testMemcachedAdapter
      • Reason: Memcached is not available (although the PHP extension is installed)
    • \ilSkinFactoryTest::testImportSkin
      • Reason: This test is skipped, because it is not possible to create a zip file, which can be unzipped at the moment in Test-Context. The test is violating thr policy to access only directories which are known to the LegacyPathHelper.

4 Preparing ILIAS 9

4.1 Timeline for ILIAS 9

Due to the changed timeline of ILIAS 8 we had to fundamentally change the schedule for ILIAS 9. The aim was to secure sufficient resources for the completion of ILIAS 8 and to take away the time pressure for the programming of ILIAS 9. In short, the release plan for ILIAS 9 has been postponed by one year.

• Feature freeze at April 30, 2023: deadline to suggest new features for this version ✓
• Coding completed: all features implemented and test cases finished until October 27, 2023 ✓
• Release 9.0 beta1 and release-9 branch planned for October 30, 2023 ✓
• Begin of testing phase scheduled for October 31, 2023 ✓
• All test cases should have been tested at Februar 02, 2024 ✓
• First stable 9.0 release planned for April 30, 2024
• Full maintenance support for version 9: until December 31, 2025
• Security bug fixes only: until December 31, 2026

4.2 Software Requirements for ILIAS 9

The required and supported software for ILIAS 9 is as follows:

4.3 Important Changes

/images directory : the subdirectory structure of /templates/default/images has been changed and more subdirectories have been introduced to to provide a faster and better overview of the existing image files. In addition, it will fix Mantis issue #35768.

In case of lost images (broken pathes), please create a Mantis report and assign it to CSS component.

4.4 Development Issues ILIAS 9

1. [[]]

   JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe]: …

4.5 Pull Requests for ILIAS 9

The following pull requests in the ILIAS repository on GitHub are related to release 9.

1. PR • :

4.6 Status of Development

This is the status of the development of ILIAS Release 9 after Coding Completed at 27 OCT 2023:

4.7 Testing ILIAS 9

4.7.1 Roadmap

• Testing phase of ILIAS 9 starts at October 31, 2023 on test9.ilias.de
  
  • Pretests from October 31 until November 10, 2023
  • Community testing starts at November 13, 2023
• All test cases have to be run at least once until Februar 02, 2024
• Retests have to be finished until March 11.
• First stable release of ILIAS 9 is scheduled for April 30, 2024.

4.7.2 Testing Performance

Status as of 2024-04-29:

• Total number of test cases to test for ILIAS 9: 4893
• 98% of test cases have been passed successfully. Current status of Release_9 branch is therefore be considered as stable. Release 9.0 can be published.
  • A big thank you to all the developers and testers who made this possible!
• All testers that still have retests to be done: please run the retests nevertheless to improve the picture.
• All developers that still have bugs to be fixed: please fix them anyway to improve the quality of our release.

Test suites with 100% PASSED test cases:

1. Badges
2. Bibliography
3. Blog
4. Certificate
5. Chat
6. Comments
7. Competence Management
8. Contacts
9. Content Page
10. CSS / Templates
11. Dashboard
12. Data Collection
13. Declaration of Data protection
14. Didactic Templates
15. Employee Talk
16. Glossary Group
17. ILIAS Page Editor
18. Info Page
19. Item Groups
20. Language Handling
21. Learning History
22. Learning Module HTML
23. Learning Module ILIAS : Assessment Questions
24. Learning Module ILIAS : Presentation
25. Learning Module SCORM 1.2
26. Learning Sequence
27. Main Menu
28. Maps
29. MathJax
30. Media Pools and Media Objects
31. Mediacast
32. Metadata
33. News
34. Notes
35. Notification Center
36. Object Service
37. Online Help
38. Personal and Shared Resources
39. Personal Profile
40. Poll
41. Portfolio Template
42. Precondition Handling
43. Rating
44. RBAC
45. Session
46. Setup
47. Staff
48. Survey
49. Tagging
50. Terms of Service
51. UI Service
52. User Service
53. Virus Scanner 
54. Weblink
55. Who is online?
56. Wiki

Among the ramaining 39 test suites, 12 have 98% or more passed test cases and none of them has a passed status of less than 85%.

4.7.3 Mantis Statistic

Current information from Mantis:

                        * … Issues with status 'open' and 'fix.acc.prio.' are recorded.

List of Known Issues

As for Release 8 we will publish a list of issues that haven't yet been fixed for 9.0 – but hopefully will be in the nearer future. This list becomes part of the 9.0 release page. Among these issues there is no show-stopper that forces us to postpone the stable release.

5 Developing ILIAS 10

5.1 Timeline for ILIAS 10

• Big Projects Jour Fixe at November 27, 2023 ✓
  
• Feature freeze at April 30, 2024
  
• Coding completed: all features implemented and test cases finished until October 25, 2024
• Release 10.0 beta1 and release-10 branch planned for October 28, 2024
• Beginn of testing phase scheduled for October 30, 2024
• End of testing phase planned for Februar 05, 2025
• First stable 10.0 release planned for March 13, 2025
• Full maintenance support for version 10: until December 31, 2026
• Security bug fixes only: until December 31, 2027

5.2 Software Requirements for ILIAS 10

The required and supported software for ILIAS 10 is as follows:

5.3 Dependencies

The following pull requests in the ILIAS repository on GitHub are related to trunk and labeled with 'dependencies'.

1. PR7427 • Composer: add phpunit/phpunit as dependenc:
   • We use phpunit/phpunit to run unit tests. It is the standard PHP testing framework.
   • We accept phpunit/phpunit as dependency for ILIAS 10.

5.4 Deprecated for ILIAS 10

The following services, methods and UI elements are deprecated for ILIAS 10:

• Services/UIComponent
  • Checkbox List Overlay
  • Glyph
  • Grouped List
  • Lightbox (Has been removed from trunk while ILIAS 9 has being developed.)
  • Modal
  • Nested List
  • Overlay
  • Panel
  • Progress Bar
  • Split Button
  • Tooltip
• Services/FileSystem
  • ilFile
  • ilFileData
  • ilFileDataImport
  • ilFileSystemAbstractionStorage
  • ilFileSystemGUI
  • ilFileSystemTableGUI
  • ilUploadFiles
• Services/Database
  • ilDBAnalyzer
  • ilDBGenerator
• Services/FileDelivery (replacement will be done with PR)
  • ilFileDelivery
• Services/PermanentLink (replacement will be done with PR)
  • ilLink
• Services/Utilities (ongoing)
  • ilArrayUtil
  • ilLegacyFormElementsUtil
  • ilShellUtil
  • ilStr
  • ilUtil

5.5 Important Changes

• none

5.6 Development Issues

1. Add Unique Certificate ID for Certificate Editor: Contrary to the migration process described above (namely: no migration), we would like to offer a "migration" in the "Setup Agent" of the "Certificate" component. We ran a few tests on our local machines, and were able to migrate (i.e. populate with a unique UUID) 500,000 persistent certificate records in 30 seconds. This would allow us to enforce certain business rules in the database, namely that each certificate must have a unique ID and cannot be persisted without it ("Unique Constraint"). It would have no benefit for existing PDF documents, but for the future, e.g. for pages with a "Certificate Verification", if we would still show certificate owners this ID in the "Deck of Cards", or similar use cases).

   JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe] : Different that originally thought, a migration of existing certificates is possible. They would get UUIDs as well. We highly appreciate this and accept the change for ILIAS 10.

5.7 Pull Requests for Current Development / Trunk

The following pull requests in the ILIAS repository on GitHub are related to the current development activities in trunk.

1. PR7332 • Expandable Standard Panel and Standard Listing Panel: We highly appreciate the extension of the Standard Panel and Standard Listing Panel and accept the PR for ILIAS 10 / trunk.
2. PR7339 • [FEATURE] UI: Introduce dedicated image upload field: We highly appreciate this PR and accept it for ILIAS 10 / trunk.
3. PR • :

5.8 Project 'Removing of Legacy-UIComponents-Service and Table'

• Status ILIAS 10 
  • UI-Components in progress: e.g. UI Data Table, Ordering Table, Confirmation Modal, Resource Selector, DateTime-Picker to KS Filter
  • Please take note: To use the session storage for the UI data table, a corresponding submission of the ID is required. See https://github.com/ILIAS-eLearning/ILIAS/pull/7272/files
• Workshop "Exports of tables" on 08.04.2024
  • Objectives:
    • General availability of exports to the UI data table
    • Two export types
      • 1) all data (all columns/all data types)
      • 2) current outputs (results according to filter / selected columns)
    • Header of Export as standardised as possible with metadata such as object title, link, date, ...
    • Output format *.ods (After consultation with the product manager, ods is favoured as the output format. We would like to promote the use of open source tools and not communicate any additional dependencies on proprietary software. As part of the export creation process, there may be an option to refer to the file format and handling.)
  • Open:
    • Responsibility for a corresponding library or its integration
    • Whether and to what extent "quantity structures" are a problem during export remains unclear. Uniformity has been recognised as the higher objective.
    • Specific access to exports will be discusses in an UI Clinic Meeting.
• Estimated funding needed to realise project for 2024: 450.000€ (like 320 Person Days).
• The missing funding is currently a major obstacle.
• Next appointments:
  • Bi-Weekly-Meeting : Monday, 06 May 2024, 14:30 - 16:00
  • Bi-Weekly-Meeting : Monday, 17 July 2024, 14:30 - 16:00 

5.9 Suggested Features for 10

1. Anchor-Links for Category, Course, Group and Folder: We highly appreciate the suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 10. In addition to the concept description, anchors will be supported in all containers that are using the IPE.

2. Transfer «Info-Page» to KS-Panels and -Items: We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 10 /trunk. The naming of the new UI component will be discussed and decided in the process of the KS implementation. An alternative label to "settings derived item" for the KS component could be "Bulky Property" (puts focus on properties).

3. Extend Booking Tool Permission: We still would like to have this feature and re-schedule it for ILIAS 10 / trunk. Please contact the test case author for RBAC, Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel], when creating the related test cases.

4. Infrastructure for Adding Metadata from Controlled Vocabularies: We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 10 / trunk.

5. Matching Copyright on Import: We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 10 / trunk.

6. Public Access Export Files for All Objects: We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 10. The export of tests should be reduced to tests without participant data. In addition, the privacy chapter should be extended and notify about possible user data in export files.

   Postponed to next Jour Fixe

7. OER-Harvester automatically creates Exports:

   • Feature request presented by Schmitz, Tim [tschmitz]
   • Length of slot: 15'

8. Improve Communication in Consultation Hours Service:

   • Feature request presented by Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt]
   • Length of slot: 15'

9. Portfolio: Abandon Banner Image:

   • Feature request presented by Killing, Alexander [alex]
   • Length of slot: 15'

10. Blog: Abandon Banner Image:

    • Feature request presented by Killing, Alexander [alex]
    • Length of slot: 15'

11. Abandon Session Mode «Load-Dependent Session Settings»

    • Feature request presented by Samoila, Oliver [oliver.samoila]
    • Length of slot: 15'

12. Session Reminder and Configuration as a User Default Settings:

    • Feature request presented by Samoila, Oliver [oliver.samoila]
    • Length of slot: 15'

13. Accessible Launcher for Request for Membership and Improved Join Tab:

    • Feature request presented by Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt]
    • Length of slot: 30'

14. Send Mail directly to bookers of consultation hours:

    • Feature request presented by Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt]
    • Length of slot: 15'

6 Developing ILIAS 11

6.1 Deprecated for ILIAS 11

The following services, methods and UI elements are deprecated for ILIAS 10:

• Services/UIComponent
  • ilConfirmationGUI & ilConfirmationTableGUI
  • ilExplorer
  • ilSyntaxHighlighter
  • ilTextHighlighterGUI
  • ilToolbarGUI
  • ilTabsGUI
• Services/Table

7 Participants