Improved management of reference data during upgrades - Proof of concept

Current situation or problem:
The Technical Council (TC) was asked to help find a solution to a problem system operators were having regarding upgrades and reference data, specifically customized controlled vocabularies. The problem statement is described on the wiki . This feature covers the creation and testing of a proof of concept for the solution proposed by the TC subgroup (see below)

In scope
A platform-wide solution for an upgrade process with improved handling of reference data.

• Proof of concept and technical design work

Out of scope

• Updates to core libraries & components: RMB / folio-spring-base / etc.
• Developer facing and sysOps/Implementer facing documentation, upgrade guides etc.
• External tooling to help facilitate resolution of conflicts between system-provided and customized reference data identified during the upgrade process.

Use case(s)

• Incomplete Reference Data Sets
  Consider that the set of material types available in a release may be insufficient. Imagine that ‘Blu-Ray’ is missing. A library tenant may then add a custom value for ‘Blu-Ray’ and furthermore assign it to resources in Inventory. But in the subsequent release Folio addresses the issue and provides its own ‘Blu-Ray’ material type. The two values are now in conflict.

• Deleted or Suppressed Default Data Fields
  Consider that the Folio distribution might include a predefined, default, set of Loan Types. An individual library tenant may not find this entire set of loan types to be relevant. Perhaps the institution is a small public library with limited lending capabilities. In this case they may want to suppress or remove the presentation of loan types that are not relevant to them.

• Customizing Field Labels
  Field labels may be customized for various reasons, including institutional conventions or local languages. Consider that a German Folio site wants to make a local change to labels: replacing "can circulate" with "ausleihbar" and not lose that change during an upgrade.

Proposed solution/stories
The solution proposed by the TC is described here.

Links to additional info

Questions