bety: BETYdb 4.8

Added new site-grouping features. Minor bug fixes and upgrades. Ruby 2.1 or greater is now required.

Changes Pertinent to PEcAn Users

Administrators need to do a database migration.

See "Database Changes" below.

Summary of Changes New Features Grouping of Sites

This release of BETY now allows the user to create a grouping of sites. The user can make this grouping publicly accessible or make it private for the user only. The grouping can be used in the BETYdb web interface to quickly get to sites of interest, or in the PEcAn interface to show only those sites the user is interested in.

Upgrade to RSpec 3

The version of RSpec that we use for testing has been upgraded from version 2.14 to version 3.4. This shouldn't affect end users, but developers will now be able to use the latest version of RSpec when writing new tests.

Other Notable Changes Ruby Versions and Travis

Although Ruby 2.1.5 is the Ruby version "officially" supported by BETYdb, up until recently, BETYdb would run with versions 1.9.3 and 2.0. This is no longer the case.

Since tests will now fail under both Ruby 1.9.3 and 2.0.0, these version have been removed from the set of versions run by Travis (our automated testing service). Travis instead now runs tests under the following Ruby versions: 2.1.5 (the "official" version), 2.1.8, 2.2.4, and 2.3.0.

Although users are strongly encouraged to upgrade Ruby to at least version 2.1, users who still want to run BETYdb under older versions may be able to do so for the time being by making certain changes to their code. If you are a user who wishes to do this, please contact BETYdb support.

Bug Fixes GitHub issues #386 and #387

An issue arose with bulk uploads when a trait or covariate variable was used that had a maximum value set to +Infinity (GH issue #386). This was because the code would treat such values as being zero, so that no positive value was acceptable (GH issue #387). (A minimum value of -Infinity was also treated as zero, making negative values unacceptable as well.) This has been fixed.

Problems with Travis and Database Migrations

A problem with Travis (an automated test-running service) used to occur when a database migration was committed. If any test code depended on the migration, the test would fail until the file db/production_structure.sql was updated. Even worse, if a test fixture depended on the migration, the test setup would fail and no tests at all would run. Since db/production_structures.sql is updated only upon deployment of new code to www.betydb.org, this meant that Travis tests would fail from the time the migration was first committed to GitHub until the time of deployment.

Now Travis uses the (new) file test_structure.sql. This file should be regenerated and the update should be added to the GitHub repository each time a new migration is added.

Steps Needed for Upgrade Database Changes (if applicable)

Administrators need to do database migrations!

There is one migration, which adds the sitegroups table and an associated join table.

The database version for this release is 20160412030352.

Gem Installation

Administrators need to run the bundler to update versions of some of the Ruby Gems.

Status of RSpec Tests

All tests continue to pass when run in the default environment and can be run using the command

bundle exec rspec

As noted above, we are now using RSpec version 3.4.

Complete instructions for setting up the test database and running the RSpec tests are on the Wiki page at https://github.com/PecanProject/bety/wiki/Automated-Tests