bety: BETYdb 4.0.1

This is a minor release that extends the API search syntax to the traits_and_yeidls_view and fixes some bugs in the Trait and Yield creation and update pages. It was deployed to www.betydb.org on April 30, 2015.

• It is now possible to get query results from the traits_and_yields_view SQL view using multiple columnname=value clauses in the query string appended to the Advanced Search page URLs https://www.betydb.org/search.xml (for results in XML format) and https://www.betydb.org/search.json (for results in JSON format). For example, the URL https://www.betydb.org/search.xml?lat=42.9&lon=-72.3&result_type=traits will find all checked trait data for sites located at 42.9 deg N latitude and 72.3 deg W longitude to which the user has access rights and return it in XML format. Note that matches must be exact! These strict search clauses may be combined with the less-strict searching provided by a clause of the form search=term1+term2+term3... which requires only that each of the terms provided be textually included in the column value of one of the columns sitename, city, scientificname, commonname, author, trait, trait_description, or citation_year.

• A new rake task has been added as a convenience for displaying the database configuration file database.yml. Run

  rake dbconf

• A long-standing bug in the processing of the New Yield and Editing Yield forms rendered the Julian date fields useless. This has been fixed.

• In addition, the upgrade to Rails 3.2 produced some new problems with the way the standard date fields in the New Yield and Editing Yield forms were processed. Furthermore, when the New Trait and New Yield forms were visited with a row id parameter passed in the URL, the forms would be pre-populated as before, but pressing the Create button would do an update rather than creating a new row as it was supposed to. These problems have been fixed as well.

• Finally, API queries involving an include[]=<table> clause now once again show information for the included table in the query results. Even with this, queries work slightly differently than they did prior to the update to Rails 3.2. Details will be given in the BETYdb Data Access document at https://www.authorea.com/users/5574/articles/7062.

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

  bundle exec rspec

Complete details for running the rspec tests are on the updated Wiki page at https://github.com/PecanProject/bety/wiki/Automated-Tests